Wondering where everbody is? Look in Austin

After starting to panic because nobody was visiting or commenting my blog (except for my few loyal friends and the usual spammers), I realized why the blogosphere has been so quiet lately. This week all the cool kids are in Austin, TX, at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference (also known as SXSW Interactive).

An important aspect of being uncool is being systematic in missing the coolest events, and SXSW is no doubt one of those. I wish somebody had launched a Web 2.0 slick app for cool-events-impaired people to alert us that it was time time to register for SXSW Interactive. I don’t remember anybody writing months ago, when one could still find a hotel room in downtown Austin, that registration for the most fashionable new media conference of the year was open.
[Note to self: Next year, remember to write a post alerting all the clueless people out there that is time to register for SXSW Interactive and to reserve the hotel room.]

The bad part of hanging out in the blogosphere is that it’s impossible not to notice that everybody except me is having fun in Austin. Because people write, podcast, podcast some more, and perhaps even videocast about it .

The good part of hanging out in the blogosphere is that with all these live bloggers you can actually know in real time what happened. Which means that, if you can’t have the fun, you can at least show off the knowledge.

A number of BlogHers are in Austin and making waves. Lisa Stone observes that 100 out of the 300 speakers at SXSW Interactive are women (so much for the excuse “there are no qualified women speakers” of so many high testosterone Technology and Web 2.0 conferences). BlogHer attendees are contributing to five panels. Two Blogher @ SXSW panels have already been liveblogged (check the Blogher site for updates):

• We got naked, now what?, liveblogged by Lisa Stone
• Public square or private club?, liveblogged by Elisa Camahort

[Several SXSW Interactive panels have been liveblogged at Auscillate.com; great SXSW posts at Social Customer by Chris Carfi; or you can spend all your waking life reading thousands of posts on SXSW Interactive on Technorati]