Even those of us who are almost professional conference goers get tired of this stuff eventually. I know I far prefer having a couple of awesome programmers over my house for a great conversation. Just did that this morning, actually, when the folks behind FluidInfo came over. No beers were consumed.
What Ryan should do is focus on hackathons and other, smaller, places where code actually gets written, shared, and discussed. There are plenty of those every week. At least there are in places like San Francisco. Every week or so there's a Node.js hackathon in our office at Rackspace. Generally folks have a choice of whether to stick around for beers after a long day, and even when the beers came out, at about 6 p.m. during dinner, it wasn't anything like a SXSW drinking fest.
Some other feedback:
1. Conferences are awful places to have real, deep, conversations. Why? There's an opportunity cost to spending any time with any specific person. Heck, you can be talking to someone very interesting, like Bram Cohen, who wrote Bittorrent and then Eric Ries walks by and you lose interest in Bram all of a sudden. It's far better to see if you can get Bram together at your house, or in a hackathon, where there's only 40 other programmers than hang out at some party with 200 other cool people you want to meet.
2. When you're in a noisy situation, like at a party (even one without alcohol, they do happen, but rarely) it's just not a great place to have a conversation. I remember being at one Techcrunch party and I couldn't even talk to the developers there. Why? I couldn't hear them and they were two feet away. So, I started drinking and smiling. Horrid for actually discussing anything important. I stopped going to those too, my time is better spent sitting down with someone in a quiet place and actually learning something.
Parties, to me, are only about one thing now: collecting business cards and making plans for meeting later on. That's what I did at SXSW. I had breakfast with the guy who runs Al Jazeera and it was magical. That's what made the parties worth it.