My weekend plans got thrown out the window the other day. Why?

I found out I would be going to South By Southwest Interactive.

So much for college basketball...time to pack the multimedia jump kit again.

If you are familiar with South by Southwest as a music festival, you may not be entirely aware of the Interactive festival, which precedes the music and film portions by a few days.

South by Southwest (or SXSW) Interactive brings together people from around the country and across the world to talk about what's happening next on the Interwebs, from social networks to web design, new media and the news. On top of that, there's also a dizzying array of gadgets and tech on display that will be turning heads some time in the very near future.

And it starts tomorrow. (Technically it starts today, but who's counting.)

So how is it that I'm going considering, oh, you know... we're having a little trouble figuring out what's in store for our future just like any other newspaper in this country?

Would you believe I won a contest?

Some of you may recall last summer I took part in a week-long multimedia workshop out at the University of California - Berkeley. That little shindig was sponsored by the Knight Foundation (sadly, not the one that creates talking cars to fight terrorism). No, this is the one that grants money for

I entered a contest through one of their newest projects, Knight Pulse, on tagging stories and blogs about the future of news.

So I'll be hopping on a plane and arriving in Austin tomorrow morning for four days of crazy technology and innovation madness. That also means you can expect an onslaught of live blogs, some slideshows, possibly a few podcasts and oh yeah, plenty of updates on my Twitter Wire.

I'm still not entirely sure how this all went down, but considering everything that is going on in newspapers (and at this newspaper), I figure I'm one extremely lucky schmuck.

This will be my first trip to Austin and my first trip to SXSW, so if anyone out there has any tips, pointers, or suggestions, drop it in the comments.

And if there's something any of you want me to check out and send back some reports on, take a look at the schedule and give me a few suggestions in the comments.

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