Category: conference notes

I have a lot of mental work to do in order to turn the last week of my life into some sort of semi-coherent narrative.? some of it will go here, some will decidedly not.? (it’s not that it’s none of your business, but it’s none of the internets’ business.)

for now I’m back at Halcyon, digesting a cheese sandwich, and gathering enough solitude to be ready for the after party.? ’cause damn it, I haven’t been to enough parties.

I’m working on a massive “things I learned” post, and I’d like to write summaries for all the notes I’ve already taken, and then maybe a list of things I want to do because of the experience.

something I want to mention now, while I’m thinking about it (and was reminded by Shelley’s post), is the role of moderation in the success or failure of a panel.

one thing all the really good panels had in common was quality moderation, which consisted of….

• not letting the introductions go on too long.
• actively directing the discussion.
• adding an interesting spin to audience questions.
• keeping good track of time and proportionality.
• humor and curiosity.

good moderators: danah boyd, Carrie Bickner, Jeff Veen, Heather Gold. they all had those common factors, even with different styles.

I will not name bad/mediocre moderators, but there certainly were some.

more postprocessing to come, probably this evening even, assuming I’m awake after the party.? definitely tomorrow, while I goof off before flying back to the land of drizzle. (tomorrow’s forecast: 50 & rain.)

still processing the experience of the last panel. this is in the same room as next-gen web apps, now I owe George Kelly a beer for his forethought in bringing a powerstrip.

the party doesn’t scale. :(? no, you are too big, too professional.

he’s in a dark, introspective, literary mood this year.? just had a party in belgrade, with 20 serbian webgeeks.? in 2006 you cats don’t need my party.? this is the hottest time.? good to see this crowd.

“welcome to the bubble echo”

when there is a web 2.0 bust, we’re all welcome.

commons-based peer production is coming up.

if gnu’s not unix, what is it?? flickr isn’t a hippie knockoff of anything else.? collaborative web filters are spooky, unlike anything else.

hard to explain this stuff to people who are not geeks, but it’s important.

tech economy is not on the coattails of gates.

windows live?!

something about global criminality.

look at page for city of austin in guidebook, nice little NGOs.? very richard florida.? warm feeling as an austinite.? scary sign of incompetence on the federal level. only in america do old telcos lobby as if they were indian casinos.

broadband in serbia; $20/month; it works, and is run by actual criminals in exile.

decadent, sclerotic, looks like soviet union. banana republic with rockets; politically and technically incompetent.

when you ignore reality for years on end, the payback is a bitch.

visionary in residence, his new book came out last week.? audacious & freaky stuff.

oil industry kid.? married to a serbian feminist peacenik dissident, met because of the internet.? always wanted to know what went wrong in yugoslavia…now he knows.

serbia has one of the most dysfunctional societies on the planet.? “some of my shoes are there.”? “I live out of my laptop now.”? will be meeting cory d. on 3 different continents in 5 mos.

listening to him is like listening to luscious techno-poetry.

“nobody notices that I have left austin.”

he does rather live in a different universe.

“like the last reels of gone in the wind here”

losing our cultural cache.? oil, real estate speculation, and blood.? we’ve always been loud & boisterous, but now we’re “hugely & scarily fat.”

slovenia == iowa.? serbian truthiness.

frantic collisions of fundamentalism with reality.

like the witching hour, death cult.

“accidentally killed 8000 people” — “8 on camera and that seems to make all the difference” — those two guys (serbian war criminals) are in monesteries.? vaclav havel with a submachine gun.

“the troubles”, “the disorder” — when it’s over you don’t get to say I proudly served, because it’s a war on morale/pride.? always covert, fake, trumped-up, compartmentalized.? this is the stuff of the disorder.

secrecy always & everywhere, and no end.? (damn I need a drink.)

on the slider bar between teh unthinkable and the unimaginable, between the meathook future and the green shiny one.? there’s a way out, but we haven’t invented the words yet.

warren ellis: there’s a middle distance between {collapse} and {nerdvana}; the human dimension, how it’s taken on board by smart people.

the street (still) finds its own uses.

yipes! back speakers came on as they opened up the barrier between rooms.? I coughed, Denise jumped.

if you took mao & ghandi and put them on the streets, they’d have no idea what to do with it.? everything that desperately poor people could do to survive has been done to the environment, but they’re booming…because of the people.

spime.

hey, now I can see him, since the crowd has thinned out into the new space.

