Sabala, who started at Digg on February 6 as community manager and marketing director, is a SXSW veteran. (You can tell because she calls it "South By.") She was set on the idea of a party at the festival, but by Friday, she and the rest of Digg had decided it was a nonstarter. The next Monday, though, she gave it another try. A call to a Napa winery landed a sponsor for wine. A call to a contact at PureVolume secured the club for Tuesday night. With that, Sabala had a party that bridged SXSW Interactive's last day and the SXSW Music's first.

A few blocks away at Six Lounge, Revision3 was also bridging music and the Web, with a live debut of "Rock Band," Randi Jayne Zuckerberg and David Prager's homage to the guitar-wielding videogame at a party hosted by Rana Sobhany. Kevin Rose ruled Austin last night — he also cofounded Revision3.

Prager, Revision3's COO, told me Monday about the times he'd put money from his own bank account into Revision3's coffers to make sure it made payroll. Those lean days are long past for both of Rose's companies. Even as the stock markets waiver, Web startups seem flusher than ever. A Microsoft ad deal has buoyed Digg; the online-video boom is taking care of Revision3's paychecks.

Are we going to see this kind of party scene at next year's SXSW? Let's be clear: SXSW was a good time, not a boundless bacchanal. Nothing smacked of excess: A mild dose of star power is enough to intoxicate the deskbound Web designers who attend the festival. But I noticed that no one talked about the stock market once the whole week. SXSW was a comfortable bubble. As the Webheads fly back home, will they even feel it popping?

Schlicht writes:

We visited Facebook yesterday and we learned that all they do is play Rock Band. They don't have set hours and the offices are open 24/7 so its not uncommon for someone to come in for an entire day but not work. There are broken guitars and drumsticks all over the room, so they must play a lot. Most times when people sing, they "meow" the song. And yet they have 22,000 fans on Rock Band.

Yeah, most days I'll come in, sit at my desk, glance at the computer screen...then I'll look at my buddy sitting across from me and go, 'Dude, wanna play some Rock Band?' We end up playing for hours. Nobody works here, all we do is listen to Daft Punk and play video games. The reason this room smells kinda funky is because one of our engineers was living in here for a few weeks. His personal hygiene wasn't amazing.

MTV is not gaining access to Bruckheimer's successful film properties or TV series CSI. Those are already licensed to other developers. Other game-development deals with high profile director-producers like Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson have produced nothing but ego massages. A partnership between MTV, with little success and experience in the gaming industry, and Bruckheimer, who has no experience in the game industry, is more likely to be the kind of disaster story Bruckheimer produces so adeptly for the silver screen. (Photo by Frank Connor)