Day and Night Digital | Irish Independent

South By Southwest in Austin, Texas kicked off 25 years ago as a music festival and conference with 700 participants and 150 bands. It has morphed into a now indistinguishable event. A quarter of a century later and SXSW now encompasses music, film, interactive and gaming, with around 40,000 people expected to arrive in downtown Austin over the course of 10 days. The future happens here.

SXSW Interactive is the one to watch. Last year, the number of attendees at Interactive exceeded SXSW Music with over 15,000 estimated compared to 13,000 for Music (with Film at 10,000 participants) and that trend is likely to continue. SXSW Interactive (SXSWi) is where Foursquare and Twitter created a significant buzz for themselves in recent years. SXSWi has been called “”Spring Break for Geeks” after all.

Web technologies are seen as a key part of innovation in all industries from fashion to music to journalism to branding to advertising and beyond. As the founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg said in his panel last week: “scripting in the new literacy”. Mellenweg also told the audience at his interview that his open-source blogging platform WordPress now powers 12% of all websites on the internet.

It’s not easy to distill a conference which counts programmers, designers, gamers, brand reps, film-makers, marketers, journalists and CEOs as attendees. Location-based apps, crowdsourcing and the relationship between brands, advertisers and consumers in a social media context were the most dominant themes at the first few days of SXSWi this year. At the time of writing, 80% of panels attended have used the phrase “real-time” at least once (probably a tie in with “Charlie Sheen”). These are social networking times.

There were discussions centered around the recent rise in social media in a political crisis (covering Egypt, Iran and an insightful re-imagining of how Twitter and Facebook would have impacted upon 9/11 had they have been in use). Discussions about publishing, platforms and how to get paid whether as a hobby blogger or as a large news organisation were also prevalent.

Many panels talked about how curation of content on the web will be key in the near future. These days we are faced with quantity overload. How do we find what’s truly relevant to us? Flipboard, a personalised social magazine for iPad suggests a way forward. It was namedropped regularly with many speakers pointing out how it was a great example of new-media and future publishing platform with a social edge and an engaging design. Now, they just need to figure out how to get paid from it…