I imagine the SXSW Interactive festival can look excessive, with all the blog posts, photos and videos of geeks out every night partying and having a little too much fun. But here’s an example of things that happen at SXSW which are why we all go: boarding the plane today, I ran into Pete Cashmore one last time, whose great blog Mashable had just run an insightful piece about our company a few hours before, and I was able to tell him in person I appreciated the story and let him know we’re fans.

This was just one of a hundred small but important interactions I had with people over the past week who are important to my life and work in some way, many of whom I only see once a year at gatherings like SXSW. It’s become the best opportunity to spend quality time with lots of people from across the interactive (and film and music) world in one place, and I’ve seen returns both personal and professional for every hour I’ve spent there.

The interactive conference was bookended for me by a couple of great NNN-related events that were part of both the Film and Interactive Festivals (which are separate, but feature a handful of joint panels and parties). The first was a panel I put together called “Quit Your Day Job and Vlog,” featuring pro videobloggers Lindsay Campbell (Moblogic), Zadi Diaz (from Epic Fu, of course), Lisa Donovan (LisaNova) and Bre Pettis (Etsy, Make) and their inspiring stories and advice. I’ll be posting a full recap of that one soon, with audio and video, but it was a big hit and a real privilege to be a part of.

The second was an event Next New Networks sponsored with our friends from Tumblr — “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go,” SXSW’s first ever epic Rock Band party, which gave attendees a chance to get up onstage and live out their rock dreams in front of a packed audience.

Pictured above are the ladies from OVERHEARD, one of our headlining acts, featuring rockstars of the web Bonny Pierzina, Veronica Belmont, Casey McKinnon and Leah Culver, who not only brought down the house with their rendition of “I Fought the Law,” but were incredibly great sports when the night of excessive outdoor rocking had begun to take its toll on our equipment and almost ruined everyone’s fun — there’s video available, but I can’t watch the first six minutes of it without wanting to kill myself — the equipment problems, which happened as soon as they got onstage, were as excruciating as the last few minutes were awesome. The next band, the appropriately named “Epic and the Fails,” literally had the entire system blow out the moment they played their first note, but that actually was awesome.

We had reached capacity crowds by then, in a place that fits about 600, and it was amazing to stand up next to the stage (albeit in a cold sweat, as Marco and I tried to coax the console into playing a badly scratched disc) and think about last year, when I’d been the only Next New Networks person there. This year, we had a whole crew, including Steve and Zadi from EPIC FU, Rob and Corinne fromThreadBanger, and Erik and Justin, Indy Mogul, creating and posting episodes from the event, and the first ThreadBanger SXSW episode was already up and playing on the big screens there at the party. Later in the night, the crowds thinned a bit and the amazing bands Brenn and The Vettes took the stage, and for a little while, we got to spend time with a lot of our favorite people in the business, relaxing, listening to some good music, and thinking about a good year in online video. Steve Woolf summed it up well with a Twitter post: “tonight, more than any other night, this feels like sxsw.”

Our SXSW coverage will be rolling out on those three networks all week, with all of it sponsored by XBox Live, who will also be including our coverage of the festival in their “Bringing it Home” program for hi-def download on XBox 360s. We’re really grateful, as they made it possible for our teams to come down, have the SXSW experience and share it with our viewers. Check out the first ThreadBanger report above — and if you were at the festival, we hope some of us got to meet you, and we’d love to see any pictures or video you have.

Please promulgate us on the interweb.

Posted by Tim at 2:15 am on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 in Events, NNN People, Next New Networks, sxsw. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.