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 […]

The local, self-organized TEDxSMU event is back for it’s second year and the application deadline to attend is this Friday, July 30th. The one-day conference will take place at the Dee and Charles Wyly Theater on October 16th, 2010. This year’s theme is focused around “starting now.”

The Bishop Arts District will be closing down North Bishop Avenue this Saturday, June 12th, for the Second Annual Brew Riot Festival. From 6pm to 10pm, taste free samples from 11 homebrewers (like Nasty Nelly’s Strange Brew, MyBlock Miabock, or Mind the GAP Mild) and beers from 9 microbreweries.

Since Ignite’s inception in 2006, the Seattle-bred event has been scheduled in over 100 cities around the world. Dallas made that list back in March 2010 and Round 2 of Ignite Dallas is scheduled for June 2nd at Granada Theater. The evening will be high energy and offer professional and personal insight into some of the interesting and creative individuals living in our community. Seventeen different personalities will get on stage one after the other and share with the audience a piece of their lives and in just a very short period of time. 5-minutes to be exact!

The new downtown park, Main Street Garden, will play host to a new community festival this month. The first annual Homegrown Music and Arts Festival has lined up some of the best of North Texas music and arts and is expected to bring in over 1500 attendees to the urban park. The event will feature 15 bands on two stages, including This Will Destroy You, The O’s, and RTB2, and 20 booths for local artists and businesses.

You’re destined to be inspired by attending this month’s Spark Club event at the Sons of Hermann Hall. The group of social entrepreneurs will collaborate with PechaKucha Night. PechaKucha (pronounced pe-chak-cha, meaning “chit chat” in Japenese) is an international event “for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.”

This Saturday is the 2nd Annual Etsy Dallas Spring Bash at the South Side on Lamar. 50 hand-picked artists will be laying out their best goods – offering unique and handmade art, jewelry, apparel, bath and body products and more. Shop for items that no one else will have and have fun doing it.

The Ross Akard Gallery in the Dallas Arts District will host the opening show for Zach Saucedo’s newest collection. The 15-piece collection, Revolutionary But Gangster, is the first solo show for the gallery and it has a twist. Everything in the collection costs $777. This holy number represents the revolution of giving away art to the masses.

After the 2010 SXSW Music Festival, Next Big Sound, a tracking tool for monitoring fan interaction with music groups, released data on their website that was music to my ears. Personally, I can’t resist hearing new music that might potentially takeover my iTunes playlist for the next few months. Last week I sampled all the artists on the list, bought a few albums, and then dug in a little deeper to check if any of them were coming to town. As of this posting, 6 bands have announced dates in Dallas. Check them out here.

The Second Annual Oak Cliff Art Crawl presented by Go Oak Cliff will be a great event for families and locals interested in the Dallas arts scene. The event goes above and beyond to create a fun and friendly environment while offering a unique look into the Oak Cliff we all have yet to discover.