I’m in LAX airport as I write this, held up from getting to Austin, Texas, and the South By Southwest conference as a result of a flight cancellation.
It’s a bad thing in that 11 hours in an airport is excruciatingly boring, but a good thing in that it gives me time to give some background on SXSW — since I’ll be blogging about it here quite a bit in the next few days.
(Oh – who am I, exactly? Briefly: I’m a producer at Digital Eskimo with a background in web, journalism and new media.)
SXSW began 23 years ago as a music conference, but wisely expanded into a media conference about a decade ago, adding a film festival and an interactive sub-conference to their schedule.
Music remains the biggest draw, attendance-wise, but Interactive has emerged as one of the largest new media and technology events on the planet. Twitter, which has gone meteoric in the past few months, launched at SXSW in 2007. Facebook forged a major partnership with SXSW last year and that relationship continues.
Some of the big names at Interactive this year include Long Tail author Chris Anderson interviewing author, Apple alumnus and venture capital guru Guy Kawasaki; NY Times media columnist Virginia Heffernan talking to digital artist Guy Powderly; copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig talking about reform in the Obama era; and a panel discussion on blogging featuring the CEO of I Can Haz Cheezburger, the creator of Stuff White People Like and political blogger Ana Marie Cox. Plus about 300 more.
Stay tuned here for reports from Austin.
Photo used under Creative Commons license from Flickr user tsand.
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[...] SXSW: What’s It All About Posted by John to Snow Flakes So, just what is SXSW? I gave a brief explanation in my first post,but for a more detailed look at the conference, here’s a setup article I wrote for the Montreal Gazette. [...]