It’s been a bit of a rough ride for a few of us here at The Baby! since the end of our favourite Conference that picks up Music, Film, Interactive, Comedy, so please excuse a little bit of radio silence. Hopefully those of you looking to speak at SXSW 2013 on a panel picked up that the deadline for submitting your panel was actually last week, July 20th.

Which means, faithful reader, that the Austin bunnies are currently doing a quick skim over all the ideas for 2013, and getting them ready to go on show in the Panel Picker, where everyone gets a chance to vote on the potential panels.

As in previous years, the public vote will have a bearing on the selection process, but SXSW will also hand pick a number of sessions themselves as well as turning to their Advisory Panel to go through the sessions providing their own input. Think of it as a third public vote, a third on a jury of peers, and a third on the gut instinct from the SXSW team on what works, and you’ll have a good idea of how it all shakes down.

The Panel Picker will go live on Monday August 13th. So in about two weeks.

The Panel Picker is now a read only environment, hope you nudged up your friends and the interesting looking panels, because it’s all over. At least it is for you. The scoring from the Panel Picker makes up 30%, that’s joined by the 30% from the advisory board, and now the SXSW staff themselves add in their 40%. Which, if you’re smart and know your arithmetic, means the could still push through a number of panels, but some could be well clear of a 50%+1 threshold already.

A veteran of many SXSW weeks, Cathy Brooks has a general “here’s some cool stuff” post on her blog that could all do with a vote on the Panel Picker:

I’ve been pleased this year to see, or rather to not see, such excessive crowing across social media. Oh sure, I’ve seen plenty of folks promote their sessions, but the tenor this year seems to be almost, dare I say, mature. Perhaps it’s because SXSW is growing up. Perhaps it’s because those who attend & participate are. More likely I think it’s due to thoughtful voices, like that of CC Chapman, who have made a point to educate and inform people about the best practices for SXSW and help guide neophytes towards behavior that ultimately serves the overall SXSW community far better.

And if you feed any community a sparkling diet, they’ll pay you back in kind, somewhere down the line. So head over to Cathy’s choices, and get voting. You have until midnight Austin time to make your mark on 30% of the final score for all the panels!

With your chance to vote on the potential panels for SXSW 2012 closing midnight Friday (Austin time), here’s another panel round-up, this time looking at the fertile ground of start-ups and small businesses. Jenn Prentice:

No, I didn’t read all 3,284 proposals, but I did take a look at over 100 proposals in the startups, funding and business categories. Below, you’ll find my list of the top 10 best SXSW Interactive 2012 panel proposals for those categories. If one of them strikes your fancy, log in to the SXSW PanelPicker and give it a “thumbs up.”

Their top ten of SMB panels can be found at Experts Exchange, and the Panel Picker hasn’t moved, it’s still here.

Naturally there’s a lot of people writing on their blogs, Facebook pages, and anywhere they can get people to upvote their submission on the Panel Picker. I’m not going to single out any site here, so some paraphrasing is going on here. But the pitch generally goes like this:

We’ve always looked at SXSW from afar. We’ve always wanted to go, and now we think that this proposal is so cutting edge and zeitgeist-y that you need to vote for it so we can get to Austin in March, because we really want to go! Please, please, please make it happen for us this year?

Just stop it. It’s not pretty, it’s not becoming, it’s embarrassing, and more importantly, it’s wrong.

It’s wrong because anyone who’s read the small print knows that getting a panel acceptance gives you an Interactive pass, and nothing else. The flights down to Austin and back again? You’ll need to buy them. It’s wrong because you’ll still need to pay the biggest expense of SXSW, the hotel room in Austin. It’s wrong because you’ll spend the best part of a week in the Texan capital and you’ll be eating out for all your meals… another expense that you’ll be covering.

So you’ve got all that budgeted. And you’re telling the world that you can’t add another $100 a month until March for the Interactive badge? $600 is a deal breaker? $600 out of a potential $2,000 for the badge, flights, hotel and spending? If SXSW is that important to you, if it is so important, then get yourself here and let it make a difference to you. If the opportunities presented are  worth $1400 but not $2000, perhaps SXSW isn’t for you?

And if you get to present a panel, then consider it a gift from yourself to the rest of those attending.

A very graphical tip of the hat to Matt Biddulph as he lays out all the tags in the SXSW 2012 Panel Picker, throws them into a word cloud, and lets us explore a very (very) big image of the Panel tags. He writes:

I’m trying to write a blog post about social-object graphs but I keep getting distracted finding new datasets to generate graphs from. The SXSW2012 panel picker just opened and every proposal has a set of tags on it. To find out what clusters of things 2012 will care about, I generated the tag co-occurrence graph and did some analysis and layout in Gephi.

That’s  just a snippet of the layout, you can explore to your heart’s content in this clickable and zoomable version.  Nice one, Matt!

From Friend of The Baby CC Chapman:

Mention that you have a panel.

Promote other people’s panels.

Spend time going through the entire panel picker and the categories you are interested in…

Leave comments on the panels you are most passionate about.

More thinking behind these bullet points on CC’s blog, which you should all head over to read just now.