Some highlights for me personally included the design presentation at meshU by Daniel Burka of Digg and Pownce, who is just a super-nice guy (also very Canadian), and the ones by Ryan Carson — complete with his trademark hat — and Kevin Hale of Wufoo.com. As for mesh proper, the music panel was one of my favourites, in part because I programmed it; but also because David Gratton was such an excellent moderator, and because the mix of people of the panel was so good, with David Usher, CRIA head Graham Henderson and Kieran Roy of the indie label Arts & Crafts (CBC has an interview with David Usher).

The presentation by Mike Masnick of Techdirt.com on “the economics of abundance” was also a personal favourite, and a whole bunch of people came up to tell me the same thing. Mike is extremely good at explaining difficult economic concepts as they apply to digital media and business models, and I could tell people in the panel room were getting a lot out of it — and I think 322 slides in 30 minutes is a new record. And of course, all the social meshing in the concourse was a big part of the conference for me, and hopefully for others, as well as the great parties put on by Maggie Fox and the Social Media Group and by Edelman, our PR partners for mesh 2008.

If you want to try and track some of what went on at mesh, here are some places to look:

– mDialog has video highlights of many of the keynotes and panels, and the videos are also available on iTunes as well (thanks to Greg Philpott and his team, and to the excellent Mark McKay).

– Flickr has some photos from mesh and from the mesh party at the Rockwood, hosted by SMG (thanks to Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan and Arieh Singer)

– David Janes’ Onaswarm has a roundup of Twitter posts, Flickr photos and more.

– Nora Young of CBC’s Spark has posted video of her chat with Bill Buxton, which will be broadcast as part of next week’s show

– My former Globe colleague Peter Nowak has an interview with David Usher.

– Michael Geist has uploaded his excellent slide presentation on digital advocacy

– Daniel Burka of Digg and Pownce has uploaded his meshU presentation to Slideshare.

– Sam Ladner, who did the Reputation Management workshop, has uploaded her slide deck.

– Amber MacArthur has put up a YouTube video of her presentation on video

– Jonathan Keebler and Guinevere Orvis (who was also on the video panel, and was an excellent choice) live-blogged most of the conference using ScribbleLive, which was featured in a TechCrunch article written by Erick Schonfeld, who attended mesh08 (and is a really nice guy).

– Mark Blevis live-blogged many of the sessions, as did Dave Fleet and Connie Crosby, and music-panel moderator David Gratton.

– Nav from Scrawled in Wax wrote about a couple of sessions, as did Colin Carmichael and mesh regular (or irregular), the excellent Michael O’Connor Clarke.

– Marketing magazine has a story about mesh 2008, as does The Industry Standard

and for bonus points:

– Mike Masnick writes about how Warner Brothers should move Ethan Kaplan out of the technology side of the label and into the business side.

– My Globe colleague Matt Hartley worked his tail off at mesh and wrote several excellent stories (and I say that as a completely unbiased observer :-): one about StumbleUpon, one about Michael Geist and online advocacy, one about online brand-building and one about online video.

– Alec Saunders of Iotum gets into a back-and-forth with moderator Rachel Sklar from Huffington Post about the privacy panel at mesh 08.

– Ross McKegney has some thoughts about meshU.

– Jon Lax of Teehan Lax posted his presentation from meshU.

– Mark Kuznicki and Sean Howard have posted their Government 2.0 presentation from meshU on Slideshare.

– Wayne Macphail from Rabble.ca has posted video of six sessions at mesh, including the keynote by Michael Geist, the keynote by Lane Merrifield of Club Penguin, the “Video is Everywhere” panel, the “New Front Page” panel, the “Cultivating Community” panel and Mike Masnick’s presentation on “the Economics of Abundance.” Just click the “On Demand” button on the Rabbletv player.

– Reg Braithwaite has posted slides from his Building and Managing Great Software Teams presentation from meshU on Flickr.

– Alistair Croll has posted his slides from his Watching the Web presentation at meshU at the Bitcurrent site.

– more at the Tucows blog, as well as from Glen Farrelly and from Doug Walker, and some thoughts on meshU at StartupNorth.

– Rahaf Harfoush also live-blogged a couple of the marketing panels.

– Zoe Siskos of Social Media Group made a video and has posted it.

– Stan Sutter of Infopresse has a post up about several of the panels and keynotes.

– Kevin Restivo has posted some thoughts about mesh08.

– Rob Hyndman did an interview with CFRA and has posted the audio.

– Kathryn Lagden has a post up about the conversation between Nora Young of CBC’s Spark and researcher Bill Buxton.

If you have any other links to mesh-related stuff — or thoughts about it — please post a comment. There are also meshU and mesh feedback forms you can use to give us your take on either of the two events.

Dr. Geist was originally scheduled to do a presentation Wednesday afternoon about how Facebook and other social media tools are being used for grassroots lobbying and advocacy purposes, building on his experience in setting up a Facebook group opposed to Ottawa’s anticipated copyright legislation. In Matt Mason’s absence, we have asked Dr. Geist to adapt his presentation as the keynote for the society stream, which will take place at 10:40 a.m. on Wednesday. Taking the place of his original presentation Wednesday afternoon will be a panel discussion on “Managing the Mozilla Way” with Mic Berman, John Resig and Mike Shaver, moderated by Michael McDerment.

For more information, please see the mesh schedule.

– CBC Radio live taping: Up until a week or so ago, we had a spot in the schedule with CBC Radio host Nora Young’s name on it, because we knew that we wanted the former Definitely Not The Opera host to do a panel discussion about something for the society stream and tape it live for her new show Spark, but we weren’t quite sure what it would be. As you can see from the updated schedule, Nora’s going to be talking to Bill Buxton — the legendary user-interface expert and visionary from Microsoft — about whether physical location matters any more in these social-networking, virtual world, Twitter-type days we’re living in. Nora is also hoping to bring a second guest for the debate, which in the sports world would be referred to as “a player to be named later.”

– Social events: As my fellow organizer Mark Evans has noted on the mesh blog, we have a couple of great events planned this year: the first is a party after meshU finishes up, which will be taking place May 20th at The Drake, one of Toronto’s favourite funky watering holes. Everyone with a meshU ticket will get a complimentary drink, but others are also welcome to come and mesh. And the following night, after the first day of mesh 2008, we have a party at the Rockwood CLub on Mercer Street, just south of King and east of Wayne Gretzky’s. That one is sponsored by our friends at Social Media Group and all are welcome. We’re also having a kind of mesh wrap-up party after the second day, which our friends at Edelman are putting on at the Bar Mercurio.

That’s it for now, although there could be more updates to come. Stay tuned to the mesh blog or @meshconference on Twitter, or follow me (@mathewi) or Rob Hyndman (@rhh) for updates. Mesh on!

Thanks a lot to Mark and to Rob Manne and the other folks at Edelman.