Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Loose notes from the SXSW 2006 session: Burnie Burns Keynote
“What happens when you employ video game technology to produce narrative, episodic content? The reigning expert in this form explains the many new possibilities brought forth by this brave new world of machinima.”
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Loose notes from the SXSW 2006 session: Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Interviews Craig Newmark
Missed most of this session due to other obligations, and I’ve seen him speak quite a few times already, but wanted to post one of his remarks (not a direct quote; from memory):
I’d like to be more involved with some of the higher-level stuff, like exploring the journalism connections, but I spend all my time sorting out arguments in the dog-owners forums. You’d think the really heated debates would be in the political forums, but those are nothing compared to the ones between the people who think it’s OK to breed dogs at home vs. those who don’t.
Loose notes from the SXSW 2006 session: Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps
High-powered session with folks from Flickr, Six Apart, Odeo, Measure Map. Focused on the iterative process and release cycle for web apps that thousands of people depend on. How much can you change and how quickly, without alienating users. How much iteration is driven by user feedback vs. internal goals?
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Loose notes from the SXSW 2006 session: How To Add Video To Your Blog
This session was heavy on the culture of vlogging, light on technical aspects (“Eh, just Google it if you have questions”), which I found disappointing – video compression, techniques, platforms are as much witchcraft as science and they could have filled a session with tech aspects, but a few interesting tips…
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Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session WaSP Task Force
“Whether it’s keeping Microsoft to their promised improvements to IE, educating developers about how to make DOM Scripting accessible and useful, addressing the ever-growing snake pit of accessibility issues, improving products such as Dreamweaver and Contribute, and continuing evangelical efforts for the adoption of Web standards, WaSP has been on the front lines since 1998. In this session, meet key Task Force members of WaSP, learn what it takes to solve standards issues in such a fast-paced world and offer your opinions and suggestions to the group, too.”
Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session: Design Eye for the List Guy
Craigslist gets an extreme makeover. May as well show the results first:
“Join the Design Fab Five as they tackle their latest: one of the most well known, well loved and well used sites on the World Wide Web. Just as they did with Jakob Nielsen in the original Design Eye for the Usability Guy, and last year’s hit “Idea Guy”, they will do a soup to nuts strategic redesign of craigslist.org while handing out tips, techniques and some lessons learned.”
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Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session: CSS Problem Solving
Code-heavy, fast-moving session addressing some of the most common CSS problems listed by developers in a pre-conference survey.
Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session: Standard Deviation
We’ve all been repeatedly hit upside the head with a big log over the past few years: Standards, standards, standards. People become fanatical about it, and sometimes jump through absurd hoops to meet the standards goals. But there are times when you need to give yourself permission to do things the “easy” or “old” way to get the job done or to best serve your users. This panel was a breath of fresh air – realists in the real world.
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Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session: “Tagging 2.0”
This was the more nuts & bolts session on tagging, being called “THE key element of Web 2.0”
Loose notes from SXSW 2006 session “Standardzilla vs. Tablella”
Thought this would be a nuts/bolts session on table-based vs. CSS design, but turned out to be more of a review session, analyzing submitted sites for semantic correctness and accessibility.