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For many the South By Southwest Conference held each spring in Austin Texas brings to mind music, sweaty clubs and the chance to see the next big thing before they become the next big thing. But in fact the conference is much more than just music and includes what may well be the year's biggest gathering of web and technology movers and shakers.
The Interactive component of SXSW made its debut in 1994 as part of the SXSW Film and Multimedia Conference. The following year film got it's own conference and and by 1998 the multimedia conference had ben dubbed SXSW Interactive.
The four day Interactive conference, which overlaps with the music and film conferences to form part of what organizers now refer to as SXSWeek, features discussion panels, a trade show and exhibition and brings together a diverse group of digerati from around the world.
"SXSW is an interesting show for web developers since it brings the geeks out of the pure-geek conference circuit, and mixes them in with designers, filmmakers, and musicians." says Marc Hedlund founder of the internet banking site Wesabe who will be speaking on a panel entitled "Barenaked App: The Figures Behind the Top Web Apps".
The SXSW website touts the Interactive festival as a gathering of "digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs." And indeed any conference that can have Dan Rather keynote just hours after engineeers from Google host a panel with the working title "Why XSLT is Sexy," has some right to brag about diversity.
But the focus of the conference is not just on celebrities digital and otherwise, but instead tries to create a level playing-field with the majority of daytime events hosted as discussion panels almost all of which close with an open question and answer period.
SXSW has also started to reflects the growing trend of user-generated content and beginning this year the conference organizers turned over panel selection to the community. Using the panel Picker tool on the website anyone could suggest and vote on panel topics and speaker recruiting.
Hugh Forrest, Event Director, SXSW Interactive Festival, says SXSW "received some really incredible panel ideas via the Panel Picker." He goes on to add that "the bulk of programming for the 2007 event was determined via this interface."
That the people chose the majority of the panes at this year's conference reflects the growing popularity of internet video. Scheduled panels (subject to change) include such topics as "Your Video Blog Can Save the World" and "Better than 1,000 Words: Video on the Web."
The true geeks aren't left out either, there are plenty of highly technically themed discussions including panels about popular programming languages like Ruby and AJAX.
The total package of SXSWeek, which includes the SXSW Film Conference & Festival, as well as the SXSW Music Conference & Festival, means that some of the brightest minds in three different industries are in Austin during this time period.
"Point is that you have all these incredibly artistic and creative people in town for this short period of time," Forrest enthuses. "So, the amount of new ideas and new brainstorms and new business connections that spring forth from the many amazing connections that are made during the event is truly astounding."
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