South by Southwest (SXSW) began as a modest, local music fest in Austin, Texas and 24 years later has morphed into the largest gathering of geeks, hipsters, and wanna-bes this side of Coachella. What separates it from the music-only fests is that it eventually built a film fest into the program, and finally an interactive festival, which is what Robin and I will be attending.  Beginning March 12th and going through the 16th, the Interactive portion is packed full of seminars, panels, tweet-ups and parties, all under the auspices of ingesting the latest in everything from augmented reality t0 location-based apps in seminars like “Becoming Immortal: Undertanding the Digital Afterlife” and “Measuring Blogger Credibility: FTC Regs vs Crowdsourced Solutions.”

Like the SXSW tagline says: This is where tomorrow happens.

This will be my second trip, having lost my SXSW virginity last year (It’s kind of like that: they have a number of seminars for rookie attendees on just how to negotiate the festival and schedule yourself.)  It’s massively free form and so unlike the buttoned up more typical ad-industry conventions I’d been used to.

First of all there’s the geek/hipster factor: everyone is continually tweeting/texting/IMing so slamming into people becomes a regular occurrence.  Don’t feel bad if you’re a scheduled speaker and every single audience member is glued to his/her laptop/iPhone.  They’re probably tweeting a question to your hashtag, or highlightling your talk on their blog in real time.

Second is the locale: Austin’s official city slogan is: Keep Austin Weird.  It’s also cool to dive into those spring Austin temps, when our NE temps are still flirting with freezing.  Austin might be in Texas, but it’s not “Texas.”

But it’s the overall takeaway that makes it worthwhile: the knowledge you ingest, the friends you make, the interactive friends you finally meet.  And even though you’re exhausted from the previous night’s Red Bull/Facebook party, as the Interactive segment winds down and the music crowd rolls into town for phase 2, you wish you were that kid at the front of the line for tickets for the Airborne Toxic Event gig much later that night.