“you are a philistine and you have no taste”

“only realized two weeks ago that it’s a tag” laughter “it’s a theory object”

gibsonian cyberspace is a consensual hallucination…we don’t have any of that, and may never do, but the term already has a period flavor to it.

elevator pitch: speculative imaginary object:

1. interactive chip so it has a unique identity
2. local precise positioning, sort where things are and where you are in re: them
3. search engine, auto-googling object
4. cradle-to-cradle recycling, transparent production
5. 3d virtual models of objects, product of cad-cam, schematics are on the net, befure they become objects
6. rapidly prototypes (like the app design discussion this morning); dreams clang right on the ground.

book by worldchanging cadre.? index of ways out of the smokefilled room.

then people would interact with objects in a truly different unimaginable way.? transparent & participatory.? see the garbage.? material instances of immaterial [missed that]

why would we want to do such a weird thing? an internet of things.? because of the way it will feel, no longer inventory my posessions inside my head, done by voodoo.? no longer both to remember where I put things, found them, cost of them, etc., etc.? search engine of things.

google your shoes in the morning.

am I the only one for whom it sounds entirely weird and a little terrifying?

just a design professor for a year.? knock on it to see what falls out.

(his voice reminds me a little of Ralph’s. and I’m going to need to put my wrists on ice for a couple of days once I get home.)

30% of you are googling spime right now.? (not me, but the woman next to me had the wikipedia page for it open.)

he talks like he writes, big and weird and gorgeous.

the 20th century couldn’t deal with this shit.? real theory object has website, tags, user-centric web apps, etc., etc., etc.? as if the surrealist cafe had been frozen into linkage.

legacy people.

trying to write a novel, because it’s his job description.? and what is that now?? matches into the bog of language and most of them deserve to die.

frankenstein is lost, the creator.? 19 year old feminist who’d run off with an atheist poet.? be the change you want to see.

make no decision out of fear.

motto of the serbians.? people tire of fraud, evil, sheer stupid pettiness, being promised jam & fed ashes.

the great american novel is over.? need regional novel about the planet earth.? human resiliance & history.

the people loved the serpent miloscevic.? “if he did some bad things, he was doing them for us and our usness.”? posters of him look like an injured muppet.? “they’re real holy now […] giant turnips of nationalist resentment”

evil has a face: the person who resents you because you don’t buy into his nationalist crap.

cure: historial perspective.? time passes, you come to your senses.? patchwork of faith-based bullshit. hammering the electoral districts of texas into shape.? the old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

serbian has a small language, so they have a lot of poets, like right-wing public bloggers.? when you can comprehend poetry it means your heart is not broken.? anna ahkmatova…”could you possibly bear witness — yes — and it was true”? and they listen and they weep aloud.? they don’t deserve to be europe, but they’re not dead.? even the pirates are in retreat.

they know how to go with it.

1937.? “couldn’t get venture capital back then”

carl sandburg

the people yes

the people will live on

the learning and blundering people

wil live on

and sold in a dense soul

[i can’t keep up, and he’s near-teary.]

a vast huddle of many units

if i had more time

i could read & study and talk things over and find out about things

book recommendations from others in the audience:

• Islands in the net
• Distraction

was originally going to be called “vulnerability” — but trying to ease people/corps into honest.
charlise theron is in the building?!

want to run it like a talk show. heather gold as host. big frustration: trying to be herself or not being herself at work. not go into “drag” at 9am. (indeed!)

david callisch, ruckus wireless, history with startups.

michalski, used to edit esther dyson’s release 1.0? aw, cares a lot about trust.

giovanni rodriguez. senior vp at eastwick pr. background in theater. callisch is one of his clients.

mark glaser, with pbs. mediashift.

heather is laying on the floor, so as to sound like the voice of god.

cathy brooks, the other girl, because “all boys isn’t any fun” great chicken matzoh soup. funny interaction with meri. gefilte fish: like hot dogs for fish?!

help mark think about what he’s trying to do….

