I'm at SXSW Interactive today through Tuesday. Follow Rex, Patrick, Summer and me the next few days on our SXSW blog.

I'm back from SXSW....what a great conference! I say every time I go that it's just like drinking from the firehose, cliche though that may be. You walk in the door of the Austin Convention Center and you are so overwhelmed. Adding to that feeling the past two years: The conference has -- I heard -- doubled in size in both 2007 and 2008. Thousands and thousands of web people all in one place at one time.

I've got my conference notes in our SXSW blog. I also attended a panel moderated by uber-connected Guy Kawasaki, but I found it hard to take notes on it. Billed as "True Stories from Social Media," the panel brought together six people who have diverse experience building, selling, using and running social media sites. It really was fascinating.

I'm going to admit right up front that I'm a recovering email overflow junkie. And I'm therefore one of the most rigid people you'll meet about email management. I'm not perfect, but I'm striving every day.

[Current inbox count: 37.]

I used to let nearly 2,000 emails pile up in my inbox. And I know why that was so easy -- a quick search shows that over the past month, I've sent and received more than 2,300 emails. Wow. In the scheme of things, 1,800 or so messages in my inbox wasn't that much.

And yet.

When I'm sorting through nearly 2,000 messages, it's so easy to forget that one important item. So -- after a lot of false starts -- I cleaned up my act, and now, I [mostly] use my email inbox as a place to see messages coming in -- but NOT as my to-do list.

So I have to say, I do still take some perverse pleasure from reading about people who are still stuck in email hell.