Tuesday morning I was on a panel for a breakfast session on Online Social Networking. Breakfast is a pretty nice thing at the The Governor Hotel, so the bottles of red wine that I saw out the corner of my eye seemed really odd. It turned out that the panelists were given a nice bottle of Oregon Pinot Noir at the end of the event. A nice touch.

Justin Garrity, the moderator of the session, set us all up by sending us a list of attributes of great panels at the SXSW Conference in Austin:

1. Relaxed and comfortable
2. Interested in the topic
3. Not hung-over
4. Sense of humor
5. Engaged in a conversation with each other and the audience
6. Puts in the extra effort to try and transform odd audience questions into great audience questions
7. Hang around after the panel is over to answer one-on-one conversations from the audience

It was really remarkable how, during the panel, Justin asked us questions that were surprising and yet played to each speaker’s strengths. Wow. I’d like to be able to do that, too.

I had proposed that we gather session notes and the real-time notes from our phone conference in a Google Docs page. From that we produced a list of tools and tagged some resources that we talked about. I’ll blog about what I had to say shortly.