At last year's South by Southwest Christina caught up with technology super-hero Guy Kawasaki to talk about his venture Alltop (which we've previously covered here at Download Squad). This year, we were fortunate enough to chat with Guy about the new MyAllTop area that lets you build a custom collection of your favorite feeds that are listed on the AllTop site on your own personalized page.

The Alltop site also provides a few selected users' profiles to show you the customization at work and since I started using the MyAlltop service a couple of days ago, I've grown to love the passive feed-reading that it offers. Instead of becoming overloaded with RSS items in NetNewsWire, setting your MyAlltop page as your homepage lets you easily dive in and out of news without the pressure of an ever-growing unread item count.

Be sure to check out the video after the break!

Twine is a service that lets you track your interests and discover new content that you care about, based on the bookmarks of the other 100,000 users who use it. On top of that, there are a million people who just read Twine every month, which means it's on track to be bigger than Delicious soon. Learn more about the human-curated web straight from Twine's Nova Spivack at SXSW.

Chris Saad tells Grant how JS-Kit works as an advanced commenting system for your blog, including stuff like OpenID and Facebook Connect. But it's also more than that: it provides widgets for comments, ratings, polls and chat across a network of 600,000 blogs. Basically, JS-Kit is an all-purpose system to cross-pollinate your comments and other info across sites in the network. These aren't all small sites, either: I Can Has Cheeseburger and Jetblue are some of the well-known sites that are on board with JS-Kit.

Grant Robertson catches up with the Data Portability project to see what they've accomplished in the past year. Turns out it's quite a lot. Internal governance mechanisms are in place, so the project can go forward and get more sites on board with its vision of interoperability and user control of data. If you don't know what Data Portability is and does, this video is a good primer.

Download Squad's fearless lead blogger, Grant Robertson, has got his hands full in another interview from SXSW. Grant gathered a group that represents everything you need to run your small business or freelance practice, from tracking your expenses, to invoicing clients, to managing your contacts. Check out this interview to learn more about what Shoeboxed, Freshbooks, Outright and Batchblue can do for you.

UPDATE: Check the comments on this post for some excellent clarification from Ben Curren of Outright about how all these services work together. Thanks, Ben!

Grant talks to the team from Rudder, a new financial-tracking service that sounds a lot like Mint.com. The Rudder guys tell him how they distinguish themselves from Mint by focusing on planning for the future instead of tracking the past. Learn about the cool features that let Rudder turn finances into a game that you play with yourself. Can financial management seriously be fun? Find out in this video.

Threadless is more than a t-shirt company, as Grant Robertson found out when he chatted with Jeffrey Kalmikoff. Jeffrey explained how Threadless works, and how they've managed to build a community of nearly a million people who submit and vote on awesome new shirts. And that's just registered users, not including the thousands who just use Threadless to buy the hottest new designs. Stay tuned to Download Squad for more interviews straight from our team at SXSW.

Download Squad's Grant Robertson has been interviewing up a storm down at South by Southwest. He just hooked up with Micah Baldwin of Lijit to talk about how blogs and trusted friend networks can lead to more relevant, more personal search results. The biggest surprise to me was that Lijit isn't supported by Wordpress yet. Micah's encouraging everyone to email Automattic and get them to change that.

It's that time of year again when the techworld descends on Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest Interactive festival. Our crack team of bloggers (Grant, Christina, Chris Ullrich, Victor Agreda, Chris Clark and yours truly) will be going to as many sessions, parties, after-parties and panels as humanly possible, bringing you news and videos throughout the next six days.

If you're in Austin for SXSW, be sure to come say hello and grab a pint of Shiner Bock with us - you can keep up with what we're doing on Twitter (links below) - and if you've got any interesting tips be sure to get in touch and let us know!

