The SXSW Report

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005
Filed Under: Local/ 9 Comments


If you travel in some of the same circles that I do (and who doesn’t?), then you’ve probably heard a lot about SXSW over the past couple of weeks. The Interactive (Geekfest) part of the festival ran from March 11-15. If you missed it, there are numerous photo sets around the web where you may enjoy putting a face to many of the white males mentioned most often around the blogging community.

For the townie, SXSW mostly means more traffic and an even longer wait at restaurants in the Central part of town. Well, it WOULD mean a longer wait, if we hadn’t decided to avoid the entire area like the plague. The increase in commentary around the web seems to come mostly from people who haven’t ventured outside of the downtown area. What’s important to know? Well, like most cities in Texas, Austin is really spread out. New York goes up, we go out. The people who post wondering why there isn’t a so and so, or a such and such, should realize that it’s just not downtown. Central Austin is probably the smallest region of the city.

The Interactive festival seems to attract many of the biggest names in the blogosphere and web design community. While the panels I’ve read about seem interesting enough for someone in the local area, I’m not sure they would be worth traveling from long distances, as many seem to have done. Of course, the argument has been made elsewhere that the real value of the festival is in the hallway discussions.

That notwithstanding, I probably wouldn’t attend anyway. I consider my skills to be similar to those of a mechanic. Not in the sense that I screw over women and old people, but rather it’s that I’m not really interested in getting together with a bunch of other mechanics and talking about being a mechanic, the best way to be a mechanic, and the future of auto repair. That doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy reading about new ideas and keeping up with innovation, only that I have greater passion for other interests. And beyond that, the Interactive festival seemed to be more about design, and less about code. I don’t really know jack about either, but I can at least fake the code part.