I believe in the general synchronicity of summer, and think June and July bring unexpected Jungian gifts. This is an eventful summer for me in many ways, but for now, a quick word on my professional life.

Firstly, buddy and fellow AOLer Kevin Lawver blogged with gusto about replacing me as AOL’s Advisory Committee Representative to the W3C. I’m going to be doing other things professionally within AOL, and Kevin, a Standards Titan at AOL, is the right guy to step up and bat for the company. I’m still going to be a member of various W3C working groups. And I got elected by the Advisory Committee to be a member of W3C’s Advisory Board, which serves an advisory role to the W3C staff. I’m honored to have been elected, and start “officially” in July. As a member of the AC, Kevin will face all the questions of the relevancy of W3C and AOL engineers making time to participate in standards that I did, and I wish him all the very best.

Secondly, the blogosphere has already been given an inkling of myAOL, a suite of web applications that I’m working on as part of a great team of AOL engineers. We’re going to launch it this summer. In particular, I’m part of the team working on Mgnet (pronounced magnet), a way to discover content through some innovative navigational metaphors. Can’t wait to go beta already!

The myAOL suite has been discussed in a “pre-release” capacity on TechCrunch and on Jeremy O.’s Web Strategist blog.

“I don’t know what you’re so highly strung about,” Charles said to me, a few minutes before our panel was about to begin. I was anxiously asking him to wolf his breakfast down and rush to the Green Room, which is the panel ante room at SxSW. “It will be ok — trust me.” I often wish I was as calm as Charles about things.

He was right, of course. The panel I moderated on Web browsers at SxSW even got scooped by PC Magazine — yay! The article mentions the empty seats, which certainly caused a brief sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Nobody likes to throw a party and have scant attendance. But the panel itself went swimmingly, and towards the end I’d say we had over 150 people in there. Thank you, Brendan, Chris, and Charles.

There was also some small measure of controversy, which I suppose is the mark of a good discussion. Dan Appelquist (who chairs the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, which I am also a part of) asked a good question about WICD, and Brendan’s answer spawned much discussion. Soon, our panel will be podcast, and everyone can see the exact quote in question. Regurgitating what Brendan said in second and third hand accounts may not lead to the most accurate discourse

South By Southwest is a phenomenon. After my first visit last year, I’ve stopped thinking of it as just a big music thing in Austin, Texas (silly me). This year, I’m speaking on two panels as part of the Interactive Festival part of SxSW. I’m chairing one of these panels.

On Sunday at 5PM, I’m speaking on a panel called “How To Get your Company to Embrace Mashup Culture.” Kevin Lawver’s got Alla Gringaus (from Time Inc.), Steve Chipman (of WIM fame and SlayerOffice fame), Greg Cypes (Mr. OpenAIM) and myself talking about some of the things we did at AOL to usher in a wave of cool zeitgeisty stuff. I’m excited to talk about the cool things AOL’s engineers did with OpenID, amongst other things.

Then on Tuesday at 10AM I chair a panel I’m really excited about called Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present, and Future Battlefields. My panelists are Brendan Eich (who invented JavaScript and is CTO of Mozilla), Charles McCathieNevile (Standards maven at Opera Software and W3C titan), and Chris Wilson (who’s worked on every version of Internet Explorer that I can remember at Microsoft, and on Microsoft’s Avalon stuff). I want to use this panel to discuss some of the same battlefronts that seem to have occurred in the past. One such clash is that of proprietary formats versus open standards of various flavors. The panel description says it well enough — where’s the Web content model really going? The speakers lived the browser wars of the past. I’m going to goad them to talk about their visions for the future of the Web.

(Cross-posted from dev.aol.com)