SXSW Interactive 2007

• 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

• 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