Greetings and welcome from Austin, Texas, home to the annual South By Southwest Music, Film & Interactive conference. I'm hitting up a bunch of Interactive panels, all dealing with social media and journalism in the era of new media --the past, present and future of the Internet. Here's coverage of the six days of geekdom (scroll to bottom of post to see more pics and live video):

DAY 5 - Tuesday, March 16:

Here's out live video feed from Austin. Stay tuned for updates:

Video streaming by Ustream

It's the day of our panel discussion, Web-First Publishing: How Alt Weeklies Can Survive, and we're prepping some slides. We plan to live broadcast the video feed right here at 6:00 p.m. EST, so stay tuned. If there's a glitch, we'll throw the video up after we talk.

Last night the rains came to Texas which only seemed to force the already teeming mass of techies indoors and into the many tiny bars and clubs that line 6th St. One of them, La Zona Rosa, played host to fellow "alt-weekly" Austin Chronicle and their annual Film Bash, complete with 30-piece funk band.

click to enlarge

• Nina Hartley: Porn Star, Sex Educator and Social Networker panel.

DAY 4 - Monday, March 15:

It's back to the panels today, as I try and learn more about social media trends for people and businesses. They say SXSW Interactive affords a look into the near future (Twitter broke big here in 2008, for instance). If that's the case, then you better get ready to tell your friends where you are all the time. Foursquare, the free, location-based social media tool, aims to do for your locations and events what Twitter and Facebook do for your status updates, opinions and links. You use Foursquare on your phone to "check in" to restaurants, clubs, bars, work -- anywhere. They make a game of it (check in to a place enough times to earn badges and even become the mayor). Austin-based Gowalla is also making a play for users, but right now Foursquare looks to be the favorite to break out of the tech-geek world and into the mainstream with nearly 400,000 check-ins a day here in Austin since the conference began. Gowalla beat out Foursquare at last night's SXSW Web Awards. See coverage of the awards ceremony here.

click to enlarge

• Foursquare team, downtown Austin.

It's also one day until our panel presentation, Web-First Publishing: How Alt Weeklies Can Survive. We are feverishly preparing today by scoping out our conference room, checking for projector access and eating tacos.

Here's Joran's video diary for days 3 & 4:

DAY 3 - Sunday, March 14:

I'm sans laptop for today (you do a lot of walking in Austin) so here's a quick re-cap of our day:

We started things off with a Wordpress-developers barbeque in east Austin. Wordpress is a free and open-source content management system that powers many sites and blogs (including the one you're reading). Some really exciting and new floated in the air as we chowed down on Ray's barbeque, which was some of the best had on this trip.

Speaking of food, I think this may be the most underrated aspect of this very well-rated city. Food choices in Austin are overwhelming -- street vendors line the roads with unique items (spicy sausage tacos) while restaurants and food stands go out of their way to achieve a little extra weirdness (Hoek's Death Metal Pizza). And it isn't just the restaurants -- how about an acupuncture clinic located inside an Airstream trailer? Check.

click to enlarge

At night's end my group headed for the Mashable party downtown and found out there's no way you can fit 2,000 people in a billiards hall, so we ended up at club Mohawk to catch a set by the venerable Man or Astro-man?

DAY 2 - Saturday, March 13:

click to enlarge

• Outside the Austin Convention Center - home to SXSW Interactive

3:30 p.m.: 'Make' vs. 'Gather?' Successful Content Business Models - One of the ballrooms at the Hilton Austin is hosting a roundtable discussion for about 250 people. The topic : What is right balance of content creation vs. aggregation from other sources -- something we at CL deal with every  day.

1:30 p.m.: Walking the trade show floor - The trade show floor at SXSW Interactive is a hodgepodge of booths comprising software and hardware companies, mostly -- nothing too exciting.

11:00 a.m.: Mobile Web panels - I'm attending a series of short panels all dealing with the mobile Web and how its rapid growth is changing the way we read, write and see news and entertainment. Here are my notes (source on figures: Nielson):

"Smart phone users make up the majority of Web users."

18 million people watched mobile video last year. That number was only 8 million the year before. Also, the younger you are, the more time you're likely to spend watching video on mobile devices (nearly 40% of teens watch long-form video on their phones). 25-30 million people will access video from their phones next year.

In 5 years, all phones will be smart phones, or tiny powerful computers that can access the Web.

Media fragmentation is NOT pulling viewers away from TV and movie theaters -- quite the opposite (see Oscars, Olympics, Grammys).

9:30 a.m. Why Keep Blogging? The panel holds up the merits of blogging in the face of new waves of short-form communication, namely Facebook and Twitter. About 400 people are here and by show of hands not many of them make money from blogging.

Twitter is an elephant in the room. There's a lot of talk here among the panelists about recreational blogging, which seems odd since the cost of badges to get into this conference makes me think the audience is more interested in marketing solutions than the panel will acknowledge.

DAY 1 - Friday, March 12:

Here's Joran's video diary from Tampa International Airport, just before we took off for Austin:

After a delayed flight and a hotel snafu, we had little choice but to call Friday a mulligan. Joran Oppelt (CL's Marketing Director) and I did manage to pick up our badges. Joran is here for the entire conference (music, film & interactive) while I'm here to focus on the geek stuff. Stay tuned for video reports.

We hit the town Friday night to eat and drink as much of downtown Austin as we could. 24 Diner was a highlight (Tampa deserves a 24-hour diner this good). One of the better parties, ScreenBurn at The Mohawk , featured amazing digital art (created in Photoshop), all "painted" in real time.

Here are images from SXSW (photos by Stephen Hammill & Joran Oppelt):

Slideshow

SXSW Interactive

Coverage of South By Southwest Interactive conference.

By stephen2

Click to View 75 slides

Follow all our SXSW coverage by visiting cltampa.com/sxsw.

Here's out live video feed from Austin. Stay tuned for updates:

Video streaming by Ustream