Technology and new media conference South By Southwest Interactive (SxSWi) is just wrapping up in Austin, Texas.  The five day event featured panel discussions, “celebrity geek” interviews, vendor exhibits — and lots and lots of parties.

We have asked some of our friends and colleagues who attended this year’s SxSWi to share their highlights and takeaways from the conference, and will be sharing them with you over the next few days.

Len Edgerly (center, in red shirt at right) is the creator and host of the Kindle Chronicles podcast, a weekly series devoted to Amazon’s e-reader. Edgerly also promotes the use of podcasting and new media in the fine arts community, calling himself a “technology ambassador to the arts.”

Here’s his take on SxSWi:

This was my first time at SxSW.  I feel grateful for the experience on many levels. I heard terrific presentations and panels. Bruce Sterling, Guy Kawasaki interviewing Chris Anderson, and Henry Jenkins’s panel on “What We Can Learn from Games were especially great.  I met other podcasters and had a chance to be a guest on one of my favorite shows, Push My Follow.

My best memory will be the first-ever meetup of listeners of my Kindle Chronicles podcast yesterday at Java Jive.  I had thought there might be listeners attending the conference, but it turned out that all of the meetup participants were NOT at SxSW but did live in the Austin area.  There were five of us who showed up, and we had a lively discussion, part of which I recorded for this week’s episode.  It was a real thrill for me to meet listeners in person and hear about their Kindle experiences.

[picture, right, of what Edgerly calls “the first Kindle Wheel seen in the wild.”]

The turnout in Austin made me realize I will be able to hold similar podcast meetups in my two home towns, Denver and Cambridge, Mass. So I’ll be setting those up in the coming months.

My mind is full of new ideas, and even though I’m exhausted I know I have a renewed supply of energy to keep improving my podcast and learning what I can contribute to this wild new world of social media and human connections via the Internet.

You can find out more about the Kindle Chronicles here.