“we have this problem, and we haven’t solved it” their product is a box that does tv over wifi, but they sell to telcos. want to connect to people, to have us/them pressure the telcos?

“why can’t they sell it directly to us?” — because they can’t handle the support issue.

comment: I think you should change your business model. if you were selling it to me, I’d buy it. long story about home networking, etc., etc. and the content isn’t available directly to you.

lots more questions….

paul: analogies to audio, if I buy your product by way of my phone company then I have to suck it with whatever they do.

league of technical voters woman: I totally didn’t catch this.

the carriers own my mom?

worst of two models: like a new channel AND like a more technical tivo.

meri fscking cracks me up. you’re missing the tivo step: recruiting the early adopters.

I think they’re a lost cause. like the ipod w/out itunes. but the ipod went for a while w/out itunes….

where is iptv working? anywhere outside the US! italy, spain, hong kong, etc., etc.

brooks is not sure about who their web site is talking to.? not sure where the audience is.

registering people with zip codes, getting kewl bloggers to play with some version of it.? hard to prove demand with something that doesn’t exist.

it’ll be on sourceforge in like 2 weeks.

cheap marketing by way of nerds.? get it in the hands of low-maintenance — bored, nerdy, etc. — users.? waiting for home wifi until all the ISPs thought it might be a good idea.

because the business in curtains in front of tables will be harmed?!

heather asks if they can give away 10 to nerds here.? will people commit, hell, I’ll do it.? if C & I can make it go, then anybody can.
these days a lot of VCs, the smarter ones, are open to this sort of thing.

simon: worried about where you’re heading, has seen this sort of thing.? telcos are late adopters, in a marketspace that’s about to be owned by apple (itunes).? people in this room would love to get ahold of your stuff.? “most nasty…industry”? (re: telco!)

municipal wifi networks & public access?

ILECs all have their own research going on.? (dude, R should totally be here.) cable tv people are perhaps the right people.

they’re just trying to solve that one little problem of wifi tv w/in the home.? I remain skeptical.

current tv.? also google video? youtube?? the actual tv channels are interested.

he wants to see how to use the new media stuff to get the buzz.

bashir of lyceum.? (media genius)? if you’ve told your investors that you want to wait until we’re like italy or korea.? moms can use airport express, but there isn’t one for video.? if you don’t want to do that, that’s fine.

would like to talk more generally about opening up management.

heather sez they’re trying to show not tell.

I jumped up and said something, about the accreditation process, and people talking whether they know the facts or not.? which wasn’t what I really wanted to say.

what david came thinking about was open source management: does your audience/customers like your board, locations; do your people vote on what products should get produced, etc.

derek becomes non-anonymous.? doesn’t like TV.

would it have been different if the CEO or whoever had been here?? yes.? getting the connection between us & them is “like climbing a mountain”

brooks worked on a startup w/out transparency and was prsenting to the board the business they thought the board wanted instead of the one they could do.

glaser: more of a big deal for the pr folks.? um, yeah.? “how can we persuade people to buy this crap” vs. bringing people into the process.

vulnerability & transparency: huge issues going forward, “what the hell are you doing?!” surowecki.? open space technology meeting?

appropriate credit?? something to think about….

simon: suggestions: asterisk in the pbx market; mythtv community; transparency is the key, his co’s president is blogging out in the open; people don’t contribute to open source unless it’s worth their while somehow.

mba student & marketer: thank you!? a cool company.? would rather work for someone willing to do this.

comment: reminsicent of the 0-advertising threadless panel yesterday.

heather will be blogging, possibly while laying on the floor.

a little drowsy, a little chilly. Bruce Sterling is a few chairs down from me, but I’m about used up of my store of fangirl moxie, so I just took his picture from a distance.

I’m mostly in this session to hear from the ginormous Veen about the uncannily addictive Measure Map.

