Category: Geek

Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel Why Marketers Need To Work With People Media

Tony Conrad, Sphere
John Battelle, Federated Media Publishing
Toni Schneider Automattic Inc

Discussion of new ways to monetize the blogosphere, to measure attention streams rather than just page impressions (especially as things like Ajax are making CPM metrics less reliable). Relationship between marketers and the blogosphere.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel The Future of the Online Magazine.

Rufus Griscom CEO, Nerve Media
Sean Mills The Onion
Ricky Van Veen Editor, CollegeHumor.com
Laurel Touby CEO & Founder, mediabistro.com
Joan Walsh Editor in Chief, Salon.com

This is the kind of panel we host at the J-School often; was surprised to see it so widely attended at this geek conf. The focus ended up being not so much on the future as on the present, but still interesting.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel: Uniting the Holy Trinity (business, users, developers)

Cameron Adams Web Technologist, The Man in Blue
Sally Carson Interaction Designer, Yahoo!
Dustin Diaz User Interface Engineer, IMVU
Jonathan Snook

Why does a site fail? Because one of the three components is not balanced correctly. If any one of those is too large, then one of the other three is failing. Do your uses really need tagging? They may not even know what it is you’re trying to convey. Or you may have a whole lot of users, but if you’re not making any money, you’re failing. At Yahoo! there are over 1,000 developers. An agency may have 10. If you’re a freelancer you may have only yourself. If you don’t know the objectives, you’re set up to fail from the beginning. Also some good conversation on extreme programming / agile web development.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel: Ajax or Flash?

Jonathan Boutelle, SlideShare

New round of religious wars brewing, whether Ajax or Flash is the better choice for interactive web apps, but it’s a false dichotomy. Conversation with someone who’s been in the trenches with both and has built a site that makes use of both technologies in parallel, using the right hammers for the right jobs.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel: lonelygirl15 case study, with editors and producers of “the show.”

This is one of those sessions I attended to “open up a circuit” – exposing myself to something I’d never otherwise discover. lonelygirl15 is a narrative story told in brief video segments that has a huge (as in, huge) following. For the first several months of its existence, the story was told as if by a 15-year-old girl video blogging her life, with a story centered around her parents involved in a religious organization called The Order, with sundry spin-off threads involving their attempt to get her to take part in an initiation ceremony.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel: Best Practices for Teaching Web Design

Taking one for the team here. Didn’t expect to learn anything new at this one, and didn’t, but since I’m teaching HTML to journalism students, thought I should be at this one. Mostly reiterating the struggle: We all know what we should be teaching, but practical constraints and .edu politics make it tough to get enough leeway to teach things the right way. Also a huge entrenched problem of HTML teachers not feeling the need to teach standards, or to even help students appreciate the subtle glory of semantic, well-structured documents. Schools want to go straight for the design and wizzy jugular before the basics are in place (felt like they were describing my life here).

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Loose notes on SXSW 2007 session: High Class / Low Class Web Design

Christopher Fahey, Behavior
Liz Danzico, Daylife
Khoi Vinh, The New York Times
Brant Louck, World Wrestling Entertainment

Fairly fascinating panel discussion re: Class-ism in design. Not particularly practical except for full-time designers working for clients from all over the socioeconomic map. What is the mystique of elegance and quality conveyed by good design? Why are so many hugely successful sites (craigslist, ebay) so badly designed, or barely designed? Do highly designed sites convey elitism to the masses?

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel session: Web Hacks: Good or Evil

Kent Brewster Technology Evangelist, Yahoo!
Sergio Villarreal Pixel Pusher, Slide Inc

This one took an unexpected turn. Thought it would be about all of the funky work-arounds we take to accomplish this and that – and whether we should feel guilty about them – but discussion about screen scraping and Yahoo! Pipes segued naturally into discussion about implications for copyright and whether it’s enforceable. Session ended on ye olde “Copyright is dead” note, compelling arguments made. No one felt cheated; good conversation.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2007 panel session: Unleashing CSS: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Internet Explorer 7, with Christopher Schmitt Lead Ninja, Heatvision.com Inc
Fast-paced session by a single presenter on new CSS capabilities in IE7; the pain it’s taken leading up to this point, how to sort out your IE hacks into separate files for better degradation, etc.

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First in a series of loose notes from panel sessions I’m attending at SXSW 2007. This one was kind of light starter session on how to make your web site “totally Web 2.0.” All tongue in cheek because the real message was this: Ditch this insipid terminology ASAP, because clients out there think Web 2.0 is something real, as if it were a specification or something. Nothing but disappointment can come from that, and the backlash has already started. Yet we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water, because there’s a lot that’s good in it. But the way it was presented was hilarious.

Andy Budd Creative Dir, Clearleft Ltd
Jeremy Keith Web Developer, Clearleft Ltd

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