Conference attendance may be in a recession-fueled funk, but this week's South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas, seems primed for a steep boost in turnout, one that will dwarf even last year's record numbers and challenge the throngs who stream into packed keynotes, panels, and parties.
If you were among the 9,000 people who crammed into the 2008 SXSWi, which had grown a rumored 80 percent over the 2007 edition, there's a good chance your experience included a series of over-capacity talks, endless lines for parties, and sardine-can hallways.
The 2009 edition of SXSWi may lack a marquee name like last year's headliner, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg--though notable FiveThirtyEight.com blogger Nate Silver is keynoting this year--and may be taking place amid an economy in meltdown, but it still is expected to grow between 20 percent and 30 percent. And while some may be tempted to freak out at the promise of teeming crowds, those in charge of the conference and many of its satellite events say the best bet is to just relax and go with the flow.
"Panels (and other sessions) will be overcrowded, and that's a fact of life," said Hugh Forrest, the director of SXSWi. "But to annoyed people, at SXSW, there are always five or six or seven things going on at once, and...inevitably, the most interesting, the most intellectually stimulating thing is something you never planned on, the party you just stumbled into. So we encourage people to be flexible."
Still, while gridlock is almost certain at many of the conference's panels, keynotes, parties and other associated events, organizers say plans are afoot to handle much of that human onslaught, spreading it out to more venues. And that's important for those hoping for the maximum amount of immersion into innovative discussions about the latest interactive technologies and long evenings socializing with the digerati at Austin's leading clubs and bars.
That SXSWi could be growing at all may shock some, given the state of the economy and the bloodletting at other conferences. But for those familiar with the annual five-day geek bacchanalia, there's no mystery in the promised crowd increases.
"It's always been about emergent technology, but now, with the social media explosion, it's only natural that SXSWi would grow in popularity," said Julia Gregory, a Web administrator for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in Austin and an eight-time SXSWi attendee. "And it's still a good deal even for those coming from out of town if you compare the price to other conferences."
Forrest agreed.
"I think the formula of our success in recent years is that we have been better able to tap into this vibrant and creative and inspiring community," Forrest said, "and the more we have learned to listen to and work with this community," the better the event has done.
Indeed, it looks like "South-by," as many people call it, may well be a must-attend event on many geeks' 2009 calendars.
"Every year is bigger, but...I can name so many more people who are going for the first time than (veterans) who are not going anymore," said popular Laughing Squid blogger Scott Beale. "I haven't talked to a single person who says they're not going 'because my company's not paying.' It's, 'I'm going to take time off and go on my own.' This year, there's so many people who've been saying they're going to go for years and they're finally going."
To Forrest, one of the reasons that attendance will be up is that airfares to Austin are cheap right now. He said it's possible to score $200 tickets from Los Angeles and similar prices from the Bay Area, two of the most common home bases for SXSWi participants. Add the fact that a conference pass is relatively cheap--they started at $375 and are now $495--and that many attendees save money by crashing on friends' couches and eating and drinking free at parties, and the event definitely seems like a good deal, even for the unemployed.
In fact, said Beale, some without jobs, and even many with current employment, see SXSWi as key to their next gig.
"If you're out of work," Beale said, "what a great place to meet your future employer."
Dealing with the crowds
There seem to be many ways that organizers are going to deal with the large crowds, even if those efforts won't alleviate all the overcrowding.
One way, Forrest said, that the conference plans to move some of the masses out of the Austin Convention Center is by locating a number of panels, discussions and even a day-long track of premium programming for "platinum" passholders--those who bought more expensive badges that grant admittance not just to the Interactive festival, but also to the adjoining Film and Music festivals--to the Hilton hotel across the street. Also, for the first time, the conference registration desk will open up Thursday, the day before the official opening, to help alleviate one of the more frustrating lines.
Laughing Squid
In addition, he explained, there are more planned parties this year than ever before, gatherings that can serve as de facto networking sessions. There are also multiple approaches for attempting to get everyone who tries to go to specific parties past the gatekeepers.
For Beale, who is a co-sponsor and organizer of the so-called 32bit party, the key to attracting a manageable crowd is not to release the name of the venue until the evening of the shindig.
That's important to Beale because last year's version of the party was already at capacity when the doors officially opened. In part, that was because the venue was smaller than expected, and in part because there was no secret about the location. This time, while Beale has been promoting the date of 32bit--it is scheduled for Monday night--he will only release details about the venue that night, and only on Twitter.
"When we're ready to go," Beale said, "then we will slowly introduce information on it. No Web site, no Facebook, no Upcoming.org. Only on Twitter."
Beale is also likely to host at least one informal meetup, and that, too, is likely to be announced solely on Twitter.
