SXSW Interactive 2007

• Panel
  • Eddie Codel, co-founded of Geek Entertainment TV
  • Micki Krimmel, Revver
  • Kent Nichols, Ask A Ninja
  • Kevin Rose, Digg Architect
  • Scott Watson, CTO Walt Disney R&D
• Problems Online
  • Net Neutrality
  • Most of the user-generated content sites like YouTube have TOS’s that say they own your content
  • Kent says we need a User Bill of Rights across websites that lets us own our content, have privacy rights, etc.
  • Bandwidth: ISP’s dont give out nearly the bandwidth they’re selling
  • Scott says in order for video to become ubiquitous on the web, we need an entirely new network, one designed to deliver video in real time
• Community & Passionate Audiences
  • Audience members are integral to Diggnation and many other community-oriented online shows
  • Can mainstream media generate viral online content that people will want to watch?
  • They do something like this with popular shows like Lost but it isn’t really interactive in the way most online shows are
• How does Joost (”The Venice Project”) fit into all this?
  • One of its pitfalls is its closed nature, as opposed to YouTube’s open upload model
  • So far, the system is aimed at mainstream media content like a direct translation of TV to the Internet
  • Kent asks Why reinvent TV exactly as it is?
• Q: Do you promote videos through your site or directly on YouTube?
  • If you care about “building the brand”, as old media puts it, promote it through your site
• Q: How do you feel about trying to promote media online first but as a way of eventually getting it to the traditional TV networks?
  • Kevin: Never again! Have more viewers now than on TechTV
  • Notes that Diggnation is available in 6 formats, making it available across many platforms

The 2007 Weblog Awards or “Bloggies” were announced today. Several of them are blogs I’ve really come to love over the last few months. PostSecret won Best Community, Best Topical Weblog, and last, but not least, Blog of the Year. I’ve always enjoyed Flickr’s blog highlighting some of the best photos on the site. Cute Overload is just plain cute, and A List Apart is kind of a no brainer for Best Web Development blog. Congratulations to all the winners and nominees, a complete list of which is available here.

• Panel
  • Steven Smith, CEO of FiveRuns
  • Marcel Molina, Rails Core developer
• What are Enterprise Class Web Apps?
  • Origin
    • Rails now has AJAX support right in the framework
    • This means having a system of abstraction of the page in your framework
    • Old solution assumed updating only one element on the page
    • Used template methods like form_remote_for, etc.
    • New system is RJS, Ruby JavaScript
  • Feedback
    • Need to have a way to indicate to users that your applicaiton is working in the background
  • Degrading
    • To degrade between JS and non-JS browsers gracefully, Rails can use respond_to method in a controller to detect whether the request is JS or standard HTTP and not have to duplicate templates and controller logic
    • This supports both a rich client interface AND old school HTML linking
  • Scalability
    • It IS possible to overload a browser with JS
    • You always want to balance server and client-side scripting where it makes sense
    • Leverage server-side processing when you can afford it
  • Testing
    • Selenium brings systematic testing across multiple browsers
• More Information
  • Slides will be available at www.fiveruns.net/events
  • RJS screencase at www.peepcode.com
  • Automated Testing in your browser www.openqa.org/selenium
  • Ajax on Rails book oreilly.com

• The 4 Hour Workweek: Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World
• Unleashing the Holy Trinity in Web Design
• The 4 Hour Workweek: Secrets of Doing More with Less in a Digital World (at 21apples)
• Convergence Culture: A Conversation with Henry Jenkins
• When Communities Attack
• Dan Rather Interview
• MobileActive: Mobilizing The Masses With Mobile Technology
• The Growth and Evolution of Microformats
• How to Create a Kick-Ass In-House Design Team

Updated Wednesday, 12:07pm.

• Speaker: Matt Mullenweg, Founder of Wordpress and Akismet (anti-spam)
• Started the company Automatic software company
• What is the problem with scaling your community?
  • Shows screenshot of a web forum
  • Shows Wordpress weblog
  • Shows Godin’s blog, no comments
• What is scaling?
• How do you keep the intimate feeling of a rock concert when you’re speaking to a half-empty room?
• You have to set up a good Foundation
• Steps
  • Start as simply as possible
    • Break things down in the simplest way you can articulate
    • Everything that is currently free will always be free
    • We will never sell your email address
    • Don’t just promise, visualize
  • Bootstrap
    • Be your most passionate user
    • Get outside your blog or website and talk to people
    • Pre-moderate
  • Let it go
    • Release some control of your community
    • If you’ve bootstrapped well enough, your will have raised people who are even more enthusiastic about your site than you are
    • Your users will steer it better than you may be able to
• Use open source
• Embrace and extend
• Personalization
  • Different from Customization
  • Every action your user makes on your site is sacred. Every tag, every click.
  • Personalizaiton is fundamentally a filter. Work to filter in only things people want, based on past actions or defaults
  • Keep it fresh
  • Make it magical. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Make your application give users the willies.

This panel was really revealing to me in how much of today’s web design practices are not compatible with screen readers and other tools of the physically impaired. Lots of great tips as well as insights into accessibility.

• Two ways of looking at accessibility
  • Making sites accessible for screen readers or other particular devices (Accessibility)
  • Making sites standards compliant and readable by all browsers (Universality)
• Universality, with Jeremy Keith
  • Achieving universality is easy when you follow the principles of Progressive Enhancement
  • Progressive Enhancement
    • Begin with content
    • Decide how to structure your content, asking what does this mean?
    • Choose the best [HTML] element for the job by asking What does this mean? not What should this look like?
    • Next ask what it should look like
    • Finally ask how should this work
  • How does this translate
    • Content
    • Structure –> HTML
    • Presentation –> CSS
    • Behavior –> JS
  • The problem with so many popular web applications today is they start by thinking ‘AJAX’, which is skipping to the end of the process from the beginning
  • New Buzzword: Hijax
    • Use Progressive Enhancement
    • Then add Ajax
  • In the browser you have links (possibly with query strings) and forms
  • On the server you have modular components of the page
  • With Hijax, instead of sending query strings and forms directly to the server, send that to the Ajax client object, which transacts the query on the backend and returns the output from the server
  • Paradox: plan for using Ajax from the start, but don’t implement it until the end of the process
• Accessibility Feng Shui, with Derek Featherstone
  • Feng Shui means wind and water
  • He looks at this as a big metaphor for making web applications
  • History
    • 1999- Accessible scripting. Site works with and without scripting
    • 2004-5- Accessible scripting, uh-oh
  • Showing an example of a canadian bookseller