Ev, Mena, Veen, eric r (map-based stuff for ????), somebody from flickr.

damn this session is fscking FULL. literally standing room only. glad I stayed where I was.

mappr, so that makes him from Stamen Design. visualization of IRC channel here. stoney. animated cab data, speed as color. whoa. C would FREAK out on this. project for exploratorium. “invisible dynamics”…okay, it’s time to plan a trip to SF.

mena doesn’t have anything beautiful to show. (except her own cutie-pie self.) iteration based on multiple products. “comment”? new product. looks/feels like livejournal, sharing with groups (friends/family) to key to getting next 300 million (?!!!!) blogging. APIs for internal use, unglamorous stuff like common billing, etc.

splashblog, acquired by 6A. the phone, instead of the computer.

“flickr is a big weird messy place”

instead of trying to think like your user, talk to them directly. funny quote from forum, what flickr is for.

UI improvments for the new. show don’t tell, again.

straightforward feedback cycle.

organizr. (I like it for sets.) she doesn’t use it herself, but probably will later. (y’know, I think I prefer the old version, because it is a space where I can see a lot of photos at once.)

Ev. “we work on audio stuff” — with the very femme up-tone! “I don’t remember my password”

hey, I wonder if C would be more likely to audio-blog than to text-blog. (he seems to love gtalk phone calls, and the phone in general.) or if Elizabeth might like it?

interesting discussion of how the tool effects the format, re: Odeo. shortform vs. longform; radio show vs. voicemail.
Veen on measure map. no use of pageviews. mixup of flash & ajax. it is damn pretty and quasi-magical. started with design, working very fast, multiple releases per week.

“the way to maximize user experience is unquestionably through iteration” — something to think about with book exchange? oddreview?

mena, something about a husband & a wife talking in a bedroom. :)? good laugh line.

now they are 125 people…how do you go from 1 engineer & 1 designer to a group like that.? partially by breaking into teams.? learning, sharing with other teams.

can’t learn until people start using something.? (not necessarily the public, but somebody!)

working with “enterprises” with MT vs. working with drunken Brad on LJ.? speed, caution.

MM slowed down updates to Monday/Thursday only, once they got users.

flickr releases stuff 14/20x per day.? any developers could deploy any tweak at any time.? hail mary mother of jeebus.

one of veen’s frustration as a consultant was not being able to do lots of little iterations.

kewl graphs.? not just crazy/wacky for wacky’s state…it’s a question of not knowing what the end state is going to look like exactly.? solutions may change the problem.? (hrm, 2nd quasi-quantum mention this week.)

scrub methodology?? from Ev, 2 week iterations.? scrum?? helpful in cutting down the decisions, not getting derailed by discussion, because you know what you’re going to do for the next week.

architecture of participation.

how many people talked to a human to book their travel here?? (maybe 10?)

clay shirky quote: basically, writing isn’t worth paying for.? ::sigh::

no difference between consumers & producers.

blog reading as gateway drug?

wisdom of crowds.? she’s worried, deeply, about being misquoted (mena).

selecting audiences.? some people at 6A were happier blogging to a smaller, selected audience, plus getting livejournal info.

odeo default recording status is private.? increased people’s willingness.

flickr, veen: live on stage! what’s up with interesting?

russian genius who saw patterns in data.? capturing activity around any given photo.

no photos on linkedin so it wouldn’t become a dating site. no emoticons in MT to keep it more of a CMS instead of a community site.

designing w/out stuff, or around stuff.? designing for flow.

veen: bottom-up semantic web?? indeed.

chicagocrime.org.

damn, I want to start doing interesting things again!? what does that mean for how I run my life??!!?!?!?!
mena doesn’t use greeking.

time for questions in the last 10 mins.

is that Meri again?? I heart her.? thinks important to design for the blank/newbie state.

eric: don’t need the word “just” — design is a container!? and that’s fun, exciting, etc.? I GET to design for something that flows, breathes, has life.

missed some stuff because I was chatting with c.? flipside to incrementalism?? can only get so far until you need punctuated equilibrium.? damn veen has a sexy brain. 😉

q: how do you build ethical standards into applications?

mena: export is big.? should be a requirement.? you have to accept that people evolve and not hold data hostage.

veen: example of feedburner: a big committment! right up front they tell you how you can quit if you want.? huh.? vs. outlook designed to never let you leave.

understanding the value of various kinds of feedback.? kinda like knowing enough about who gives writing feedback in a group to be able to filter it through your own goals.

