SXSW became the annual ritual that constituted the Web 2.0 social world

Evidence

The 2005 festival, for instance, featured keynotes from Malcolm Gladwell, Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox, and science-fiction author Bruce Sterling. For Web 2.0, “South By” represented what Burning Man did for an earlier generation of geeks. It helped to constitute a social world, providing an annual touchstone for people to reconnect and revive their passion for technology. It allowed hard-working geeks to blow off steam and eat barbeque in the sun while nattering about RSS feeds and trading business cards. SXSW could kickstart careers; Twitter broke into the mainstream during SXSW 2007 and Foursquare was launched there in 2009. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 155

Founded as “SXSW Multimedia” to celebrate Austin’s burgeoning new media industry, SXSW had steadily grown since its inception in 1995 and emerged in the mid-2000s as a destination for the same digerati excited by Web 2.0. The 2005 festival, for instance, featured keynotes from Malcolm Gladwell, Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox, and science-fiction author Bruce Sterling. For Web 2.0, “South By” represented what Burning Man did for an earlier generation of geeks. It helped to constitute a social world, providing an annual touchstone for people to reconnect and revive their passion for technology. It allowed hard-working geeks to blow off steam and eat barbeque in the sun while nattering about RSS feeds and trading business cards. SXSW could kickstart careers; Twitter broke into the mainstream during SXSW 2007 and Foursquare was launched there in 2009. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 155

Categorization

• CANDY: The detail that Twitter broke into the mainstream at SXSW 2007 and Foursquare launched there in 2009 is a light, shareable fun-fact.
• SEED: The parallel between SXSW for the Web 2.0 generation and Burning Man for earlier geeks suggests an article angle on how subcultures ritualize their annual gathering as identity-renewal.
• XREF: The ‘social world’ framing connects to earlier chapters on scene construction and to the reader’s broader reading on how communities cohere. — connects to: Annual tech conferences like SXSW function as gatekeeping rituals for scene membership — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 199
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 155