ReadWriteWeb

Substance Labs has put together a new site called SXSW Lesson. This Twitter-powered mashup site listens for tweets with the hashtag #sxswlesson, archives them, and then throws one of them up when you visit. This is your lesson. You can then check comments on the lesson to see how others interpreted it, add your own comments using Twitter OAuth (which doesn't reveal your password), and look for other lessons.

Joshua Baer (@joshuabaer), founder of OtherInbox, was nice enough to sit down with us this weekend at SXSW Interactive and go over what's new with his company's product. OtherInbox was developed out of a need to intelligently manage the rest of your mail. That is to say, the mail that you might get from mailing lists, shopping sites, and other services but may not actually be from another human. We all get this mail, and to a greater or lesser extent have developed strategies to manage it, but OtherInbox provides a comprehensive and stylish solution. The big news is that the core service is now free of cost.

One of the more popular panels at SXSW Interactive this year was one called Beyond Aggregation. The panel included our very own Marshall Kirkpatrick, as well as Gabe Rivera (Techmeme), Louis Gray (LouisGray.com), Melanie Baker (PostRank) and Micah Baldwin (Lijit). The topics revolved around information gathering and management.

From the panel, Marshall and Louis had new sources and gathering tips, Gabe and Melanie weighed in heavily on how to manage information and Micah had some great suggestions on discovery of new information sources.

Alltop, Guy Kawaski's project to get all the best sites on the Web organized by topic, is now offering a customization option. This new feature comes exactly one year from the official birth of Alltop, and on top of amazing growth of the site overall. It's called MyAlltop and it is deceptively simple - but very welcome - and really nicely integrated. Basically, MyAlltop lets you choose what sites listed on Alltop you like the most and pull them together on to your own custom Alltop page.

On the panel were Kevin Gibbs (Tech Lead & Mgr Google App Engine, Google App Engine), Yousef Khalidi (Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft), Werner Vogels (CTO, Amazon.com).

I'm not at SXSW this year, but I might as well be. True, I don't get to run into my friends and colleagues in person, and I'm not rubbing elbows with some of the most famous people in the interactive digital world... but from the blog posts and Twitter stream coming out of Austin, I get a pretty good feeling for it. Enough that I don't even feel jealous.

At SXSW Interactive yesterday, I met Curtis Spencer (@cruxlux) in the hall between panels. We sat down and spoke for a few minutes and he told me about an application he was developing called Cruxlux. The name describes what the application attempts to do: Lux for light and Crux for the decisive point. In essence, the goal of Cruxlux is to analyze the web page you are visiting, and scour other web sources for related stuff, then present that information to you, summarized, and without actually leaving the current page. Although technically in beta, it is available to use without registration.

SXSW Interactive begins today, bringing thousands of geeks from all around the world to Austin, Texas, to talk shop and party. One of the key stories about SXSW history is that Twitter blew up there (in a good way) two years ago. Everybody wants to know - will there be another app that takes off in the same way this year?

Many people will likely come to the SXSW Web Awards at the Hilton on Sunday night hoping to discover the next big thing. The fact is, though, that the annual Web Awards are all about design - not social functionality a la Twitter. In years past, most of us have ended up leaving the room afterward scratching our heads and saying "I've never even heard of those websites." But not this year. Check out the RWW Guide to the SXSW Web Awards Finalists below, where you'll find brief scannable explanations of who and what is behind the 80+ companies and projects that have been named as finalists for the awards.

Mozilla Labs has announced its latest "Labs Design Challenge" today. The task is to create a better upload widget than what's currently in use. The Labs team realized that uploading files from a web page is serviceable at best, so they want something better to replace it. This challenge comes on the heels of the very first (and more wide-ranging) design challenge that closed at the beginning of the month.