what about release and “oh jeez that was stupid”?? and how do you get to the thing that’s entirely different?? things people don’t know they want.

innovation!

research as a foundation from which you innovate; rules of English as a foundation from which you write great stuff.? nice analogy.

mention of pattern language.? where are you getting inspirations?

books, magazines.? mena got her design training from just looking around.? another english major! abstracting craft.? (book to look up.)

it’s 12:30 so I should probably bail.

digital craft as a potter’s wheel instead of as a discrete set of steps.? spiffy.

came in late, or they started early.

lawver had good stuff about building a standards support team. I wish Deirdre was still around. 🙁 fun, management liasion. should talk to Dale about this, to start something on a statewide basis, maybe in connection with WaSP etf?

netscape/aol guy feels lots of empathy for the opera guys.

kim sez: providing good tools for creating good markup provides good feelings…you’re making their lives easier. roll your own training program? hrm. 2nd mention of “brown-bags.” identify experts/believers and pair them with others not quite there. even to the point of seating charts!

perestroika. learn to speak their language.

is this whole panel AOL-Netscape-TimeWarner people?

give folks a daily reading list, examples. (ah, the Zen Garden.)

oh, that’s the Slayer Office guy. his color palette creator is one of my absolutely essential tools.

fun thing, create your own internal zen-garden-esque moments.

let your people play on company time. time to play means time to learn.

don’t stay silent. “nothing bad will happen to you”

have the group so you can pass the torch, work in pairs, etc. guerilla redesigns…the first one was a nightmare, because they weren’t constructive. don’t call anyone’s baby ugly.

bandwidth math helps…a number with a comma in it.

he (lawver) uses drupal for organizing group. pick off people from other groups to infect, plant people.

when you screw up, apologize, say you were trying to help, and make it better.

show don’t tell.

who is this frickin’ guy? blah blah blah, white coats, other standards, widgets, yadda yadda.
the only thing you need to say is: it’ll save time.
Meri. what about work only done by outside vendors? goes back to finding high-value targets: the person who writes contracts. that’s why I insisted on that in the webadmin guidelines! I need to make sure that’s being followed up on.

Jeremy Keith. what about working with the wider web? vying to be the coolest developers. does transparency help? “maybe they’ll come work for me someday”

becomes both an internal & external tool. (talking about netscape devedge)

what about working with tools that are harder to get standards-compliant, accessible? particular reference to .net. (oy) “if there’s a huge technology investment…you have your work cut out for you. […] good luck with that.” (fsck.)

eric (meyer?). having teams compete in making pages smaller was very helpful. if the teams like each other.

this panel is the one that gave me the most to do later….

Molly calls everybody up front, I shout that we have power, and zeldman’s voice is very ragnarok-like on the mike.

zeldman!

started selfishly, no particular understanding of the real benefits of standards. were rebellious 14-year-olds because they had no hope. so to speak.

funny story about being anonymous. WaSP: “oh, Glen’s thing.” but now there’s the perception that it’s his thing, but it isn’t and wasn’t really. by being helpful, offering suggestions for improvement instead of ranting.

mmmm…webmonkey….

published all on the same day (bunch of different sites/lists) when they announced the WaSP.

John Allsop (?), people doing things idealistically is the herding cats thing. Z recruited him. a lot of people fought a lot of battles, and Z was the general. looking back on 1997-1998…which is where I got started.

MS gets a round of applause. (?)

lesson that we learned, and are now having to learn them over again. CSS Samurai.

man, my wrists are killing me today.

his claim to fame: introducing Z & Eric Meyer.

“good luck to the next lot”

steve champeon. funny story much like zeldman’s.

andy clarke. silly (fictional?) story. history of the wasp site. (ah, I remember that turn of the century orange look….)

pulled out of room by phone call, came in to unveiling of new design. very sexy.

kim…wouldn’t be where she is today w/out Duran Duran, Molly, and something else that I missed. AOL gave her the free time. 😛 very oscar-like speech.

new site has comments. (keep sharp objects away from Steve Champeon.)

“in these times a conversation has to happen for things to get done”

a new era!

