Last year iliveindallas.com teamed up with local blogs in-this-economy.com and fiveoclockdallas.com and submitted a panel into South by Southwest Interactive. We promoted and pushed our panel out to everyone we knew and to a lot we didn’t. Because of your votes, six average Joe’s (that’s us) grabbed the attention of the staff and advisory board and made it to Austin for a discussion on Citizen Journalism. Wow, we honestly couldn’t believe it but it had really happened.

This year, when we met again to brainstorm topics for SXSWi 2011, we started looking back at what we learned and would have done differently. What we realized is, there isn’t any sort of rule book or guide to getting in to SXSW. Panel submissions can get lost in the storm of 2,000 + other submissions. But they don’t have to.

We’ve submitted the panel: Getting Your Panel into SXSWi: The Amateur’s Guide.

The first round of voting ends on Friday and here’s where us local bloggers could really use your help. Your votes account for 30% of the panel picking process and we need all the votes we can get to once again grab the attention of SXSWi. We’ve even started a website (launching soon!) where we’ll be sharing this information and interviewing past SXSW amateur speakers on what they did to stand out.

Voting will take you less than one minute. It’s really easy:

• Create an account in order to vote/comment on our panel here —http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/users/register
• Check your email and validate your account  (don’t worry, you are not signing onto any e-mail lists by giving SXSW your information)
• Click on or paste the link below in your browser and give it a thumbs up!

http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/5763

We also made a short video to watch and share with your friends. I hope you like it.