It’s that time of year again, and I’m in a flat spin preparing for another trip to South by South West, in Austin Texas. I will be there from 11-18 March, after which I’ll probably need to take the rest of the year off.

South by South West is one of the world’s premier film, music and interactive festivals, attracting near 20,000 people to the delightful university town of Austin. The programme is packed with serious brain food and equally serious food and entertainment.

To pay for it all (courtesy of our sponsor, Old Mutual) we’ll be blogging and tweeting up a storm. The official Twitter account is @sxswsa, and I’ll be editing a blog at sxswsa.co.za. Follow along, and use the hashtag #sxswsa to facilitate searching. There’s also a Twitter list, at @sxswsa/sxswsa, with all the South Africans who are going along. This year, the effort will be lent much professionalism and polish by the addition to the team of two social media and marketing mavens, Catherine Lückhoff (@cluckhoff) and Gaby Rosario . They’ll both be writing and photographing their way around Austin. In addition, we’ll aggregate as much other South African content on the sxswsa blog as we can, to make it a one-stop shop for the South African invasion of Texas.

As an introduction, here’s a piece written for BizCommunity, one of the sites (along with Memeburn) which has kindly agreed to cover our trip: The South African invasion of Texas. I will likely write articles for other publications too, so keep an eye out for them.

When flyers were distributed offering cash for organs, Johannesburg, and the country, were in instant uproar. It turned out to be a brilliant marketing stunt, for which the creative agency’s craven corporate bosses immediately apologised. Shame on them. My column on the subject, Ogilvy should grow a spine, made the front page of the new Freakonomics blog, which gave me warm fuzzies for days.

In an unusually dull State of the Nation address, Jacob Zuma did mention that he wanted to spend some very large amount of money on a broadband implementation plan. Given the government’s record in telecommunications, this struck me as a stupid idea. Don’t ministers need cars or something? Read Throwing good money after bad on ITWeb.