SCHED.org's
SXSW 2012 Blog

Today is when people descend for what I call Spring Break for Web Nerds, the SXSW Interactive Festival.

According to my.sxsw a total of about 20,000 people have signed up to be a part of this year’s event either as a speaker, attendee, tradeshow booth babe, or what have you. On top of that, the Interactive panels (that attendees helped pick) have exploded across the Austin Convention Center to the nearby Austin Hilton’s third and fourth floor. It’s going to be fun, but frantic week.

With all this booming activity, it begs the question of how you are going to deal with SXSW this year?

If you are a first-time to SXSW, I would suggest heading to the How to Rawk SXSW: The Basics panel on Friday at 3:30pm in Austin Convention Center (Room 18BCD). After that, try doing your own thing and finding out how it goes. Learning the that you can’t do everything you would like to do is best learned the hard way.

The Co-Founder of JPG Magazine and Founder of Fray, Derek Powak, lends advice he learned the hard way.

Personally, my advice is to first make a schedule of all the panels and parties you want to attend. Use that as a starting point everyday or whenever you feel lost of what to do next. The idea is to use your schedule as a backup plan because the goal is to find a few people to hang out with and then go with the flow until you need to crash.

Yes, you will miss out on some important content, cool conversations, and so on. The key is to recognize that there is so much of that going on that taking part and contributing your own mojo is going to make this conference appealing for other attendees, too.

For those not going to SXSW Interactive because you are too painfully hip, you might want to save your Twitter stream by filtering out those SXSW tweets. There’s nothing like not showing up and then plugging your ears with fingers to make everyone knows you are cool.

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Blogged by Christopher Schmitt, your personal thought leader and man of the people. See him speak at Designing Our Way Through Forms and sign copies of Professional CSS with Mark Trammell and Cindy Li.