What’s the Best Way to Follow SxSW From Your Desk?

SxSW Interactive, one of the best technology conferences you can attend, kicks off today in sunny Austin, Texas. Unfortunately, even though I’m only one mile away, won’t be attending this year. But that doesn’t mean I can’t keep up with what’s going on in my favorite sessions.

At 2:00PM CST, Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly media and brilliant web guru, will be sitting down for a Q&A keynote session. I’m not sure about too many things in life, but one thing I’m sure of is that this event will be heavily tweeted.

So what’s the best tool to capture the plethora of consumable play-by-play sound bites?

There are numerous applications to track hashtags, and I’m no expert in this subject, but my favorite is Twitterfall.com. I use this service over others because

  1. You don’t need a Twitter account to keep up
  2. If you are on Twitter and login, you can easily Retweet, Reply, DM, Follow, or Favorite
  3. It automatically refreshes
  4. You can use advanced search capabilities like multiple searches, geolocation, and exclusions
  5. You can customize the stream with speed, fall size, language, and text size

If you want to follow Tim O’Reilly’s session but don’t know which hashtag to use, you can start with “sxsw” and “keynote”, then watch the pattern and see if it evolves into something else.

What other tools will you be using to keep up?

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