WaSP roll call. oh, hey, that’s photomatt. I should go tell him thank you.

most frequest comments: how can I get involved? you should have a task force for $i.

what about handheld/mobile? kelly goto has contacted them about coordination of a renewed TF.

represents french-speaking people, has been translating wasp stuff into french. how can they mimic what wasp is doing? want to have more internationalized presence!

government, policy makers, etc. Justin Stockton. go find him later.

addition: Europe needs a lot of work.

workflow problems. project mgmt applied to web site design/development. xhtml wireframing, christina wodke. yeah, I saw her present on that at webvisions, that was cool.

boeing in getting to standards took a year to work with their CMS.

it’s 5 after, and I need to go….

A really good lunch with Ralph. The kind of excellent friend conversation one would hope for, and which is too nice to be blogged. (the Taco Shack is tasty & cheep)
Kimberley Blessing, is she the ETF person?

I think Molly is rad.

Drew on the history on the WaSP, browsers supporting standards. must be more specific now, everything on the web is more specialized.
“not one person can do every job on the team” heh. I still need to write that article idea.

the task forces break into those new specialties.

ATF had a sit-down meeting here. (Matt May) Andy Clarke, Derek F., Jim Thatcher(?), Matt & Molly.

did a bit of name surfing. when I started paying attention again, Matt is talking about helping create knowledge around accessibility for designers/developers, spread the knowledge around. also want to work with software developers, all the tools. being involved with WAI.

Molly on ACID2. came from Opera, has flaws that need to be address, to test any kind of rendering/user agent. absolutely an agenda. and the test is not an accurate measure of what they really wanted? does something, what that means is up to you.

a time to review Acid2: what’s the next steps? no clue or consensus yet. collaboration?!

Dori Smith. co-leader with Jeremy Keith. JS: don’t call it little! because of the origins, people either think of the language as not-real or themselves as not-programmers. enough browsers support “good enough” JS that it’s time for good practices. now it’s DOM scripting! they aren’t about lobbying the browser makers, not now. digression re: XMLHTTPRequest (or whatever). longer term will be server-side developers, and they aren’t ready yet. plan on articles, members working on books. if you’re writing, let them know and they’ll point. if you have a good article & nowhere to post, let them know.

best practices…unobtrusive scripting. Dori’s having a hard time talking. not either/or js vs. access! graceful degredation. usability. separating behavior from content :: css does sep presentation from content.

DW task force. project manager for dw! many of original goals (as of 2001) were met with MX release, a good first step. a rallying point within the company. some progress, room to improve. “genius of the obvious”: standards & accessibility matter. in DW8 default is for alt on insert to be on, and they get feedback: do more for accessibility!

but we can’t save users from themselves. no kidding. they learn from us out here on the ground. in the combined company, they have lots of tools that author stuff to the web, and want to bring the whole company to the task force. (she looks really familiar, like that Jen who was in my college spanish class.)

yep, Kim’s the ETF gal. a wide audience. indeed. two objectives: teaching standards, promote creation of standards within academic sites. (we rawk…table-free since 2001!) came prepared to announce 9 members of ETF: Mark Trammell (I need to find him!!!! UFlorida!) & four other higher ed people.

edu-tfpp — proliferation project. anyone (like me!) can join. many students have joined: “I’m being failed because I’m using standards!” instructors learning to change how they teach. 70+ people on the list. IRC channel. (I wonder if I should try that.)

participate in events for higher ed webbies: HighEdWebDev. looking to expand their role there. fsck. I wish I could go.

W3C QA group is interested in investigating a standardized curriculum, and will be working with ETF. sexy.

what’s missing is the applications that students have to use: online registration, grades, calendaring, application, etc., etc. the big vendors.

recoginzing for good or for ill, supporting people in need of help. questionnaires about programs that are in their area, to get data and investigate.

