It is that time of year again: SXSWi panel pimpage! I've put together a somewhat vague panel proposal on behalf of microformats.org and I would appreciate it if you could give it a vote.

Apparently voting only counts towards a relatively small percentage (30%) of whether or not it will be selected, but with 2346 proposals in the system, I suspect it counts a lot more than that.

The session is rather vaguely defined because I'm not really sure right now what'll still be interesting in a few months. I also want to garner as many opinions from the community as they can about what they want to know more about, see speak or show off - so do make your voice heard in the comments.

SXSW submissions are a bit nuts, really.

The mega-conference happens in March every year. By the time you're done clearing your credit card bill and the fuss on twitter has died down a few weeks after the event, it's already time to submit proposals for the coming year with the deadline at the start of July.

That means you need to think about your proposal a good 9 or 10 months before the next event.

In my mind, it's incredibly difficult to predict what will be a hot topic or really relevant 10 months down the line in an industry like ours. Things move incredibly quickly. I also find it very difficult to know what to vote for - I may find at the beginning of next year that actually, I really could have done with knowing more about The Latest Technique, but right now I don't know what it is to vote for it.

I also worry that interesting topics that I don't know about yet don't have the community around it to rally support and get the votes. Inevitably, the topics that are most trendy or have the most well-known organisers/panelists will be the topics that get the most votes. They tend not to be the panels I've enjoyed the most, though. Unfortunately, it's becoming increasingly hard to figure out which sessions are going to be great and which aren't, since SXSW is just so big now - I think it has become quantity over quality. </ complain>

Anyway, not a lot I can do about that other than play along and attempt to include a session that I will attempt to put together at a level that I deem acceptable quality. I do want to see microformats.org have a representation there, so help me out, huh?

p.s. The spelling of the tag "microformats" as "micoformats" is not mine. It's theirs. And I asked to have it corrected, but apparently their system doesn't easily allow for that at the moment. WTF?