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AUSTIN, Texas--As my colleague Caroline McCarthy pointed out earlier this morning, the parties at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) this year are so overcrowded that waiting in line outside has become commonplace.

On Friday night, I tried to get into that evening's biggest party, the so-called Mix at Six. Along the way, several friends and I kept running into people heading away from it who were reporting that there was a long line outside. And indeed, when we got there, it looked like there was an hour-long wait just to get in.

Last night, I was on my way … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--In a lively discussion that focused on youth and collective intelligence, noted researchers and authors Steven Johnson and Henry Jenkins officially opened South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) on Saturday in the conference's first keynote address.

Johnson, a well-known journalist and author whose books include Emergence and Everything Bad is Good for You, and Jenkins, an MIT professor who has written books like The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture and Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, talked at length about their ideas related to how youth culture is changing in the face of rapidly … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--I never thought I would have a chance to wear sweatpants to a professional networking event, but thanks to Kick, count that as one more boundary broken.

The brainchild of Six Apart Vice President and well-known blogger Anil Dash, Kick was a game of geek kickball that took place Saturday morning here in a park near the Austin Convention Center, where South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) is in full swing.

The event involves large numbers of geeks playing kickball on a weekend morning, many hung over from partying too hard the night before.

Dash started Kick in 2002 as … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--One of the things I left this capital city after South by Southwest (SXSW) 2007 hoping for was that the conference organizers would do something to solve the problem of the massive amount of wasted materials that end up in attendees' swag bags.

As I noted last year, someone here to attend all three of the SXSW festivals--Interactive, Film and Music--would receive three separate bags containing more than ten pounds of newspapers, magazines, fliers, and so much more.

So when arriving here this year for South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), I wanted to see how things had changed, if … Read more

Rumors are flying: Tudou, a hugely popular streaming video site based in China, has been instructed to shut down by a Chinese government authority. Tudou is still online as of this writing, but if it goes down, a major haven for streaming television will be gone.

The rumor can be summarized quickly. China's State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) supposedly instructed Tudou to close its doors, and word is it's because the people responsible for taking down illegal material missed some porn.

Anyone who has looked through sites such as SurfTheChannel is probably familiar with Tudou, … Read more

These days, Twitter is a worldwide phenomenon, a household name, and has even spawned a verb, "to Tweet."

But before the second week of March of last year, when thousands of geeks began arriving in Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest Interactive festival (SXSWi), few people had even heard of the nascent microblogging service. Within days, however, Twitter had taken the conference by storm. The story of how Twitter took over SXSWi, and how it spread to the outside world because of the many influential early-adopters in attendance, is well known.

"People see what happened with … Read more

For anyone who follows alternate-reality games (ARGs), it should come as no surprise that the latest entry in the genre, The Lost Ring, is the brainchild of, among others, Jane McGonigal.

Until now, it was only suspected--though with extremely high levels of confidence--that the game, which is centered on helping a fictional amnesiac woman named Ariadne discover her identity, was a promotional vehicle for this summer's Beijing Olympics.

But McGonigal, who is keynoting at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin on Tuesday, confirmed to me that the game was in fact designed in collaboration with the International … Read more

I was all ready to highlight what seemed like a very insightful comment on this blog by a co-founder of the advertising company CultureFish Media on the merits of Baidu, China's leading search engine. But then I remembered Rick at CNET Asia had asked readers for reasons to love Baidu. Lo and behold, the same comment appeared there under the name of a different CultureFish exec (and prominent blogger).

This wouldn't bother me at all, except that the comment includes personal reflection, such as this passage that appears verbatim in both posts: "Maybe I will get more … Read more

For months now, I've been hearing whispers that a big new alternate-reality game was on the way. I never got any details of what it was about, but when a box arrived at my desk on Friday filled with clues, I knew this was it, and it seems that it's linked to this year's summer Olympics.

If you're not familiar with these types of games, known popularly as ARGs, they tend to be mixed-media affairs that task players the world over with solving puzzles, both individually and working with others, online and in the real world, … Read more