You wouldn't ask best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell to format your disk drive.

Nor would you want the Washington online gossip maven Ana Marie Cox to explain how to "trick out your iPod," or expect comedian/talk show host Al Franken to clear up when you should use Flash and when you should use HTML.

But then, that's exactly why these people are among the featured speakers at South by Southwest Interactive Conference this year. You see, they're "ideas people," not really "tech people."

And that nicely illustrates the challenge of scheduling something like SXSW Interactive: You need entertaining, big-picture speakers to inspire folks to come to your convention, but you also need plenty of hands-on, more practical content to inspire the participants' bosses to help foot the travel bill.

Which is one reason SXSW got a little creative this year, re-branding about a third of their panels as "How To's." Hence, your more conceptual fare, such as "The New New Economy: Is 2005 the next 1997?" now coexists with a batch of sessions that would sound more at home in a particularly high-tech issue of Popular Mechanics magazine — "How to Bluff Your Way in CSS," "How to Grow Online Community" and "How To Create a Multimedia Moblog."

The titles might be new, SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest says, but the content basically remains the same.

"They're things we've covered in the past, but we're doing a better job packaging them," Forrest says.

It appears to be helping. Forrest says registration is up 10 percent over last year, which saw 3,270 participants. That's putting the festival back in the range of its heyday of 2000, when approximately 3,500 attended.

Beyond the clever "how-to" packaging, though, contributing factors to any success are the improving technology economy and a lineup of featured guests that's attractive even to folks who don't know CSS from "CSI."

• Keynote speaker Malcolm Gladwell seized the attention of the business and technology world with his 2000 book, "The Tipping Point." His follow-up, "Blink," currently rides high on The New York Times best-seller list.

A SXSW first-timer ("Friends of mine had gone down to the festival . . . And they said it was fun"), Gladwell is on tour promoting "Blink," which examines snap decisions, which Gladwell believes might be every bit as valuable as the more studied decisions society tends to trust more.

"There are many, many situations where we do better with less information than when we have more," Gladwell says. "That's the sort of thing this audience at least will respond to. They may be very driven by the idea that more information is always better. That's the part that'll make it fun. You don't want to go up there and tell people everything they already know."

• Ana Marie Cox is living the dream of many of the folks who attend conferences like this: She moved from job to job before hitting the blogosphere jackpot in 2004 with the founding of the Washington gossip blog Wonkette, which is now among the most popular blogs out there — especially among D.C. insiders.

She parlayed this into a part-time gig as MTV's correspondent at the Democratic National Convention, as well as a book deal — she took February off to work on her first novel. She concedes, "There's not as much progress on the novel as the publisher would like."

Cox, a former Austinite who spent two periods during her childhood in Central Texas, had predicted that blogs would lose some relevancy after last year's presidential election but given blog-driven scandals at CBS News, CNN and within the White House press corps, blogs are in the news as much as ever.

"I guess my assessment was off," Cox says. "I had forgotten about the big news hole that opens after the elections, and reporters like nothing more than reporting on things they're reading about, and a lot of journalists read blogs, so . . ."

Her skills as a prognosticator aside, Cox represents a career path that's exactly what many SXSWers have in mind, Forrest says.

"You start your blog or project, hone it to a certain level, then suddenly get to cover the national convention for MTV or write a book," Forrest says. "Not many can hope to succeed on that level, but it's that idea that you start small and scale it up to a larger level."

• Al Franken's talk show was the flagship offering of the liberal Air America Radio, which reached just a smattering of stations nationwide in March 2004 and struggled to maintain even those numbers. Even today, when its network now extends to 49 stations (it should premiere soon on Austin's KOKE-AM), a vast segment of its audience listens on the Internet.

"I don't know what percentage of our listeners were on the Web, but obviously a lot." Franken says. "I think we're the fourth largest live audio streamed thing in the world. The first one is, I dunno, some kind of dance music.

"As far as talk radio is concerned, we may be No. 1. I mean, we're not in so many places. It's an odd bragging right to have something like that — rated so highly because we're not on the air in a lot of places."

Air America's dabbling in Internet radio is how they're framing Franken's appearance, but — to restate, his qualifications as, say, a Webmaster would be a bit suspect, to be kind.

"I'm a bit of a Luddite," says Franken, who uses the Internet for research and e-mail, but for the important stuff, keeps a book in his back pocket. "An actual, physical little book with my schedule in it. I also keep the cloth I use to clean my glasses in a little plastic thing in it.

"It's very versatile."

• SXSW welcomes an old friend as part of the keynote conversation, with former Austinite (and "Wired" columnist) Bruce Sterling sitting down with Alex Steffen, editor of Worldchanging.com.

• Perhaps the most visible makeover is Sunday's Web Awards, with comedian/actress Laura Swisher (late of G4techTV's "Unscrewed with Martin Sargent" fame) as master of ceremonies.

"I think they just sort of wanted to get a professional host," Swisher says. "In a sense, up the level a little bit."

"The event has always been fairly crazy," Forrest agrees. "We think she'll be able to take it up a notch."

Of course, many of the biggest names actually are best known to techies: Bram Cohen, whose BitTorrent application and the large file-sharing it enabled has been giving Hollywood fits; Jeffrey Zeldman, Tantek Çelik, Eric Meyer and Andy Budd, leaders in standards-based Web design; Dave Shea, of csszengarden.com, who's behind one of the Web's coolest experimental standards-based design forms; and pioneering Iranian blogger Meg Hodder.