Some people think SXSW actually isn't big enough, and that Austin could support a whole fringe of events: certainly a lot of people attend Music without an actual conference badge or even a wristband. This year Etsy led the way in Interactive by hiring out a 2 storey venue on 6th Street for 2 days and organising a variety of talks, panels, crafting workshops, bands and parties.

I attended a panel about people-powered communities, featuring speakers from Etsy, Threadless, Kickstarter, BurdaStyle and NeighborGoods. Each had a slightly different take on running businesses that rely on the community to keep the sites going: whether designing tshirts for Threadless or creating products to sell through Etsy and Kickstarter.

NeighborGoods was the newest and smallest service: they're looking to create ways to share physical goods in communities (something Saul Griffith was espousing as a real way to reduce your carbon footprint). As the service grew, they've realised it isn't just about the transactions, but the conversations and actual community that emerges from people local to each other meeting and co-operating.

Kickstarter has had lots of successes recently, but the most successful projects are those with an interesting story to tell, and those that create dialogue between the project creators and supporters (one that has just happened is for an iPad pen, where supporters could choose whatever they wanted to pay, but the project had to reach a certain monetary figure to be funded – it didn't quite reach the target initially but has provided valuable pricing information to the creators).

One interesting aspect was the different takes on privacy. Many of the sites let you use an alias instead of your real name (as Etsy found to their cost) and people like keeping this distinction, even though for transactions the buyer might feel more comfortable having a real name for the supplier.

As well as fringe events, there are unofficial guides and ephemera emerging. The official guide is 330 A4 pages and is too heavy to contemplate carrying with you; to this end, the organisers also provide a pocket guide, but there's still too much information to contemplate.

Last year, James Bridle produced a SXSW Fieldnotes book, containing maps, Austin travel and guidebook information, the complete schedule and space for your notes. I nearly ripped it to pieces to take parts with me this year, but I'm glad I didn't.

Luckily, this year Blaine Cook and Maureen Evans produced a similar guide – Dan Williams also produced something similar, but I didn't get to have a look at it. Blaine and Maureen's research into the food in Austin is unparalleled (leading us to a great vegetarian-friendly BBQ, with no other SXSWers present and a great live country music) and the interesting thing about their guide is that it was made entirely out of HTML before being printed by Blaine's promised to release the source code soon, which should really aid taking bits of the Internet and printing them out.

The Guardian also produced their own SXSW special edition, as well as offering conference attendees a proper cup of tea and a scone. They had a complete field team of reporters, fashion editors, designers and coders working together to create the newspaper itself, and material for the Guardian website.

So that's SXSW. Until next year…

(guidebooks photo by Paul Mison – thanks!)