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Countdown to SXSW Interactive Festival

• Darren Waters
• 13 Mar 09, 08:34 GMT

The streets of Austin, Texas, are quiet and the city feels like it is waiting for something.

It had been waiting for rain: after a 17-month long drought the downpour finally arrived this week and the whole city is breathing a sigh of relief, not least because the area surrounding Austin is farmland and there had been talk of ranchers going out of business.

No, the city is waiting for the first wave of visitors. More than 10,000 web professionals arrive for the , followed by thousands more for the and festivals which take place later this month.

Apparently the only way to tell the web geeks from the music heads is that the T-shirts on the latter group are slightly cooler.

The first of the festival goers are already here. In the corridor outside my hotel room I've heard a handful of people walk past discussing their record labels and music deals.

"I have a very diverse audience. If you like hip hop I can give it to you; If you like rock I can give it to you," said one man, giving himself the hard sell on the phone to someone who I assume is in the music business.

Austin is now used to the wave upon wave of visitors, not least because the city itself has been growing at an exponential rate over the last few decades.

Everywhere you look you can see buildings been thrown up. The standing joke about Austin is that the state bird is the crane because of all the construction work going on.

Before the madness begins I sat down with science fiction author and Austin-ite Bruce Sterling, who has been part of the SXSW festival since the early days and is giving a State of the Cybersphere talk next week.

He used to give the closing talk at the festival but is now one of more than 350 different sessions.

"I am a relic of the early days of this particular enterprise. I think they keep me around for sentimental reasons really," he tells me over lunch in one of Austin's dining institutions, Hut's Burgers.

Sterling's annual party at SXSW became a legendary event. Held at his house, the open invitation grew from a handful of people, to 100, 300 and eventually to 800 people four years ago.

"I wasn't doing an exact headcount but the cops did show up. It got out of control."

For reasons of safety and sanity, Sterling had to end the annual shindig.

The party became famous not just as a place for great conversation but also as a way for geeks to meet the opposite sex.

"A number of romances started at my house. Lots of women come to SXSW and it's known as a Web 2.0 cruising site," he laughs.

While Sterling is no longer the finale to SXSW Interactive, he does still promise some surprises.

"My ability to go in and give a blessing to these geeks has faded with time. The speeches tend to toward emotionally unloading on people. I could do some futurist punditry but people like the literary and poetic aspects.

"I try to do things 'left brain' for a crowd that is quite geeky; something intuitive and sentimental."