SXSW Interactive 2007

• Panel
  • Gina Trapani
  • Molly Ditmore
  • Matthew Haughey
  • Annalee Newitz
  • Penelope Trunk
• As a freelance web geek, your self presentation do matter
• Independence doesn’t mean you’re “too good” to do self-marketing
• Newitz
  • Just published book “She’s Such a Geek” about women in technology
  • Working on getting her book publicity
  • Has found that if a book (or website or whatever) is really good, people will just magically find it is NOT TRUE
• Molly Ditmore
  • First piece of advice: have an elevator pitch
  • An elevator pitch is a precise, heavily practiced, pitch about what you do
  • Be brief, be positive (say what you do, not what you don’t do)
  • Don’t be embarasses to rehearse your description in the mirror
• When you’re explaining what you do or what your product is about, talk about how it relates to them, not just about the topic in general
• Make it relevant to the listener
• Matt Haughey
  • Differing opinion: marketing is not black and white
  • Build a great product and build a great reputation
  • Find web design meetups and other smaller group meets to network
• Listening is more important than talking
• Self-linking
  • Matt thinks linking to earlier work has too much bias
  • If you are linking to yourself, make sure you are being reasonable and only linking to relevant other information, not promoting yourself excessively.
• It’s important to participate in several social groups, but not too many. Like only be in about 2 to 4 groups. (If you’re in too many, people will wonder why you have so much free time on your hands)
• Can turning down jobs make you more desirable?
  • Sometimes. You should always choose jobs that enhance your career path
  • Matt says you never say ‘No’ in freelance; just double your price
• Blogging or keeping a personal site of some kind helps immensely in developing street cred, as well as bringing a sense of trust to someone who is considering hiring you
• The sad truth of freelancing is that you should spend 50% of your time promoting yourself
• Q: What is your Absolute Truth?
  • Ditmore: Show, Don’t Tell
  • Haughey: Have a great site and show them you’re the best
  • Trunk: Specialize. Say exactly what you do, dont try to do everything.
  • Newitz: Don’t stop, just keep going.
  • Trapani: Trust your gut and keep with it.
  • (Audience member recommends Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinberg)
• Q: What is your experience with the online freelance marketplaces?
  • Many community sites are setting up job boards
  • Check them but don’t rely on them
  • Networking by finding designs you like and contacting the designer works better

The iF! Tradeshow opened today at the conference, with exhibitors including Google, Second Life, Mozilla, Opera, Make Magazine, AOL, and many others. The Mozilla booth was particularly popular with their “wear our tattoo on your head for a free shirt” policy. Sell my body in support of an open-source software product? Count me in!

My second favorite booth was Make magazine’s, which gave out current issues to anyone wearing the button they gave out in everyone’s “big bag.” I scored copies of both Make and Craft, both of which were on my mind after Phil Torrone and Limor Fried’s provocative keynote about homemade electronics and just making stuff in general.

All in all, great day at the conference. Adobe Web Awards are in an hour and then I’m calling it quits early; I’m exhausted.

• Speakers
  • Limor Fried - MIT graduate in EECS
  • Phil Torrone - senior editor at MAKE mag
• People build all sorts of cool stuff
• This movement of making things parallels the open source software movement
• How does the open source software movement relate to hardware? How do you OSS physical stuff?
• Open source CAD design using SketchUp make OSS hardware or stuff possible to release to the public
• Limor releases her creations under Creative Commons license
• Open hardware
  • The Linksys W54G router project is a key example of how popular hardware has been opened up to user tinkering
  • The Roomba floor robot’s API was opened and people started using it for all sorts of different purposes than vacuum cleaning
  • The Green Phone is an open linux based cellphone that is open all the way down to the device drivers
• The two enjoy all types of electronics hackery
• Showing example of a cell phone jammer made from readily available components
• Audience member calls him and gets blocked on screen

Hellonline has another great writeup on Limor and Phil’s keynote conversation.

• Panel
  • Jonathan Boutelle, CEO of SlideShare
• SlideShare is built to be the YouTube of PowerPoint
• Users upload ppt files after a conference and get a flash-version compiled that is share
• and embed-able worldwide
• The app uses both Flash and AJAX integrally
• 1- Play the field
  • You don’t have to choose either AJAX or Flash
  • You might even need both tools
  • Bottom line: pick the best tool for the job, don’t let biases or hype decide which tool you use
• 2- Keep Flash on a leash
  • Full-screen Flash is a no-no
  • People don’t like 100% flash sites over time
  • Use “Flash nuggets”
  • A less-thought of disadvantage is that search-engines can’t spider Flash apps
  • Flash is bulkier and takes a little longer to load
  • Instead of the bulk of Flash, use the power of HTML already given to us over time
• 3- Cheap Tricks
  • Things like in-place editing, attention control, in-page messaging to user, tabs
  • In-place editing
    • Show people data in a read-only fashion, with small controls to change the data
    • When they click to edit, change the read-only data to text fields, or some analogous field for your type of data.
    • When done editing change back to read-only and save behind the scenes using AJAX
  • Attention control
    • Show that “something happened” behind the scenes
• 4- Flash graphic goodies
  • Flash is the best for things like embedding fonts, heavier animation, vector graphics, etc.
• 5- Flash multimedia
• 6- Widgets
  • Choosing the Flash or JS version of a widget depends on what effect on the page you want to have
  • Flash tends to be more noticeable, JS tends to integrate into the page better
• 7- Cool Flash features that aren’t useful
  • Sockets
  • more pro’s choose an HTTP hack to keep the session open. Used by GTalk and Meebo
  • Local Data Objects
  • not a lot of people using them, a cookie-like client storage system
  • FLEX
  • mostly outputs full-screen Flash application replacements

Check out Jonathan’s slides on his SlideShare.

