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Along with apparently everyone else in startupland, awe.sm’s two Jonathans (middle and second-from right above) will be descending on Austin this weekend to mingle with the social media elite at SXSW Interactive.

If you’re there and want to learn more about what awe.sm does, how cool it would be to work with us, or to chat about ways to measure the performance of social media marketing in general (or if you just want a shirt or some stickers ), we’re @jhstrauss and @cowperthwait on Twitter and you can stalk us on Plancast here and here, respectively. Or you can always just email us at questions [at] awe.sm, which we will be checking throughout the conference.

See you in Austin!

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If you’ve ever wanted to see exactly how information spreads through social channels like Twitter and Facebook, now you can with VIPLi.st, a fun visualization of the data awe.sm tracks for Plancast.

Plancast is a great service that enables users to share and discover events with their friends. One of the main ways that social discovery happens is through Plancast’s deep integrations with Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. All of this activity happening off their site is a big driver of traffic and engagement to Plancast, so they integrated with awe.sm to track how these external shares drive results.

The core integration is completely white-labeled using the awe.sm API and Plancast-branded tracking links, giving Plancast full control of the design and functionality of their sharing features. In addition to the dashboard we provide, awe.sm data also is pushed into Plancast’s Google Analytics account so they can see everything in one place.

We originally built VIPLi.st for the Strata Startup Showcase*. It uses the data we track for Plancast and combines it with their attendee data to build a map of how word of an event spreads through the social web. Enter the URL of any Plancast event to see how many sign-ups each attendee drove and through what channels, like this VIPLi.st for SXSW Interactive.

VIPLi.st is just one example of the many powerful use-cases that can be tracked with awe.sm and it was built in under a week using our APIs. For more thoughts on the potential applications of awe.sm, check out my interview with Pete Warden on ReadWriteWeb. If you’re interested in learning more about awe.sm, drop us a line at questions [at] awe.sm.

And if the challenge of turning the chaos of high volumes of sharing data into compelling products like this appeals to you, we’re hiring!

Finally, here’s a video of me telling Robert Scoble basically what you’ve just read :

* Credit to our friend @gregarious for the initial idea for VIPLi.st.

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I’ve been a bit behind on blogging the last couple weeks. Thanks again to everyone for your great comments on my Entertainment as a Service post. And for those interested, there’s a follow-up post about what I think this will mean for conventional media companies over on my personal blog.

The main reason I’ve been slacking on the blogging is because we’re getting very close to the private beta of the Snowball Factory’s first product, appropriately called awe.sm. And the reason I won’t be telling you more about awe.sm this week is because I’m at SXSW courtesy of my friend and the Snowball Factory’s first ever customer, Happyjoel — who of course *won* his trip here in a contest.

To celebrate the launch of awe.sm alpha customer Famery, the Snowball Factory is sponsoring a SXSW after-hours party tomorrow night at a top secret location.

When: Monday, March 16 @ 2:30am – ?

Where: It’s a sekret!

How: To get the exact details, either follow awe.sm on Twitter or sign-up for the awe.sm email list *by 6pm Central Time on Monday, March 16*

Why: Because we can!

And here are some photos to show you just how fun we are to party with:

P.S. In reality, this is more just me and my friends being bummed about the lack of places to party late-night in Austin coupled with the fact that Joel has a really big hotel room. So, we decided to buy a bunch of booze and invite people to party with us after the bars close. And being the scrappy entrepreneur that I am, I decided to see if we could turn it into a little publicity stunt for our new product. It’s still gonna rawk though, and you totally want to come!