MsftTF head has been with MS IE since mid-90s after working on Mosiac. but has also been an open standards guy from the beginning, career focal point. challenging position at microsoft. TF has helped by giving web developers a voice w/in MS.

not just about IE. .Net, etc.

his participation in WaSP was covert before, he wanted them to be good at guiding MS. he came back to IE to drive standards forward. his problem with Acid2: people take it as an expression that MS doesn’t care about standards. he mentioned the 3-pixel-jog, my personal nemesis. no, actually, the disappearing text bug is my true nemesis. it hurts, hurts, hurts.

he said some stuff, but I was im-ing with C.

time for questions, open annual meeting will be at 5pm.

q: have big company employees felt that you were putting your careers at risk by being standards advocates? Jen from DW: absolutely not. it’s been bringing the customer’s viewpoint into the company. MS guy: hasn’t put job at risk…he started with standards as a goal. his boss wanted to put NS-style frames in, and he advocated for including CSS instead. (back in IE3 days.)

q: when will IE7 be released? trying to think of how specific he’s supposed to be…. the intent is to release with Vista. might ship anyway in 2nd half of 2006 if Vista ain’t done.
q: what do you wish there were time & resources for? Molly sez they want to hear about that in the open meeting. CSS & mobile are the ones she has at the top of her mind.

came in late, brain still buzzing from digital preservation panel.

a lot of the best practices for various web disciplines overlap. best thing copywriters can do is write something that’s worth linking to.

bottom line: don’t use “click here”

alt text…used to be just a place to reiterate the keyword, and now they’re using them more thoroughly.

for SEO, h1 should be for the title of the page’s info, not the name of the site. (I think I’m doing that with the core at work, definitely not here!) but don’t lose sleep about it.

if you follow accesibility standards, then you’re following SEO best practices.

so says hagans. can I post that on a big-ass sign somewhere?

most important stuff:

1. descriptive page titles
2. good link text
3. good navigation

anything on top is gravy, and doesn’t particularly overlap as much with SEO. according to that guy.

site maps? I was looking up something else & missed the answer.

microformats? potential but not a whole lot of practical payoff. oh, yeah, hReview. I’d sorta like to do that with oddreview. meyer would like to see the microformats used as indexing source.

clients don’t care about the bandwidth bennies of standards, but definitely like SEO effects. use it as a weapon.

so you have no objection to billing them twice?

I’ve heard this one before: it’s cheaper if you do it from the beginning. (SEO this time)

people are trickling out….

but first, some mathmatics:

long skirt + bike + strong gusty winds = a bad scene

a bad scene + a nice pedestrian = skirt distentangled from rear brakes

cycling + fruit + iced mocha + 11 hrs sleep = cheerful and intellectually engaged Elaine
greenberg is writing a history of vcr’s & video stores! trip on that.

carrie b. tells a story about paper archives. malcolm x papers that were saved from firebombing, stored in florida, put up for online auction by storage owner. paper wins, because it’s durable. (relatively speaking.) blogs as collections of personal papers. it’s almost too late to capture early blogging. (I think I may have lost my own earliest (pre-Blogger) blogging.)

wells: project to preserve a group of blogs, decided to focus on 2004 politics. even by fall 2005 a lot of material was gone, then thinking about Katrina blogs, but too close to the events, couldn’t identify which blogs were significant and/or long-lasting. instead went for current snapshot approach. broad/arbitrary categories: personal, professional, political, journalism/media, arts/entertainment, definers of the genre. each person in class identified a few from each category that were “significant.” famous vs. obscure? ended up with list of 75-100. 2-3 from each category studied, then presented.

locks? lox? I missed that bit. blogs that would be easy to capture technically, ended up with a total of 15, and then 5.5:

huffingtonpost, kottke, textism, bluishorange, al franken (the half), and I missed one. okay, that’s why Alison Headley is here.

q from carrie to allison: does writing for posterity change things? have always written that with the intention that it was going to stay out there. things that she’s wanted to take back, but doesn’t. once I publish it’s been published. “I don’t think that there are takebacks. I may be in the minority there….”

q from carrie to josh: defining the archival unit, what is the most salient feature of a blog/series of blogs, and how do we preserve? feels bad for speaking for the historian. depends on what individual is trying to research. we don’t know what questions people will be asking in 50 years, when there’s enough critical distance. the idealistic answer: come back to early 2006, etc. and really understand what it was to create and read in the environment. for him…general lived experience. interested in ads. frank conrad, early radio broadcaster, first radio ad, but nobody knows what it was for. design is fascinating. (why I keep screenshots!) the emergence of geography/maps; historians will want to see that, but it’ll be really difficult. the environment in addition to the actual content.

