Category: Geek

Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: Putting the Public Back in Public Media (partial)

Think NPR and PBS are just broadcasters? Think again. Public media is no longer just a one-way street. In many towns, NPR and PBS stations are the only locally-owned broadcasters, and their mission to serve the public demands that they develop new ways of engaging and strengthening those communities. They’re convening Barcamp-like unconferences called PubCamps all over the country, allowing local techies and citizen journalists to forge collaborative projects with NPR and PBS stations, both online and offline. Public media staff work with volunteer coders, creating software for public media organizations that otherwise lack the capacity to develop it on their own. Public media engages communities in new ways that go beyond those annual pledge drives, challenging them to work together for the common good. They’re putting the public back in public media – right where it should be. This ain’t your father’s public broadcasting. Come learn how people are plugging into public media – and how you can get involved.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: All These Worlds Are Yours: Visualizing Space Data

At the intersection of video gaming technology, open government and citizen science are new applications making it easier and more fun for the public to explore space data. Get an inside look at virtual environments incorporating real-time spacecraft data and images. Become an armchair astronaut and travel through the cosmos from your personal computer. Ride along with NASA spacecraft, hazardous asteroids and distant planets, or just experience the vastness and beauty of space. All these worlds are yours… including Europa.

A truly awesome session, featuring members of NASA and the JPL, on all of the amazing data being gathered by earth’s orbiting satellites, and the powerful ways that data can be visualized, in many cases illuminating surprising realities about earth’s climate and overall health. The tools for public education coming out of this team are nothing short of stunning.
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Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better

Jane McGonigal
Creative Dir
Social Chocolate

One of my favorite sessions of the week – McGonigal turns everything you thought you knew about the healthiness and benefits / downsides of video games on its head. By the end of the hour, we walked away convinced that basing our educational system more on the models of video games could be a great move for our children.
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Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: Ordering Disorder: Grid Design for the New World

Khoi Vinh, Design Director, NY Times. Wrote book of same name.

Everyone’s using grids, and grid tools and frameworks are everywhere. But do you truly understand the ins and outs of this powerful design principle, and how it’s changing along with new media and platforms? Chances are most digital designers have only a cursory knowledge of the grid’s concepts and best practices, overlooking the tremendous value that truly smart grid usage brings. In this expansive sequel to his famous 2006 SXSWi talk “Grids Are Good,” designer and grid expert Khoi Vinh (NYTimes.com, Subtraction.com) will give a bracing tour of the many ideas packed into his new book “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design.” This solo talk will span the history of grids, take a brass-tacks tour of best practices, and look ahead at some of the most enlightening and innovative thinking that’s shaping grid thinking in the future.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: Believe Me or Your Own Eyes: Eye-Tracking Entertainment

“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes” said Groucho Marx or as the wikiquote page for Groucho tells us, the line was actually spoken by Chico Marx. This panel discussion will focus on the usage of eye-tracking to get quantifiable data to support what users see and what they don’t when they visit entertainment sites (e.g. sports, games, news, or book sites). While many entertainment sites use analytics to get information about user behavior, there is no way to measure the effectiveness of the visual aspect of their site. Users cannot rationally describe what they feel and what makes certain visual elements desirable; eye-tracking can help you measure such metrics. This panel will bring in user experience managers, directors, and/or vice presidents who have an eye-tracking lab or have used eye-tracking consultancies to get data to support the value of photography and video on their site.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: So Long, and Thanks for All the Babelfish (partial)

Will 2011 be the year of the Universal Translator? As this science fiction dream teeters over the horizon, what can and should we do now to prepare for a time when the translation robot, not the search engine, becomes the single most important audience for your site? Will SEO give way to TEO? Does language need its own subtext markup? And when on Earth is Microsoft Word going to replace its ‘Bold’ button with a ‘Strong’ one? Lay aside your Google Goggles and iLingual apps (just for 60 minutes or so), and enjoy a session that’s packed full of accessible translation theory, insight into the working processes of web copywriters, and more than the occasional riff on Douglas Adams.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: John Battelle interviews Matt Mullenweg

Audio available at link above.

WP currently powers about 12% of the web. Future of WordPress is as a full platform/CMS, not just a blog.

wordpress.com 290 million uniques per month. Adding a new blog every two seconds.

WordPress at its best is invisible – it gets out of the way.
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Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: Asleep in the Classroom: A Wakeup Call from Tomorrow

America’s students are bored. According to the Gates Foundation, boredom is the number one reason they give for dropping out of school. How can creativity, innovation and technology address this growing crisis in education? If technology is a driver for shorter attention spans, can it also be the solution to bring back the wonder of education? Can we extend the reach further and engage our students more both inside and outside of the classroom, to reawaken a love of learning?

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Loose notes from SXSW 2011 session: Dork Intervention: Bringing Design to Agile

Agile is broken. How can designers help deliver products that users will love while grappling with the constraints of agile in corporations? With large companies rapidly adopting agile methods, it is crucial that these teams include designers to create great products. But the agile framework available to larger companies doesn’t take into account the work style of design team members. Agile, by its nature, shortcuts the design process without considering the value that design brings, not only in providing on-the-fly design solutions but also when crafting the vision of a product that the team can build towards. We are designers with agile team experience in the corporate world. These are our stories of triumph and tragedy. Come hear what worked for us and share your own war stories.

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