South by Southwest Interactive is beginning today and Twitter is liable to be at the center of communications there for many people. Presuming that Twitter can stay up the whole time, two problems remain. First, how can new users tune in to the hottest conversations on Twitter quickly? Second, how can all the people not participating in the week long event still enjoy their beloved Twitter if it's overrun with SXSW references?

Never fear, RSS filtering is here! Below are instructions for some simple ways you can accomplish either of the goals above. See also our post on the apps most likely to break out for the first time at SXSW.

Tuning in the the Top Twitter Conversations at SXSW

In talking to people who are going to SXSW for the first time and who haven't used Twitter very much, I realized that it could be helpful to create an easy way for them to follow the messages of the defacto leaders of the Twitter community. Enter the Tweeterboard 100, an algorithm driven leaderboard of the most talked-about Twitter users.

Twitter is a democratizing communication environment that anyone can gain value from whether their circle is large or small. But if you're new to the scene, much less spending thousands of dollars to go to a public event, you may want to cut the democratic crap and find your way quickly to the heart of public discussion.

Here's two ways you can do that:

1. @SXHotDogs is a Twitter user you can follow that combines all the messages of those members of the TweeterBoard 100 who have said they are going to SXSW. So far that's about 25 people. I'm working with the folks at Twitterfeed to work out a couple of kinks there but it should be good.

2. SXHotDogsTopic is a Twitter that delivers only messages from any of the Top 100 Twitter users that include the word "SXSW".

There's a lot of overlap between those two streams but they will deliver different experiences. You may want to subscribe to one or both for just a day in order to discover people you want to follow individually, or you may want to stay subscribed the whole time to keep your fingers on the pulse of the event and nightlife. Big thanks to the friends of mine on Twitter who helped me put those feeds together.

Get SXSW Out of My Twitter!

There are already people complaining on Twitter about SXSW taking over the Twitter experience. It's worse than the Super Bowl, it's all day and night for a week. Twitter is addictive, if it weren't then who would put up with the down time?

Here's how you can remove all references to SXSW from Twitter. Start by grabbing the RSS feed of all your friends' messages. You can substitute your username in this URL (I'm marshallk): http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/marshallk.rss

Take that RSS URL and go to FeedRinse. It's one of 6 ways we recently profiled to filter an RSS feed, but it's the easiest to filter things out with. You'll need to quickly create an account there, then add your Twitter feed. Once it's imported then you can "create new rules" (see below) and block anything with SXSW in it.

Once that's done, the orange RSS button next to your feed title will hold the link to your filtered feed. Grab that and subscribe wherever feels appropriate as a substitute Twitter reader for the next week. Maybe you Firefox Live Bookmarks? Maybe a startpage like PageFlakes, Netvibes, MyYahoo or iGoogle. You'll still need to find a way to post messages to Twitter and going to the web page is probably the easiest way to do that - but the point is, you'll now be able to communicate with all your friends on Twitter without having to see any mention of SXSW.