Another approach is the one Digg is using for its widely promoted Saturday night blowout at Austin's famous Stubb's bar.
The party, which should get going around 8 p.m. local time that day, is open to the public and doesn't even require a conference badge, as do many others. In the past, this has ensured horrendous lines, but Beth Murphy, Digg's senior director of marketing and communications, said the company has ways to make life easier for those standing and waiting and waiting.
"We've developed a couple of ways to communicate with our crowd and keep them posted," said Murphy. "We use everything from Twitter to Facebook to Digg when we announce (information and) to suggest that folks get there early. We give them real-time line update status from our Twitter account."
In addition, she said that Digg will have someone answering questions about the party on Twitter, in real time, in order to give people even more data on their chances to get in. Plus, Stubb's is three times as large as the venue Digg employed for the 2008 version of its party.
Even more unusual, Murphy said, Digg will also be using its top executives, founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson, to help out. "It's kind of first come, first served, for folks in the line," Murphy said, "so we often send Kevin or Jay out to work the crowd and hand out swag."
Go with the flow
Despite all that, there are still likely to be times when even those who get somewhere early are going to find themselves locked out of an event they want to go to, or where hallways are too crowded to find the friend they're looking for.
For those moments, the best advice of veteran SXSWi attendees to the first-timers sure to be a little overwhelmed by it all, is to chill out.
"I think it's important to pick your spots--there's always so much to do and so many things going on at once that if you try to do it all you're only setting yourself up for disappointment," said Mike Barash, marketing communications director for on-demand book publisher Blurb.
"Attend the things you really want to attend, and don't try to be everywhere or do everything," Barash said. "You're also going to need to know when to cut the cord--if you're committed to the Facebook party but you've been in line for an hour, do you stay in line, or do you bail for an alleged second-tier spot that may end up being a better time?"
Could the odd confluence of a US Airways jet crash-landing in the Hudson River and Barack Obama's presidential inauguration finally push Twitter over the top and into the broad mainstream consciousness?
That could be the case, according to statistics released Tuesday by Hitwise, an Internet analysis firm.
Hitwise reported that as of Tuesday, Twitter, the popular microblogging service, had for the first time surpassed the market share of visits of the hit content aggregation site, Digg.
According to Hitwise.com, the market share of the microblogging site Twitter has now caught up to that of the aggregator Digg.
(Credit: Hitwise.com)According to Hitwise, Twitter now stands at number 84 in its Computers and Internet category, one space up the chart from Digg.
A glance at a chart tracking the share of both services reveals that Twitter has been slowly, but steadily, gaining on Digg over the last few months, finally matching--and even passing--Digg last week. Hitwise said that as of the end of last week, Twitter was netting 0.021 percent of traffic in its Computers and Internets category, just a touch up from Digg's own 0.021 percent.
Perhaps a driver that allowed Twitter to overtake Digg was the tremendous interest last week in Twitter users' reports of the US Airways crash in the Hudson. One photograph of the plane, posted to TwitPic.com, a service that allows mobile Twitter users to append photos to their tweets, was viewed so many times that it took TwitPic's servers down for a while.
Hitwise noted that the general rise of social media has fueled Twitter's recent success, with many users of the site coming from services like Facebook, or MySpace, whereas Digg's traffic comes in large part--38.8 percent last week--from Google.
But in another report issued recently, Digg still far outweighs Twitter when it comes to total users, according to Compete, a site analytics service. Compete reported that Digg had 34.4 million users as of December, while Twitter lagged far behind at 4.4 million.
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 Twitter last year," said Hugh Forrest, the SXSWi conference director, "and want to be the Twitter of 2008."
Whether it's because of Twitter's SXSWi emergence or all things cybergroovy becoming part of pop culture, one thing is certain: SXSWi has gone mainstream. Does that mean it's also lost its edge?
Mark Zuckerberg
(Credit: SXSWi)Let's start with the mainstream question: There's little question SXSWi has hit the big time. In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be keynoting, a certain coup for the 11-year-old event. It's not a Bill Gates keynote, a la CES, but he's certainly a borderline household name.
"He is the most 'it' person we've had," said Forrest. "As with a lot of things that happen at SXSWi, I think it is the right match with the right person at the right time. Facebook wants to reinforce their message with the cutting-edge crowd that attends the Interactive festival."
Hmm...Not to take anything away from Zuckerberg, but Facebook is not really cutting edge anymore. Not with many tens of millions of users, cover stories in national magazines, and a market valuation of $15 billion.
