Poetry slams and rap battles are soooo OS9. All the cool kids are throwin' down with battledecks, the hardest version of a Powerpoint presentation ever. Competitors have five minutes to put together a presentation to a series of random slides. And random means screengrabs of Digg, scaleable horses, charts of pudding versus skin, and massive Amy Winehouses. The results are judged on conviction, jargon, interpretive dance, Husker Du references and how disgusting your fund is.

SXSW regional Battledecks champion Anil Dash of Six Apart Ltd. put his success down to "Passion. No, I like to have a good time and I'm pretty comfortable with crowds." He also, he admitted, got lucky with the slides, saying, "I thought there would be a Winehouse, and I was thinking a lot about what I would do if she turned up." But he puts his final victory down to a brief video clip of Rick Astley. This would have thrown a lesser battler, but not Dash. "Throw in a Rick Roll and you can't go wrong, that's just magic in a box."

Down at the Edit Me! How Gamers are Adopting the Wiki Way panel: The big question. Why do people wiki?

After all, for games this used to be the stuff of expensive printed game guides (official and unofficial) done for profit. Angelique Shelton of Wikia Inc. uses the basketball analogy: "Have you ever played ball in the street? Well, there's people in the NBA who get paid to do that."

NCSoft community manager April Burba has a pretty good idea who these volunteer encyclopedia builders are: "The users of wikis are people that are into producing documentation." They serve a double purpose for developers: not only do they keep the discussion going and get more people involved, they keep players playing.

"You have to collaborate in development." That's the simple message from Tim Langdell (appearing as a SXSW Interactive panelist at Redrum in the Rue Morgue': Collaboration in International Communities, Saturday at 3:30pm in room 6 at the Austin Convention Center). He should know. He's helped build the industry for three decades.

"I'm incredibly interested and excited by the direction the game industry is taking," said Langdell, "which is back to the vibe of the early 80s, for the independent game developer to have a voice." Co-founder in 1979 of UK-based EDGE Games (one of the world's oldest computer games firms and for many years effectively SEGA and EA's European divisions), Langdell also helped establish the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, and wrote and taught the first games entertainment curriculum for USC film school. He's now head of the videogaming department at National University in California, the first academic institution in the US to offer an MFA in videogame production. Increasingly, his interests have turned towards building collaboration into games and game development.

I've always been fascinated by the left-field ascent of a trend, a movement, even just a turn of phrase, as when snark … the word … went from non sequitur to ubiquity to backlash in the blink of an eye, or when that Hasidic reggae rapper starting popping up everywhere. And while we're at it … there's the increase in the arbitrary insertion of a period to create a sort of oh-so-clever stopgap, followed by a sentence fragment.

Which totally drives me crazy.

Start the tally.

Not that it's a contest or anything, but put one notch on my party belt. Local video-game publisher Gamecock Media hosted their second annual EIEIO pre-SXSW party. Low temps and turnout made for a less than crazy party vibe, but it wasn't for lack of trying on Gamecock's part.

Maybe you read about Heather Gold in last week's Interactive issue and ever since you've been wondering what she meant by that whole revolutionizing-the-talk-show-idea. Well, then, just maybe this is your lucky day: Heather will be hosting a special broadcast of the The Heather Gold Show – titled "Opting Out" – on Monday, March 10, at Scholz Bier Garten (1607 San Jacinto) at 8pm.

On the proverbial couch are Evan Williams, Nick Douglas, Jane McGonigal, Ben Brown, and Jonathan Coulton. The night is free for badgeholders. Don't have a badge? You can check out her show online here.

Last week, Austin’s avant-garde reissue label, Unseen Worlds, unearthed Carl Stone’s 1983 composition Woo Lae Oak, a droning, 54-minute suite of string and wind samples. Along with an appearance Monday, March 10 at Scholz Garten in conjunction with SXSW Interactive, the California-based composer performs this Wednesday, March 5, at Ballet Austin (3002 Guadalupe), re-imagining his piece “Guelaguetza.”

Off the Record: Were you surprised when Unseen Worlds approached you about reissuing Woo Lae Oak?
Carl Stone: I was certainly very pleased. It’s nice to know that people remember the work. I’m not sure how the folks first encountered the LP. It came out in 1983, so it’s been a quarter of a century. It turns out that it has an underground status among DJs. I wasn’t so much surprised as I was glad they found it of enough interest to want to bring it back out.

Facebook is fast becoming the one online networking site to rule them all, so it makes sense its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, will deliver the Sunday, March 9, keynote address at SXSW Interactive … which itself has become the essential place for techies to meet, talk shop, and, we're told, make geektastic love (seriously, we hear it's like the high school caf, only cooler).

Zuckerberg – who, at 23, puts me, you, and everyone we know to shame in terms of sheer go-getter-ness – joins previously announced keynote speakers Frank Warren (founder of the addictive PostSecret Project) and Jane McGonigal (game designer of World Without Oil). SXSW Interactive runs March 7-16; for more info on badges, panels, and all other things interactive, check out their site here.

"You may have noticed, I'm not a girl gamer," said moderator Joel Greenberg. He then proceeded to get out of the way as the Frag Dolls and PMS Clan took over today's "Girl Video Gamers Teach You the Facts About Succesful Marketing" panel.

Chronicle cover star Morgan "Roulette" Romine (favorite game of the last year - Okami for the PS2), and gaming twins Amy "Athena PMS" Brady and Amber "Athena Twin" Dalton (Gears of War for X-Box 360 and Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii respectively) talked kicking derriere in on-line gaming and on-line marketing.

Apart from asking some really major questions, like, "since the Nintendo-DS comes in such really cute colors, and is almost exactly purse size, why don't they advertise it in women's magazines?", they got into how to get to on-line markets. The key to their success has always been honesty - they've proved their worth by being genuinely skilled gamers, and that gives them some product-promoting clout. If a frag doll tells you which network card to buy, you better listen.

Honesty in marketing? It's crazy enough to work.