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Comment by otto | Hacker News Reader

SXSW isn't a tech conference. It's a music/film festival with an "interactive" section.

I don't think I would consider the interactive section which is primarily made up of bloggers and web startups(and not focused on the tech they use) as a tech section. Bloggers are not tech oriented(unless they primarily write about some sort of new technology).

I went a few years ago for just the music festival and had a blast. Andrew W.K. showed up and did a scavenger hunt under a highway overpass. I had one of those expensive badges and found other badge holders were pretty nice. Chatted with someone from SOMAFM for a while.

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It's funny, I first heard of SXSW only in the context of the music/film stuff and was thoroughly confused later when I heard it mentioned as some sort of "tech" event and actually thought maybe they were two different events. It's good to know I wasn't totally off-base.

I think it's also only recently that the interactive part has been big at all. Not entirely sure, but it feels like 2007 or 2008 was the first year it was one of those big all-the-cool-kids-in-SF-must-fly-to-Austin deals. Certainly the late-90s SXSWs didn't have anyone flying there for the tech content (though plenty were flying there for the music and films).

I know a number of web designers who refer to SXSW as "geek spring break", and could never quite figure out just what was so geeky about the event. Outside of the music/film part, it's a marketing schmooze fest for "Web 2.0" types.

True. The underlying assumption in bolting the interactive conference onto the rest of SXSW is this:

Interactive apps are entertainment properties and will have a similar development trajectory to bands and films: experiment -> indie -> niche hit -> mainstream hit.

If you're building a piece of software that actually delivers value, this is not a likely trajectory for your project. And if you're a techie building something that actually is an entertainment product, SXSWi is a great way to see how the industry funnel operates, and just how brutal it is in culling thousands of conference wannabees (these are the people giving out shirts and stickers) to just a handful of big hits (people who draw the biggest crowds at sessions and parties). The 2008 iteration was a pretty convincing argument that the startup I was then working at wouldn't win at what it was trying to do.

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