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The South by Southwest conference gave me an opportunity to try out travel tools I've been reading and writing about for a couple of years. I found I could easily leave the laptop computer in the hotel room while continuing to write articles and blog posts from the conference. What a big relief for my back and shoulders!

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Twitter, a simplified blogging service founded by Blogger co-founder Evan Williams, is hot at South by Southwest. Twitter is a service that lets people post one or two short sentences, using phone texting, the Web, e-mail, or chat, and read updates from others through the same channels. You can subscribe to networks of friends or like-minded people; there's a Twitter group set up for South by Southwest. John Edwards, a Democratic presidential candidate, seems to have a Twitter account.

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Join InformationWeek and Dr. Dobb's Journal Tuesday morning for a kaffeeklatsch to discuss the South by Southwest conference, going on this week in Austin, Texas. SXSW is one of the leading conferences for Web 2.0 and it's where I am right now. DDJ's John Jainschigg (a/k/a John Zhaoying in Second Life) has arranged a special treat for Tuesday's discussion; if you miss it, you'll want to cut out your own brain.

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Participants at the "Web 2.0 to Web 3-D" panel at South by Southwest on Monday talked quite a lot about how Web 2.0 is participatory, but virtual worlds like World of Warcraft or Second Life are immersive. That sounds like a lot of marketing baloney unless you've actually been active in a virtual world. Sure, it's engaging to be involved in a Web 2.0 site like Twitter or Digg. But, when you're active on a virtual world, your attention is fully consumed in the experience, and the real world just falls away.

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I expected to see a lot of Macs at South by Southwest, but I didn't realize they'd be this dominant. You have to look hard to find anybody using Windows.

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My first panel for South by Southwest was titled, "Open Source: Tell Me Why I Care." Four advocates discussed the reasons for using open source. Pleasantly, there was almost no Microsoft-bashing, and only a little discussion of using open source because it's socially the right thing to do. "One of the myths that keeps people away from open source is that it smells a little bit like patchouli," said one audience participant. Instead, the panel offered hard-headed, practical reasons why using open source makes sense. The arguments will be pretty familiar to open source advocates, but they'll be compelling to anyone who's sitting on the fence, currently committed to proprietary software and worried about the risks of using open source.

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I'm here in Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest conference, four days of Web 2.0. I think I like Austin. Getting off the plane, a woman pulled me aside from the crowd and asked me what flight I'd been on. I said where we'd originated, and she said we weren't the flight she was waiting for. "But," she added, "I'm glad y'all landed safely." That's the kind of friendliness you expect in Texas. In San Diego, where I live, she would have said, "Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude" and in New York, where I'm from, she would have hit me over my head and taken my wallet.

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I'm getting ready to head out on Saturday to the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. SXSW is one of the two leading Web 2.0 conferences (humility prevents me from naming the other one). I'll be blogging the heck out of the conference; you can keep up on the SXSW category page here on the InformationWeek Blog.

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