SXSW is a junction of film, music and interactive folks with the iF! trade show floor reflecting that eclectic mix. We found a healthy smattering of music booths, some film schools and lots of web app companies. Big booths included Sony, Mapquest, Opera, Yahoo and O'Reilly while smaller booths from Axiom, Kyte and AIM provided a smorgasbord of interactive wares. You can see the full list on the SXSW site or just peep our gallery for a virtual tour.

Trade show floors often take on a circus-like atmosphere, with booths doing what they can to lure you to their wares. At iF! the "cool thing" was Guitar Hero. We counted no less than four booths with the ubiquitous guitar controllers and LCD screens (even if they were often unmanned). One booth broke with tradition and had Rock Band. Brave, no?

Our money for Most Fun Demo is on Bitstrips, a killer app for making your own comic strips online. Imagine mixing Mii-creation tools with Comic Life and you get the idea. Lots of fun, diverse and powerful, and stupid simple to use. Most boring? Well, hard to say because by the time we hit the floor a few booth attendees had left, leaving their booths sitting there, dejected and stickerless.

"Funwalls." Free Conference Calls. "Gifts" in the form of bitmaps of red roses. Today's Facebook applications are heavy on the social and light on the networking, and techy thought-pioneer Tim O'Reilly says in a new report that today's Facebook apps aren't exactly making their developers wealthy. So it makes us wonder, are more promising applications around the next turn, or is social networking really the gimmick its detractors claim? Is the Facebook "platform" just a mechanism to drive more traffic into the web site when better, more obvious, pre-existing solutions exist outside the Facebook ecosphere?

While we think certain applications offer a compelling case, like eBay's offering, we're constantly amazed at how folks will try to pass off something that wouldn't make the cut for the O'Reilly Hacks Series as a legitimate add-on, like this so-called Skype-Facebook Mashup. With so many Facebook add-ons rolling around the bottom of the bit-barrel and receiving little to no attention, it begs the question, will anybody glean as much Facebook mindshare as iLike, or is Ken Camp correct when he refers to most Facebook apps as not "genuinely useful"?

Last month in Portland, Oregon, approximately 250 people convened on Cubespace, a co-working space, for BarCamp Portland 1. BarCamp, if you aren't familiar, is an unconference - an Open and free event whose content and direction is decided by its participants. It's a great way for people to come together in the spirit of community to share knowledge, talk about technology (generally related to Web apps and Open Source), and generally geek out. Started two years ago in Palo Alto by Andy Smith, Chris Messina, Eris Stassi, Matt Mullenweg, Ryan King and Tantek Çelik (among others), it has grown quickly to an international scale. To date there have been BarCamps in Amsterdam, Austin, Shanghai, Milwaukee, Paris, San Francisco, Chennai, London, and many, many more places.

One of BarCamp Portland's organizers, and artisan of all things community, Dawn Foster, took a moment to answer some questions relating to BarCamp Portland and the BarCamp phenom in general. Read on!

DLS: What inspired you to take up organizing BarCamp Portland?

Dawn Foster: Last year, I was lucky enough to be invited to FooCamp, which is a yearly invite-only O'Reilly event that was the model for BarCamp. Spending the weekend having discussions with some very smart people from across the technology industry was an amazing experience, and I wanted to replicate that experience here in Portland. We have a great tech scene in Portland with so many users group meetings, but very little cross pollination between groups. I wanted to create a monthly meeting that brought a diverse group of techies together for networking and discussions about a variety of technologies. As I was talking to people about this idea, I learned that Raven Zachary was starting to plan BarCamp Portland. The two ideas were so similar that Raven and I decided to merge them into a monthly BarCamp Meetup that we would use to plan the BarCamp Portland event.

Last week a bit of a storm sprung up when CMP, which runs O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference, sent a cease-and-desist to Irish nonprofit IT@Cork regarding the naming of their half-day Web 2.0 conference. At the time, Tim O'Reilly himself was on vacation and O'Reilly's VP of Corporate Communications responded at O'Reilly Radar, but many were unsatisfied with her response. Now that Tim is back on the grid, he's posted his own response in an attempt to clarify O'Reilly's side of the issue. Despite indulging in a bit of finger-pointing, I think Tim's post is pretty well-reasoned and it's worth a read.

"Web 2.0," depending on who you ask, is either the future of the Internet, a great buzzword for your résumé, or an overhyped cliché, but what everyone can agree on is the term's ubiquity. That's why, when publisher O'Reilly Media sent a cease-and-desist to Irish non-profit IT@Cork regarding their upcoming half-day Web 2.0 conference, the blogosphere did not take it lightly. How can O'Reilly own "Web 2.0," a term that gets 65 million hits, the vast majority of which are unrelated to O'Reilly, on Google? Yesterday O'Reilly's VP of Corporate Communications Sara Winge spoke up over at O'Reilly Radar on that very topic. O'Reilly's official take is this: O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 back in 2003 and CMP, which co-produces their Web 2.0 Conference, has filed to register the name as a service mark "for arranging and conducting live events, namely trade shows, expositions, business conferences and educational conferences in various fields of computers and information technology." Winge says they regret siccing the lawyers upon IT@Cork instead of just talking to them like people, but stand by their right to the name.

My take? I'm a little torn-after all, the ubiquity of the term is incontestable-but I'm tempted to say "oh, just let them have it." Their service mark, in my opinion, is sufficiently specific, i.e. it only applies to conferences and the like and won't enable them to go after, say, ZDNet for their Web 2.0 Explorer blog.

O'Reilly has a page that lists every one of their hacks available online, including sample hacks from their "Hacks" series of books and hacks contributed by readers. There are dozens and dozens of hacks there, from Amazon to XML and Astronomy to Yahoo! If you've ever wanted to know a better way to do most anything with a computer, check here.