This Is SXSW 2011: The Motherboard Omnibus (Updated)

It's another line. The young woman, slouching with a tote bag over her shoulder, was groaning. "It's always a line." Behind her snaked a long queue of South by Southwest conference goers, protruding out from a table like the slowest of progress bars. They were waiting in front of a giant stage, inside an impromptu trailer park near the convention center covered in Astroturf and a handful of Starcrafts and classic Airstreams (I'm writing from inside of one of them right now). The occasion for the park is a line of printers to which one can send a printing job from any mobile phone. The table was handing out beers in koozies branded with the Hewlett-Packard logo and the words "Mobile Park."

"It's not South by Southwest unless you're waiting on a line. It's always the way it is. You turn a corner and you see people waiting on line and you think, 'Oh, it must be something good,'" she said, then sighed. "And it never is."

"Attendance has doubled every year since I started coming to Interactive," said a strong, bespectacled entrepreneur panelist as we bounded across the street, apparently mistaking the statistic I had heard, an increase of 24 percent in 2011. "But they keep it the same number of parties. That's why I don't bother with the parties anymore. "

The increase in attendance has cemented the Interactive portion's popularity: it's now larger than the music and film attendance numbers combined. It's more spread out, with a number of new canvases. But growth hasn't changed the crowd's make-up: most people taking pedicab rides around town (according to one prodigious pedicab driver) are either from New York, LA or San Francisco. And most people, he added, aren't very interested in talking about what they do.

"Everyone's hating on the Internet," said one marketing magician at a bar on 6th street, at one of the many multi-disciplinary parties that crop up around the interactive and film sections of the conference. "But the Internet is my jam."

It wasn't clear what he meant exactly, but it is clear that developers are more interested in getting people off "the Internet" (as defined by web pages and laptops) and into a realm where our mobile devices activate real world experiences. No, this does not really include internet dating. The focus is on location-based services, game layers that throw points on top of all sorts of actions, group buying, group texting, and monetization: the question at the heart of all of this is how can we create better platforms for advertisers to sell things to us while possibly also making us better human beings in the process. No one's really figured it out yet, said Seth Priebatsch, the ever-effervescent and sunglassed wunderkind behind SCVNGR: "There's a lot of money in it, and there's a lot of value that can make the world a better place," but it hasn't happened yet.

While Seth spoke of "communal gameplay," "blissful productivity," and "inclusive ownership," at SXSW the real question essentially boils down to which apps, once downloaded and maybe used, can provide any hungry conference goer with free food, a chance to win an iPad 2, or access to a Big Boi concert at a power station.

What makes an idea successful on the Internet is arguably the meta topic of the interactive festival, and there is always heavy representation here from those across the fields of art, culture and sociological investigation who seem to carry an increasingly uncanny amount of wisdom about memes, viral videos and irresistible hashtags.

Don Caldwell, co-editor at Know Your Meme and your community editor on this website, helped his colleagues lead a raucous panel discussion that toured the range of viral successes, from awkwardly commercial (The Jennifer Aniston Vitamin Water ad) to less awkward commercial (Old Spice) to not-yet-and-possibly-very-soon-commercial (search Reddit). They also wrestled with what exactly a meme is. As if 4chan isn't already creepy enough, listen to Don's description: "We don't like to think of meme as a classification of culture," he said. Rather, it's more like a living thing. "It produces, it replicates."

John Tolva:

The Samsung blogger lounge has a fancy refrigerator outfitted with a screen that lets anyone Tweet from the door. Presumably that can be used to ask any of your food items if they have gone bad, assuming that they have Twitter accounts. Also, to Tweet at staffers of the Samsung blogger lounge to let them know that the fridge no longer contains any more drinks. But the machine wasn't connected to the web, so at least one blogger went thirsty.

At the introduction to one keynote, Hugh Forrest, the head of SXSW Interactive, revealed that the killer app is the same this year as it was the year before and before that: the passion of people. He might have also added, "And group messaging services, like GroupMe and Fast Society."

The one challenge: to find out what people are really saying about these group texting apps, you may need to be a member of a group that is texting each other. And as Groucho Marx once said about Facebook, any group that would accept me, I wouldn't want to be a part of.

A simpler solution to improving group dynamics is an app that places emphasis on real-world interaction, and takes it in wild directions. It's called 3Frames, and it's the iPhone version of a not-popular-enough website that gives average schmoes the power to make their own animated GIFs. It's a healthy dose of the 90s in the midst of the future.

The Sealy InBed App allows users to add the ever-useful "in bed" to any slogan that you can capture with your phone's camera.

That moment when you realize someone "stole" your app idea, the one you've had since last SXSW, and probably the one before that one too.

Hey Internet! It's Motherboard's official SXSW live blog. Get lost with us in the streets of Austin as we become inundated with spectacular stuff/things. We'll be back here all during SXSW Interactive and Film to give you the nitty gritty on our experience at one of the world's most mind-twisting festivals ever drummed up by mankind.

What the hell is SXSW? If I were to summarize everything my friends and co-workers have told me about what SXSW is it would read something like: "A networking extravaganza where you're getting rained on by free crap and everyone is always checking in (Gowalla and Foursquare), doing drugs in hallways and going hog shit over the best BBQ on the planet. Meanwhile, all of your favorite bands are playing shows that you may well miss because of the crowds, you got too intoxicated at a website's party, or you were paralyzed by choices."

OK, so it's like Altamont, but if corporations were the crowd control instead of the Hell's Angels. That makes sense to me.

First of all, my favorite band is a guy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and I'd hate to resign myself to the idea that the only way I'd ever see him play live is as a zombie wearing a Red Bull t-shirt but that's just our situation.

Furthermore: networking. In many ways it's another word for "sharing" which in and of itself has become a bastardized term more comfortably identified and signified in the brain as synonymous with, "giving a little in return for a lot." Just picture pockets overflowing with business cards and free branded USB sticks.

Finally, intoxication is great. Within reason. I've heard more stories about going to bed as the sun is coming up and waking up mere minutes later to jump back on the snake and ride again. As much as I romanticize it, I can't fully endorse the idea of completely coming unhinged and winding up with my own personal copy of Fear and Loathing in Austin scrawled on my body in sharpie and blood.

Stay tuned for updates from the edge of the real life Internet (the wifi Gods willing). And yes, from the great city of Austin, Texas too.

- Sean Yeaton, @yeatons, and Alex Pasternack, @pasternack