So the answer to the "edge" question depends on who the newcomers are. If most of the first-timers are legitimate interactive media and technology movers and shakers, people who are well-wired and who simply had never managed to make it to SXSW before, then the growth may well be a boon for the conference's street cred as a central location in the larger geek and interactive media conversation.
"Hangers-on and sycophants"
But if the newcomers are corporate suits looking to cash in, SXSWi could go the way of R.E.M. after its 1988 album, Green and, dare I say, blogs after The New York Times started blogging in earnest.
"If there are a lot of industry hangers-on and sycophants--investors, shameless self-promoters, or wannabes," said Andy Baio, the founder of Upcoming.org, "it'll make it harder to randomly find interesting people at parties and in the hallways. (But) if you already have a strong social network, it shouldn't impact you."
SXSWi mashes it up with Microsoft's Silverlight.
(Credit: SXSWi)Make no mistake about it--despite a calendar of panels, sessions, and keynote speeches that dwarfs any SXSWi has had in the past, the real engine behind the event is the social scene. Parties abound, with several scheduled each night. For many attendees, these soirees are the most important place to make connections, meet new and old friends, and find out about cool new technologies. This year alone, parties are being hosted by Gawker Media, Facebook, Google, Flickr, Moo, and Digg, to name a few. (The festival also has a tie-in with Microsoft's new Silverlight Web technology.)
But with huge crowds showing up at each successive shindig, SXSWi can stop feeling like an annual reunion of friends.
"Two years ago, I stood in the hallway (and) saw nobody I knew," said Molly Steenson, a Ph.D. student in architecture at Princeton University who will be making her 11th visit to SXSW, "and started yelling, 'Others! Others!' (a Lost reference about unfamiliar people showing up in the middle of a well-established group of people) at the top of my lungs when I did make eye contact with an equally freaked out friend."
Yet Steenson also argues that the growth may well be a good thing. "Last year was particularly good because there were so many people who had never come before," Steenson said, adding that she had been pleased to see old friends finally make it to SXSWi.
"More and more to absorb"
For a first-timer like Carly Eiseman, coming to Austin for the conference is a chance to finally take part in something she sees as "an American cultural institution for independent art." While she acknowledged that SXSWi has likely changed a lot over the years, she isn't worried that she's missed the event's best days.
"With these things, it's never too late," said Eiseman, editor of the travel blog TheLobby.com. "It's just a matter of what you expect from it. I sort of expect it as a kind of place where I'm going to absorb so much, and each year, there's more and more to absorb. What you get out of things, whether they're small or large, is a personal experience. And I don't think that changes."
One thing that has many people excited about this year's event was that Forrest and his team of organizers were overwhelmed with submissions for panels and sessions. Rather than have to sort through and make all the choices themselves, they relied in large part on what is known as the "panel picker." This system allowed members of the SXSWi community--even newcomers--to vote on the panels they wanted to see selected.
In the end, the majority of the conference programming was selected by the community, and there are so many panels and sessions that Forrest and his crew have had to rent far more space at the Austin Convention Center than they have in the past.
With so much going on, one thing that is necessary for SXSWi survival is to keep careful track of everything going on. Making the rounds is a mashup called Sched.org that pulls information from the official SXSW schedule and allows users to easily select the sessions, parties, and keynotes they want to attend. Once finished, Sched.org creates a personalized, Web-based schedule that attendees can share with their friends and colleagues, a feature that helps people figure out what's worth going to.
"I'm using a combination of Upcoming and Sched.org," said Baio of his organizational planning. (He no longer works for Yahoo, which purchased Upcoming.) "Sched.org is a brilliantly designed scheduler for the panels and official events, so I've been using that for scheduling my daytime programming. Upcoming has all the unofficial events and gatherings, and is social, so I can see where my friends will be."
Of course, event organizers are making use of many different services to get word about their gatherings. When I got my invitation to the Digg party, it said to be sure to RSVP on Upcoming. (Is Digg still edgy? I'll have to go to the party to find out.) But Beth Murphy, Digg's director of marketing, said the company has been tech-agnostic in its promotion strategy.
"We are promoting the Digg SXSW party on Facebook, Pownce, Twitter, traditional e-mail, and Upcoming," Murphy told me by e-mail. "In addition to Upcoming, we've asked for an RSVP on Facebook and Pownce."
In all likelihood, there will be many hundreds, if not thousands of people at the Digg party, which takes place Tuesday night as the last SXSWi gathering. A large number will be longtime SXSWi attendees.
Still, first-timer Eiseman is expecting to get value out of the conference.
"You have to check it out at least once," Eiseman, who had only recently arranged housing for the conference, said. "But if you talk to me at the end of it, I'll probably (be able) to tell you where I'll be staying next year."
See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).
- prev
- 1
- next
