As I’ve said in a variety of different threads here, if you’d like any information about Austin or SXSW, let me know. PM me if you’d like.
The music festival and the interactive festival (and the film festival—and the game festival) are fairly independent of each other, even though they have the same name, and happen at relatively the same time in March. These are all offspring of the original music festival, which was started by a tiny group of guys associated with The Austin Chronicle, our local alternative newsweekly. The Interactive Festival is about 15 years old now—I was part of the first one, and believe it or not, we thought then that the future was CD-ROMs! The new game festival just started last year, so this is a plastic and evolving set of events—do we call them events? It’s just people getting together over things that interest them.
One of the reasons this is held in the particular segment of March that it is—all the different parts of the festival—is that it’s spring break for the University of Texas at Austin, which is the largest university in the United States: 52,000 students. That used to be over 10% of the population of Austin, but Austin has grown considerably over the years so that proportion is no longer true; but the student population is still immense—and, moreover, a lot of UT graduates stay in Austin and start tech/media/movie companies. Austin was just rated by MovieMaker magazine as the “number 1” place to live and make movies in the U.S., higher than Hollywood, so you get the picture: Austin is growing faster than most other metro areas in the U.S., and most of the new jobs are in media/digital/movies/interactive, etc. The two sources of new people are grads from the University of Texas and people moving here from other places. (In my local neighborhood, the community association is dominated by a majority of people who have lived in Austin for less than 5 years; a popular bumper sticker says “Welcome to Austin: Now Go Home!") I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve met here at a digital media conference of some sort who decided to move here once they got a taste of the Austin lifestyle.
This is just to give you all some context, and perhaps to give some flavor to people who can’t make it to SXSW. When I and some friends organized the first SXSW Interactive Festival, we had maybe 300 people in a single room with about 30 computers, most of them showing CD-ROMs. Now SXSW Interactive is the largest digital media conference in the world. Just goes to show you (like pMachine, and now Ellis Labs) that “from small things, baby, big things one day come” (Bruce Springsteen). . . . 
-- Gary
P.S.—Also, as I’ve noted, I won’t be at THIS YEAR’s SXSW—first one I’ve missed in a while—because I will be teaching digital media at the University of Lisbon and the University of Porto in Portugal, and telling the Portuguese about EE. I don’t expect to have a bad time in Portugal, but I’ll miss seeing you guys at SXSW! Sorry I can’t be there. . . .
