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.

A quick tweet from Hugh Forrest shows just how competitive the Panel Picker process is going to be. Now it’s (really) closed for new submissions, the final count for Interactive is over four and a half thousand submissions, and while I suspect that Interactive will be more popular in terms of submissions than Music or Film, that’s a huge number!

Wow!! More than 4500 PanelPicker entries for SXSW Interactive 2012. If you sent in an idea, you can edit until Aug 5 — panelpicker.sxsw.com
@H_Forrest

If you’re one of those, you can edit till August 5th, and then we can start voting and picking out our favourites.