ReadWriteWeb

It's Monday and that means that the Interactive portion of SXSW is drawing closer and closer to its close tomorrow after a weekend of great talks, panels, parties and overall hoopla. While some of the most fun parts of SXSW may be behind us, there are still a lot of great things to go see in Austin, especially for those in the startup and entrepreneurship communities. So if you're looking for some interesting panels to attend before you catch your flight home later this week, here's a run down of some of the remaining startup-related talks and events.

During today's SXSW keynote, social media research Danah Boyd, who works for Microsoft Research New England and is a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talked about online privacy. Specifically, she focused on how users can navigate issues around online privacy and how developers can help them to do so.

Everyone has been talking about how this year's SXSW will be the "year of location" as Foursquare and Austin-based Gowalla go head-to-head in a location-based battle royale. Location, however, is not the only emerging technology that will be on display in Austin; American auto maker Chevrolet announced it will be debuting new augmented reality promotions at SXSW this year.

Fascinated by the cloud and what it means for the future of Web apps, social gaming, open-source and the after life? Then you have plenty to keep you busy if you are heading to SXSW this year.

This is part of a series of ReadWriteWeb guides to SXSW Interactive 2010. If this guide isn't your cup of tea, be sure to check back for more information soon!

Location based social networks - are you over it already? It feels like location is all we ever hear about anymore, especially this week leading up to SXSW.

We're excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-ups What Twitter's Geolocation API Makes Possible and The Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived. But it's getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness.

Twitter launched lists in October 2009 and this feature has quickly become an essential part of the Twitter ecosystem. The power of lists isn't just in their ability to organize your followers, they also provide an an insight into how other users use Twitter. The number of followers an account has might show its popularity, but the number of lists called, for instance, "most influential" or "essential", that it appears on reveals just how important that account is.

Today, we're using lists to unscientifically analyze what we think are some of the some of the most influential Twitter accounts. We used a variety of lists to identify 485 accounts and then ran those names through Tableau's data visualization tools.

Wow! It's March already? 2010 is chugging along and as we head into the second week of March its time to look back on the highlights from this week on ReadWriteStart. In this installment of the Weekly Wrapup we talk about how startups make use of crowdsourcing, how outsiders see startup culture, and we even glean some useful lessons from one man and his dancing. And finally we take a look at South by Southwest for startups as the even draws nearer.

Monday evening I was made aware of a particularly interesting promotion that will be taking place over the course of two days before South by Southwest (SXSW). The event, or tour, is called The Startup Bus, and will challenge 12 participants to create as many tech

Last year, Foursquare was called the break-out mobile app of the conference by more than one tech journalist.

This year, a new contender has appeared - Austin's native Gowalla. And Brightkite is still hanging on to the LBS community,

Which do you use now? And when your attention is at a premium during one of the year's most popular geek conferences, which app or apps will you use to collect badges, connect with friends, and find out where the party really is?

SXSW Interactive is just around the corner, so it's time to make your party plans for Austin, Texas! ReadWriteWeb's SXSW party - in partnership with PBS, NPR, and others - is happening on Sunday, March 14, from 9pm at KLRU's legendary Austin City Limits Studio. There will be shuttles to and from the Austin Hilton.

We invite you to enjoy some tex-mex, margaritas and live music with us! Also you'll network with the smart, cool people attending SXSW from ReadWriteWeb, PBS, NPR, Frontline, ITVS and Futurestates. This event is free to attend for all SXSW Interactive or Film badge holders.

It has been well over a month since the devastating earthquake struck near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, and while thousands of relief workers have flocked to the island, some of the efforts are still in the planning stage. Though innovative tech startups aren't the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of a developing nation like Haiti, the founders of Seattle-based Startup Weekend believe their model for entrepreneurship and innovation is the kind of spark the country needs to get back on it's feet and prosper in the future.

Last month we brought you information about a promotional package available to startups at this years South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) event, a popular place each year to launch new products. This year SXSWi will be holding their second annual Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator competition where a recently released list of 32 finalist companies representing innovative web technologies, entertainment, and social media (both business and personal) will battle for the chance to be named one of four champions.

Earlier this week, we told you about the thriving startup scene in Austin, TX, which is home to South By Southwest (SXSW), one of the largest events of the year for the startup community. Many startups have used the Interactive portion of SXSW to launch their new product, including Twitter and Foursquare, and now the organizers of the event are offering special package for companies that can help with that process.

Announced yesterday, The aptly named "Launch Package" provides companies with floor space at March's Film and Interactive Trade Show, as well as advertisements in the event program, inclusion at an invite-only press event, and the opportunity to get their "creative swag" in gift bags to be distributed at the event.

When you think about South by Southwest Interactive, your memory may serve up warm recollections of open bars, awesome booth swag, and the occasional keynote worth remembering. But amid the festival atmosphere, thousands of would-be entrepreneurs, web developers, and VCs mill around looking for (or pitching) the Next Big Thing.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the SxSW Panel Picker is replete with startup-related panels. Ladies and gentlemen, for your consideration (and votes and comments), here are ten could-be-awesome proposed SxSW panels all about the space we love best. Look closely, and you just might see some themes, such as bootstrapping, revenue models, and life outside the Valley.

Mike Rohde was named the official "sketchnoter" of the South by Southwest Interactive conference this month in Austin and his sketches are the only form of note taking we've ever wanted to spend time going through after an event. Panel discussions at conferences are notoriously disappointing, but Rohde has done the dirty work and made it easy and fun for all of us to learn the lessons that speakers like Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman and many others came to Austin to share.

PeopleBrowsr, the online dashboard which tracks updates across all your social networks, has just launched a version of their application designed for the folks who will be attending the SXSW Festival later this month. With the customized application now available at sxsw.peoplebrowsr.com, you can track parties, SXSW-related hash tags, and you can even see where people are tweeting from using Google Maps.

If your team is spread out over a wide geographic region, online collaboration tools are key to getting everyone on the same page. Something that dispersed teams haven't had much opportunity to use use are whiteboards, which can be really useful in brainstorming sessions. But now, with Twiddla, this year's winner of the Technical Achievement award at SXSW, comes a team whiteboarding service that offers a no-setup, online meeting web site for team collaboration.

I'm back at SXSW as one of the RWW contributors covering the interactive festival. This afternoon I attended Jason Fried's presentation on "Stuff We've Learned at 37 Signals". 37 Signals is a software company headquartered in Chicago, IL that started as a interactive design company and has since become one of the leading software companies for personal productivity software.

South by Southwest Interactive is beginning today and Twitter is liable to be at the center of communications there for many people. Presuming that Twitter can stay up the whole time, two problems remain. First, how can new users tune in to the hottest conversations on Twitter quickly? Second, how can all the people not participating in the week long event still enjoy their beloved Twitter if it's overrun with SXSW references?

Never fear, RSS filtering is here! Below are instructions for some simple ways you can accomplish either of the goals above. See also our post on the apps most likely to break out for the first time at SXSW. Update: Tweetpeek just launched and takes care of much of this functionality.

Online comics service Bitstrips will be one of the startups hoping to become SXSW Breakout App of 2008. In fact they responded to our Breakout Apps post by creating a special comic strip for ReadWriteWeb (see below). So what is Bitstrips? It's an online comic strip that you can create and run as a series, kind of like a visual blog. I think this has a great chance of gaining traction, because a lot of people think visually and everyone enjoys comics.