If you’re not familiar with it, South By Southwest (SXSW) is a multi-week conference held in Austin, TX covering the Film, Music, and Digital industries. SXSW Interactive (March 11-15) is where Twitter was first announced three years ago, and where Foursquare and Gowalla defined location-based marketing.

 We elect to attend SXSW because it helps us better serve our clients, arming us with bleeding edge technical knowledge and a blindingly long list of #hashtags and new buzzwords. We will tolerate endless references this year to the Iranian revolution, and screaming matches about the verity of Charlie Sheen’s social influence, and we will risk carpal tunnel tweeting it all because it is one of the most unique conferences on the planet. The sessions are crowdsourced—voted on, and bubbled up by us, the audience—and as a result, the content is both rich and targeted.

 The only drawback, really, is that in some ways it is too rich—it is difficult to actually decide what to attend each hour. But, we got to work and studiously scoured the session guide to make the most of our time there.

Here’s just a sampling of a few sessions that jumped off the page:

Death of the Textbook, Emergence of Games  

Child’s Play: Game Design As An Educational Gateway  

Thin is In. The Future of Digital Wallets  

OMG - My Pancreas Just Texted  

Designing Stuff Kids Will Use and Love 

Brave New World: Debating Brands’ Role as Publishers  

The Potential of Augmented Reality for Education  

Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better  

TV + New Media = Formula for Success  

The Art of Enchantment

Interactive Narratives: Creating the Future of Storytelling

How Print Design is the Future of Interaction  

Future of Collective Intelligence: Location! Location! Location!

If you’re attending, let me know what I missed in this list! 

If you’re not attending—take a look at the list:  http://bit.ly/fcetni and let us know if there are any you’d like to hear about. We’ll send in our proxies and report back!

 Be sure to follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/marketingstore

You can follow all of SXSW goings-on across Twitter with one of these two hashtags: #SXSW or #SXSWi (just interactive).

Heather Gately is the Director of Marketing and Communications for The Marketing Store Worldwide and can be reached at heather.gately@tmsw.com. You can follow The Marketing Store at Twitter at: @marketingstore