With attendance up 30%, has SXSWi gotten too big?

Has the South by Southwest Interactive festival turned into a Mardi Gras?

A kaleidoscope of images -- festive folks adorned in colorful beads, and impromptu parades -- were as ubiquitous as geeks, gadgets and gabbing at panels. Blame it on a coinciding spring break and crowds bursting at the seams here in Austin.

"The one thing the Internet did not have until now is a cultural event," says Dave Morin, CEO of Path, a personal network that limits your connections to 50 friends. (It recently spurned a $100 million buyout offer from Google, according to TechCrunch). "That's South by Southwest."

"This was always a creative mecca, but now it has become an icon," says Morin, a former Facebook executive.

The enormity of SXSWi, which closes today, was not lost on those who braved long lines and packed panels. Attendance was up more than 30%, show organizers say, from last year's record 14,000, prompting some to wonder if the festival had outgrown the cozy confines of downtown Austin. Some even suggest breaking up the show into smaller parts to handle the overflow crowds.

Until then, companies large, small and in-between tried everything in their marketing arsenal to stand out.

The CNN Grill and Pepsi center shared one street, just a block away from a caravan of buses that doubled as mobile video studios. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, was in one of the buses, where he was autographing his best-selling book, Delivering Happiness.

Hsieh also introduced a new company, Delivering Happiness, helmed by Zappos consultant Jenn Lim.

In other tidbits from an stuffed notebook:

-- Kudos to www.sxswcares.org, an organization that is raising funds for victims of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis in Japan. As of Saturday, the group has collected $25,000.

-- BranchOut (www.branchout.com), a company some like to call "LinkedIn on Facebook," continued to polish and hone its online professional network. It rewards its members with badges, quizzes and an assortment of work-related history without divulging personal information.

"LinkedIn is black and white, and we're color," says BranchOut CEO Rick Marini. The site lists 3 million jobs, and its endorsements are 140 characters.

-- A major undercurrent at SXSW, and one not likely to fade away, is the envitable overlap of old media (mainstream press) and newbies (bloggers, videocasters) as they try to learn the skills of each other's craft.

The newbies are learning to tell stories, in the best tradition of classically trained journalists. And the grizzled veterans must embrace, and learn, how to integrate digital tools like embedded video, digital cameras and Twitter-length posts to capture a younger audience.

It is a developing story that -- with the advent of people reading from their iPads, iPhones and Android devices -- neither class of reporters can overlook.