A lot of folks from the Sunlight Foundation will be heading to SxSW Interactive and we hope members of the Sunlight Labs community will follow us on twitter and find us wherever we’re at to meet up. It’d be great to put some faces to the names of the people in our community.

For those that aren’t going to SxSW though, and do use twitter, SxSW represents an annual flood of conference information that pollutes your twitter stream with stuff you don’t care about. Last year, my friend and neighbor Mike for instance, ended up unfollowing all his friends on Twitter that were at SxSW because it got so overwhelming.

This tip will only help out Mac users, but I’ve experimented with it and found it useful.

First: Switch your twitter client to twitterriffic. It is a great little twitter client in its own right, but the other thing that it does is– it has a hidden preference that allows you to filter out tweets with a particular string, like, for instance, a hashtag.

Next, Open up the terminal and type this in it: defaults write com.iconfactory.Twitterrific tweetTextFilter -string “sxsw|SxSW|SXSW|#sxsw”

This will filter out all the tweets mentioning SxSW to the best of this regular expression’s ability. Of course, you can use this for other purposes too. Thought I’d share a handy trick in hopes that you don’t get deluged with ours or others’ tweets from SxSW. But if you’re there, let’s connect!