Twitter Links: Download Squad - Grant - Christina - Victor - Nik - Chris Ullrich - Chris Clark

We're in the thick of it at SXSWi 2009! Our own Nik Fletcher unbags and disects the official South by Southwest bag full of goodies. Keep your eyes peeled from more from Austin and, if you happen to be here with us, hit us up on Twitter and meet up with us in person!

This week saw an odd migration of geeks in and out of Austin. Early this week the tech geeks all left the capital of Texas en mass, while music geeks all boarded trains, plains and autos headed for Austin. And if you're still suffering from jetlag and whiplash, here are a few stories you may have missed.

Download Squad SXSW2008 coverage continues

Southy by Southwest Interactive may be over, but we scored some amazing interviews with movers, shakers, and up and comers. Check out our interview with Guy Kawasaki where he discusses his new startup on a budget, Alltop. And keep checking back for more interviews and special coverage from SXSW.

Who needs IE8? Get WebSlices and Activities in Firefox

Last week Microsoft released the first public beta of Internet Explorer 8. And while it's still a pretty early release with serious compatibility issues with many web sites, IE8 does have a few pretty nifty features. And it only took a couple of days for Firefox extensions emulating those features to pop up.

SXSW is a junction of film, music and interactive folks with the iF! trade show floor reflecting that eclectic mix. We found a healthy smattering of music booths, some film schools and lots of web app companies. Big booths included Sony, Mapquest, Opera, Yahoo and O'Reilly while smaller booths from Axiom, Kyte and AIM provided a smorgasbord of interactive wares. You can see the full list on the SXSW site or just peep our gallery for a virtual tour.

Trade show floors often take on a circus-like atmosphere, with booths doing what they can to lure you to their wares. At iF! the "cool thing" was Guitar Hero. We counted no less than four booths with the ubiquitous guitar controllers and LCD screens (even if they were often unmanned). One booth broke with tradition and had Rock Band. Brave, no?

Our money for Most Fun Demo is on Bitstrips, a killer app for making your own comic strips online. Imagine mixing Mii-creation tools with Comic Life and you get the idea. Lots of fun, diverse and powerful, and stupid simple to use. Most boring? Well, hard to say because by the time we hit the floor a few booth attendees had left, leaving their booths sitting there, dejected and stickerless.

There are a few good questions up so far, so give it a shot if you're wondering anything about SXSW or what to do in Austin. In case you're curious about what in the world a "fluther" is, the site explains that it's a group of jellyfish that all communicate with one another. Hey, that's one question answered already. While you're waiting for someone to answer yours, keep watching Download Squad for more SXSW coverage!

Recently I was interviewed by a graduate student who was working on a thesis about representations of female sexual empowerment in popular culture. Much of our conversation centered on women's usage of the internet. One of the first questions she asked me was whether I thought there was still a stigma against women being openly sexual online. After stumbling over my words because I couldn't get the "yes" out fast enough, I gave her an example that shows just how much of a problem this is.

I go to a lot of conferences, unconferences, and all variety of social media-oriented events. Frankly, I'm feeling a little conferenced out at this point. Anyway, at each of these events I go to, there's almost always a panel or session or discussion group focused on the question of how to "present yourself" online – usually framed in a business context. And even if there isn't a session nominally devoted to this topic, it ends up coming up sooner or later. It's obligatory, just like the incessant "bloggers vs. journalists" debate.

These discussions can get quite heated, with people becoming very earnest about not wanting to look "unprofessional" online. Women in particular tend to get very worked up about it (which isn't surprising; there are expectations placed on us that men won't ever experience). Without fail, the ultimate example of "unprofessional" is always something sexual. Someone will be ranting about the presentation of their professional demeanor online and attracting new clients and blah blah blah, and it's only a matter of time before they make an offhand remark like, "So, I'm not going to go around posting naked pictures or anything!" Such comments are usually received with much laughter and nodding in agreement.

So, YES, if one's sexuality is the ultimate representation of what it means to be unprofessional, then absolutely we have a problem here.