Understanding SXSW with the firehose of SXSW Baby

There’s a tale in Richard Feynman’s second autobiography that I love. He’s been assigned to the Presidential Commission to investigate the Space Shuttle Challenger’s explosion. Rather than wait around for all the Commission investigations to start, he high tails it down to JPL to find out as much as he can before he starts – reasoning that being prepared is always a good idea. And the engineers literally queue up in a lecture to firehose everything about the Shuttle into his head until he can take no more.

And I feel that way about SXSW Baby.

The Unofficial Blog for SXSW has been running now for twelve years in various forms with various webmasters (I see myself as the current Babysitter more than anything else) but every year as January turns to February and people’s minds start turning to those eleven days in Austin, it becomes a wonderful resource for thousands of people. It talks about the events, sessions, parties and shows, about things to do to get read for the almost two-week long conference, interviews with the big (and little) names at the event, and acting as a wonderful little website that can.

There’s a fantastic team writing on the site this year, probably the best out of the last three years I’ve been editing. Having sorted all the software and archives and moved the site to WordPress has helped, because the time firefighting and fixing that was needed last year has become time to support the writers this year.

But here’s the secret sauce of SXSW Baby and what it means to me. While I’m picking through the mountain of press releases, deciding if this party gets to have a post over the sixteen other parties that arrived in my email inbox, search the webs and social media networks for stories, listening to any of the thousands of bands that are playing there, I’m getting a firehouse of information about what’s on offer and what people are talking about.

SXSW Baby is my JPL. It’s an immersion in far too much detail of an event that I love going to every year. But it all floats around in my head, and it means that I can get a huge amount of value out of the trip to Texas.

And for everyone reading The Baby!, I hope it helps them just as much.