Last call for boarding

The countdown has begun to Thursday morning when many Vancouver locals will crawl out of bed much eariler than normal and head down to YVR to board their flights to Austin, Texas for the 2008 edition of South by Southwest. Many of us will be on the same flight which should make the trip that much more fun.

There is still a lot to do to prepare for the trip. I still have to go through the schedule of events while at SXSWi but may take it day by day instead of spending too much time planning every hour of the conference. There are many ways to see what’s going on from the official site, Upcoming, Facebook and the SXSW Insider on Ning to name few. If you’re planning on attending any events or parties, it’s probably a good idea to scope things out in advance and rsvp. While many events are open to all Interactive attendees with a badge, demand usually far exceeds capacity so get on a list if there is one and show up early.

While down in Texas, I’ll probably not be doing a lot of blogging around here until after the conference but will be dropping dispatches from Austin on Miss604, Flickr, Utterz and Twitter…and possibly other places depending on what I find and have time for.

As more of a backup plan in case Twitter implodes under heavy use during SXSW, I decided to setup my own pseudo version of it using the recently released Prologue theme for WordPress. If you’re going to be down in Austin and want to try it out, drop me an email or direct message and I’ll add you to the list. Using this theme and a standard WordPress install, we’ll be able to micro-blog what we’re doing without relying on other services to be available as well as not bombarding the non-attendees with tweets.

It’s pretty plain and simple at the moment (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing since it loads fast) and that could change if I get time between packing and getting ready. A nice feature of the theme is that you can subscribe to an RSS feed of everyone’s posts or just a specific person so I’ll probably plug my feed into a few services.

That’s it for now….gotta go find my giant suitcase.