sxsw

AUSTIN, Texas--The biggest ballroom at the Austin Convention Center was packed full with an eager audience well over half an hour before Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, recently pegged by Forbes magazine as the world's youngest billionaire, was set to take the stage for his keynote at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Sunday. There were even two "spillover rooms" for a simulcast of the keynote, where the young CEO was going to be interviewed by BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy.

In case you didn't know already, Zuckerberg is a pretty big deal in the tech sphere. … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--What does it mean to be "Internet-famous?"

That was the topic of conversation at "I'm Internet Famous: Status in Social Media," a South by Southwest Interactive "core conversation" hosted by Alice Marwick, an NYU doctoral candidate studying feminism and social media.

Not surprisingly, a good handful of the attendees at the "conversation" displayed various degrees of Internet fame (or notoriety): Dodgeball founder Dennis Crowley, Valleywag writer Melissa Gira Grant, video personality and dating columnist Julia Allison, BoingBoing's Joel Johnson, Ypulse's Anastasia Goodstein, Budget Fashionista blogger Kathryn Finney, Boinkology … Read more

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--"Dude, this sucks."

You could hear a whole lot of people saying that on Saturday night as the first real evening of South by Southwest Interactive Festival's after-parties kicked into gear. So how come it sucked? Well, it was the crowds. The lines outside the Google party at Light Bar, the Avenue A-Razorfish party at Six Lounge, and the 16Bit party at Scoot Inn were so long that they instigated plenty of woeful conversations about whether SXSWi had gotten so big and so mainstream that it just wasn't any fun anymore.

I, for one, … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Lindsay Campbell rose to fame as the perky, witty hostess of finance video blog Wallstrip, made headlines when the show was purchased by CBS Interactive, and made even more headlines when she passed anchor duties on to new host Julie Alexandria so that she could take the helm of Moblogic.tv, a new video blog about news and finance.

Moblogic premiered on Friday, in conjunction with the South by Southwest Interactive Festival here. I took a few minutes to talk with Campbell about her new show, whether she gets recognized on the street, Brangelina (read on, you'll get … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--If you run a social media site, from a blog to a virtual world to a network like Facebook, you're going to have to deal with angry users, and that's a fact of life.

Such was the theme of the discussion at a South by Southwest Interactive panel on Saturday afternoon called "Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting."

The all-female panel (a rarity in the tech world!) was moderated by Annalee Newitz, editor of the Gawker Media-owned science fiction blog IO9.com, and consisted of Jessamyn West of MetaFilter, Gina Trapani of fellow Gawker … 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--Professional video gaming could be the next great sport--and the one that will be the choice of the digital generation.

That was the prediction of a panel on the future of the sport at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference here Friday.

Speaking with video game instant-messaging company Xfire's CEO, Adam Boyden, an impressive cross-section of the professional video game industry talked at length about why their chosen sport could join football, baseball, soccer, and basketball at the top of the athletics heap in the future.

Joining Boyden on-stage were Jason Lake, a former property attorney, and … 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