There's no doubt that SXSW is the best tech party of the year. When you mix geeks, panels, a sense of technical invincibility, music and beer, well, you can't help but feel like technology can solve any problem.

Then, there's an earthquake.

On Friday, just as the crowd was flying into Austin, a massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake occurred near the northeastern coast of Japan. Then, devastating tsunami waves came ashore.

For the social media crowd, there was an opportunity to do what they do best: mobilize and communicate. They'd done it before. With Haiti, with New Orleans.

As NPR's Andy Carvin has explained, in the past you could donate blood, or money. But now, you can donate information. After Hurricane Katrina, projects like PeopleFinder gave the tech crowd reason to be proud.

And the SXSW community was mobilized to help.



But by Sunday night the emerging crisis at Fukushima's nuclear power plant was beginning to hang over the event. The Twitter feed on my iPhone was 80 percent party and panel information, 20 percent notes about hydrogen explosions and exposed fuel rods.

For a tech community feeling a sense of pride in the mobilization of citizens in Egypt, the limits of what can be done with smartphones and laptops began to replace empowerment with a feeling of helplessness.