Congratulations! The South by Southwest festival committee has asked you for panel suggestions for next year's SXSW.

A couple of weeks ago, Matt Mullenweg's business cards broke.

As long as you're pretending you went to Supernova, pretend you hit every conference in downtown San Francisco this week. Old-school blogger Dave Winer is holding his BloggerCon "unconference" down the road from Supernova, and he can only let 150 attendees in at a time. (At least at Supernova, there's room to sneak into the Palace Hotel and schmooze for free.) Don't worry, Dave and his attendees are making BloggerCon the most un-unmissable conference of the season.

So you're missing the Supernova conference, and now everyone will know you're out of the loop. Not so! Modern technology allows you to pocket the $2500 admission and sit at home. Come back to work full of Supernova stories, and the boss will never know you didn't go.

Here at the Supernova tech innovation conference, speaker Craig Newmark (the Craig in Craigslist) was wandering around with a network administrator, testing the main room's wireless connection (so he could write this blog post). All day at Supernova, attendees have suffered the most common conference headache — a wifi network that almost works. This is what they should have done:

Biz magazine Business 2.0 is run by a savvy set of editors. They've learned (along with every other cunning but lazy journalist and blogger) that a list goes a long way further than a carefully assembled article, and that the former takes half the editing time of the latter.

Talk about a clean exit — hours after Microsoft's point man in the war on Google steps down, his name's off the public website and the official report's out to Bloomberg News. How can you cut a clean break like newly fired MSN Marketing Chief Martin Taylor?

A Reporters Without Borders study concludes that Yahoo is the worst censor among search engines in China. The news comes just a few weeks after UK and Irish journalists urged a Yahoo boycott following CEO Terry Semel's comment that he might be willing to report them all to the Nazis.

Good morning and welcome to Conference Week, Waggers! Yes, this week brings such cons as Supernova, Bloggercon, Mashpit, Dorkbot, and BarCamp. You need no excuse for missing most of these, but Supernova has real speakers and all, and missing it requires an excuse. A local journalist shares this guide to copping out.

In the booming Silicon Valley economy, everyone's looking to buy or be bought. But not all offers are equal. How do you politely turn down a lowball without burning your bridge? Let's take a look at three turn-downs — none of which were publicly reported.

It's not what you know or who you know — it's how you ask. (Well, that and how much blackmail fodder you've collected.) All favor-asking letters are really the same, so to take the guesswork out, here's the Valleywag template for begging anyone to do anything. Keep in mind these three crucial elements: feigned personal connection, direct request, and strong hit at reciprocal favors.