This morning marks ~48 hours before SXSWi 2009 begins. As event coordinators scramble, geeks have been descending upon the Austin-Bergstrom airport like (insert something more clever than I can come up with this early in the morning). It’s a cold rainy morning in Austin and looks to stay wet until Saturday, so bring your slickers and galoshes with you.

Now to news

• Nick Bilton, editor in the New York Times research and development lab, spoke with Wired about the “the future of news”. Bilton makes projections about how the medium for news must change and stressed that “Paper is dying, but it’s just a device… Replacing it with pixels is a better experience.”

• And as a Birthday gift to Mr. Rupert Murdock(he turns 78 today), Fox published an article on the positive edits made to Barack Obama’s Wikipedia page. The article states that “President Obama’s page on the free online encyclopedia had been edited to remove any mention of his links to former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, and to allow only a brief citation of his connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright” and contrasts that with Wright‘s and Ayer‘s pages which have their own subsections detailing their links to the President.

• SWSXi has released a printable guide containing a day by day conference schedule and map of the convention center. Neato. Thanks, guys.