Mashable scores big at SXSW but is the event now becoming TOO big?

However, the Observer says, "It's the serendipitous face-to-face encounters in the currents of the Austin Convention Centre that have made this event extraordinary. Unfortunately, these joys were lost this year because the event's size and the distance between locations meant that, by the time you'd heard about a particularly interesting gathering, it had already dispersed."

The attendees are there "sniffing around for the next global phenomenon" says the paper, noting that in the past the conference has been the launch pad for interactive success stories such as FourSquare and Twitter."

This year's talker was the "game layer", a design system that makes unpleasant things fun by giving punters rewards for repeated interactions. The keynote speech was given by Seth Priebatsch, the 21-year old brain behind location-based game developer SCVNGR,.

One innovation was a team-up between Ad Age and People Browsr, a social-media analytics firm, to gauge the impact of 30 key brands' reception at the conference.The custom analysis from People Browsr analysed total mentions on Facebook and Twitter from around the globe in connection with SXSW from March 10 to March 14. The results were filtered, "so no FourSquare badges or check-ins and noTumblr photos, and then scored based on sentiment", said AdAge.The top 10 most-mentioned brands, based on the brands submitted, were Mashable, Twitter, Google, FourSquare, Facebook, CNN, GroupMe, Tumblr, Microsoft and Instagram. Prominent brand marketers such as Pepsi (No. 12), Samsung (No. 13) andChevrolet (No. 14) ranked just outside the top 10.Mashable scored top honors in total filtered mentions, with 6.1 million compared to No. 2 Twitter's 4.6 million. The tech blog teamed up with Facebook for "Facebook Live," an online news series that was updated throughout the conference, and also streamed coverage of the conference on its popular Twitter feed.