I’m always looking for great tech/interactive/entrepreneurial conferences and I think I’ve found another one that isn’t very far from my home. The conference is called Big Omaha and it looks like a mini SXSW here in America’s heartland. Is Omaha becoming the next Austin in the world of tech start-up and entrepreneurship?

My family was just up in Omaha last week to look at colleges for my daughter and we had a tremendous visit and were pleasantly surprised by how cool Omaha is. My wife Cathy captured the weekend great on this entry from her Uncommon Lifestyle blog.

There are several videos from last year’s conference that you might want to catch up on.

Check out the Kaneko Orgnization in the Old Market where the conference will be held.

One of my favorite talks from last year was this one by Scott Harrison the founder of Charity Water.

Scott Harrison – charity: water from Big Omaha on Vimeo.

I’m sure you know that SXSW is taking place for the next few days. There are three separate conferences in Movies, Film and Interactive combined into one single event. An amazing amount of content and presentations are currently taking place but you are not there.

Here are a few of my tips for getting something out of the conference if you can’t be there in person.

There is currently a link being sponsored by Pepsico where you can watch keynotes on demand, a YouTube SXSW channel and a Facebook page where you can find lots of links and content.

Another great way to get a sense of what people are thinking that attend the Interactive part of the conference is to follow #SXSWi from your twitter account. You will see live links to other individual conference sessions where attendees are tweeting observations in real time for the conference. These conversations can become a great archive of the topic that was covered. I’ll try to provide an update to some of my favorite breakout sessions.

After the entire conference is over many of the sessions will be podcast via iTunes, or via an interactive phone app. Here is the link to the 2010 iPhone SXSW audio archive application. I had downloaded this earlier and it works from my iphone, but it looks like it is no longer available from the US iTunes store. I wonder what is up with that.

If you have a favorite 2011 SXSW session, please share the links to content that may be available.

I’ve included this video from last year’s 2010 conference because I think it gives a great video overview of what takes place at SXSW.