Here’s some good coverage I found on concurrent panels:

• Turning Projects into Revenue Generating Businesses
• Why We Should Ignore Users
• Serious Games: Can Learning Be Hard Fun?
• Avatar-based Marketing in Synthetic Worlds
• Blogging Where Speech Isn’t Free
• Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence and Reputation
• Keynote conversation with Limor Fried & Phil Torrone
• Ten Ways to Run a Startup Like Gengis Khan
• The Rise of the Blogebrity
• Design Workflows at Work: How Top Designers Work Their Magic
• Designing for a Global Audience

Updated 11:45pm

Sorry for being slow in posting, it’s been a crazy morning.

• Panel
  • Frank Robles, CEO Impalta Networks
  • Dan Dubno, Blowing Things Up,
  • John Hanke, Google, director of Maps, Earth
  • Doyle, MIT Museum working on Museum without Walls Project
  • Gina Bianchini,
• Doyle’s Museum without Walls
  • MIT is a large campus, 20K on 160 acres
  • 2800 wireless access points
  • Lots there for conferences
  • Many buildings and easy to get lost
  • Location-based storytelling
    • Trying to make it easy for people to contribute stories about places, in this case, places on campus
    • Need a place to store these [video or audio recorded] stories
    • Have a place for others to view these stories
    • The usage for this will be applications like guided tours using handheld devices
  • “Tour 2.0″
    • Handheld device
    • Location sensitive
    • Complete with stories from the online storytelling library
• John Hanke: Building the Spatial Web
  • 2004 - Made Keyhole
  • Became Google Maps in Feb 2005
  • June 2005 Google Earth launched, Google Maps API
  • Google has an exclusive partnership with a nonmilitary high-res satellite imaging company and provides the satellite basemap for Google Earth
  • 1.5 million places worldwide have been placed by users
  • Google bought SketchUp and released it to the world free
  • Hopes to bring real 3D models to maps by letting users add buildings to the map
• Dan Dubno
  • Attended many discussions on the ideas that John Hanke actually implemented with Google Earth
  • Problems with current system:
    • Spotty satellite imagery coverage
    • The majority of nonurban areas are not high-res
    • High-res worldwide is important for those rare times when you need imagery, such as providing imaging during earthquakes
  • Interesting use of Earth in partnership with CBS News is the Earthquake monitor
  • You can mashup a feed of earthquake events with their corresponding latitude and longitude and look it up on the Earth along with satellite imagery of the location
• Frank Robles
  • Did work with Panoramio which geotagged millions of photos
  • CAP - Common Alerting Protocol
    • Government-mandated location-based civil alert system
  • Also using Google Earth to map very tall buildings and show what level of Internet bandwidth are available there
• Gina Bianchini
  • These technologies are bringing the power of this map technology to the people, where it used to be only (in a lesser capacity) available governments
• Questions
  • Accessability
    • Want to allow people to navigate the system if they have physical disabilities
    • Need to have ability to read instructions aloud if necessary
    • Working to make this information available in more than one language
  • Privacy Issues
    • Dubno: Somebody’s always going to get concerned when you start carrying around a device that knows where you are, etc.
    • Dubno: These technologies will be opt-in and user-controlled
    • Hanke: The “eye in the sky” fear that spying on people is possible with Maps and Earth products is simply not the case
    • Hanke: on the other hand, satellite imagery has in some cases revealed to people what is happenning near them that they didn’t know about. Things like the rich elite’s mansions or dictator’s military location
  • What can this technology do for Third World Countries?
    • Huge potential. For example in Mexico, many cities that were previously unmapped got mapping online for people to see, perhaps for the first time
    • Another use is in natural disasters when location information is critical, that worldwide geoimagery is tremendously useful.
    • Hanke: Friend runs the Fair Trade organization that labels certain exports like coffee that are being made by places with proper and “fair” production practices

I only took some rough notes on this one, sorry, I was sleepy. Here’s what I got…

[Each panelist is taking 6 minutes to present their point of view, while the audience holds up given red or green cards in opposition or support, respectively, to their argument.]

Sarah Bloomer: You can’t ask users what they want. 60% of what users actually want is subconscious and users don’t know how to express it in your terms. People always have goals in their activities, but frequently cannot vocalize them.

In figuring out how your application will work, one way is to make “activity scenarios” which are narratives that detail how a potential user might use your product. The story can be made from real-life observations on how people use the existing product by watching and then writing down the steps they make using post-its.

Robert Hoekman: We should ignore users. Three example applications designed completely without user research have been very successful, with high sales and very low customer support calls. Users who voice opposition to certain features are often alone or wrong. After designing a product, then start listening to users, making sure to look for patterns in the feedback.

SXSW Diary has a better writeup with almost all of their talking points.