South By South West (SXSW). Austin, Texas. Nine crazy days mixed with tech, music, and film. It’s probably the next Sundance. Definitely the biggest music gathering. But it also includes this thing called interactive. Four years ago the tech portion was about 2,000 people. This year they say it’s 15,000 just for interactive. Impressive? Yes. But I’ve heard plenty of grumblings in the halls that it has grown too fast and left many of the 15,000 interactive attendees scratching their heads and as
king themselves why they came.
Certainly this is a networking nirvana. But for many of the 15,000 who came here to also learn, they wandered aimlessly looking for a decent seminar, workshop, or panel, of which there were few that truly delivered. Even Guy Kawasaki trashed Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams, for his boring Keynote interview, of which more than half the room packed with 2,000 people walked out.
Too bad. Chris Brogan’s post today addressed this. Hopefully the powers at SXSW will get the feedback they need to have this venue expand appropriately and fix the problem for next year. The opportunity is awesome. There are just obvious challenges to face when something this big grows so fast.
