Excursions

AUSTIN, Texas--"Yesterday's Q&A wasn't enough fun!" Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joked as he walked up to the stage at the "developer garage" event that the company had organized as part of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. The 23-year-old CEO had opted to take some time and answer questions from the audience in between presentations geared toward developers.

Just hours earlier, Zuckerberg had sat down for an interview with CNET News.com about the company's future.

Speaking to a packed room at the Pangaea nightclub in downtown Austin, Zuckerberg's … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Mark Zuckerberg probably knew his keynote address at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival would produce a lot of press, but he likely didn't expect it to turn out the way it did.

CNET News.com sat down to chat with the young Facebook founder fewer than 24 hours after the widely criticized onstage interview with BusinessWeek journalist Sarah Lacy, in which a disappointed audience turned on Lacy and demanded better questions.

After the media flurry, Zuckerberg was understandably eager to move on and talk about different topics. But he still touched upon the incident, hinting that while … Read more

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--"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--Despite having plenty of blogging work still to do on Friday night, I decided to check out some of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival's notorious after-hours scene. Man, it's enough to give anyone a headache long before the aftereffects of the free drinks set in the next morning.

Friday night promised to be the least party-heavy night of the week, with only one "official" party on the books: PR firm Porter Novelli's happy hour at the massive bar called Six Lounge. Probably because of the lack of other SXSWi parties, the line outside … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--I just rolled off a JetBlue flight where half the passengers were typing on MacBooks and talking about last night's episode of Lost and the other half were wearing worn-out band T-shirts and combat boots. Incoming text messages from Twitter are making my cell phone buzz off the hook. I have this sudden craving for baby-back ribs and a giant margarita.

I guess it must be South by Southwest.

I'll be here through Tuesday night for South by Southwest Interactive, the digital-culture arm of the festival, and I'm pumped. Unlike my seasoned colleague Daniel Terdiman, I'… Read more