carrie refs history of slavery, the use of advertising as a research medium in that context.

carrie to linksvayer: copyright as a barrier to preservation (of cultural legacy)? technology is the main barrier, seems to be. quick explanation of creative commons.

spaced out for a bit. (alison makes jewelry! I wonder if she brought any with.)

carrie to alison: are we too late? depends: what is the scope of blogging? if it’s going to be big for a long time, then we’re still at the beginning. if it’s going to end, then maybe so. better now than never, she can think of some that she used to love (2000/2001) that are gone. about 30% of audience has the same experience.

carrie talking about losing the visuals of her early blog. same deal here. it feels weird to look at things I wrote in early 2001 but in the visual “clothes” of 2006.
to josh: what’s the thing? the post is a historical document. moving to a new template radically changes the historical context. one hands it’s a conceptual problem, and for libraries, categorization, difficult. (I lost his train of thought.) again, depends on the question being asked. and is it too late? keeps coming back to the history of radio…20 years between first use and first “broadcast” and again 20 years before NBC broadcast. here (sxsw) we keep thinking that so much has past, but relatively we are still way at the beginning.

to linksvayer: cultural environmentalism? term designed for lawyers, but take the analogy further to see how digital preservation fits, learning lessons from the environmental movement. the cultural/digital habitat?!

carrie: broaden to preservation issues in general:

shit. c sent me a gtalk msg (about sending back BSG disc 3) so I missed that last bit.

okay…the question of tracking authenticity, changes. definitely a challenge! (history paging Dave Winer.)

josh: historians are used to working with “stuff” this digital thing is tricky. project re: 9/11. w/in a few weeks, they put up a survey & collection mechanism, trying to get stuff quickly. wound up with archive of hundreds of thousands of digital items, very heterogenerous. making sure it’s around 100 years from now: not so easy. test bed for library of congress: what the hell do you do with all this stuff? January issue of d-lib.

carrie: usually librarians aren’t in on the original collecting of archive items. example of weirdo who liked tobacco stuff, turned it over to a library; people with passions, when they die stuff goes to a library. not likely to happen with digital stuff. educate people about taking care of stuff. zeldman story about music in old format…terrified of losing jpgs/tiffs of early photos of childhood…and she knows what she’s doing!

what can we help people do to preserve their own digital legacies?

linksvayer: people do like backing up, so anything to make that easier is a good idea.

josh: metadata about it. one nice thing about a lot of blogs is that they tend to be pretty structured.

carrie & josh in conversation: if you think your intellectual output is going to be worth something, having your records in blog format may be a good thing. (I’ve almost tossed out my boxes of old paper journals a few times. they’re fscking hard to move.) then there’s the scattering problem…email, flickr, social bookmarking, etc.

wells: standards, open standards, structuring, relying on people to organize their lives in some meaningful way! (oy, the boxes of grandma n’s photos.)

audience q: attempt to find inadvertant archives? project in hopkins in ’97, cd for prospective students, also a snapshot of campus.

carrie: bbc doomsday in the 80s. laser disc. because it was proprietary, became obsolete, 2 colleges created an emulator, took YEARS to get to the content. figuring out about how much cost is in emulation.

alison: blogs in general as inadvertant archives. wasn’t her intent to write for posterity. doesn’t think most people w/LJs etc are thinking of history. (I must be the lone weirdo that way.)

wells: value is in items in collection as a whole, becomes the cultural significance.

josh: were asked to do something similar to 9/11 project with last yr’s hurricanes. one thing avail. now have social photos & bookmarks, tags. look at stuff tagged: katrina. (I have a delicious tag katrina-rita) then ask people with those items if they have other stuff. but all this focus crowds out the non-digerati, the people w/out computers. like the illiterate of years past: making sure that we get those voices.

carrie: now archivists get a mix of print & digital. relating physical to digital objects will be a problem for a while.

audience q: how do you archive w/out changing how people do stuff? (carrie: prime directive.) carrie relates to book publishing, move to acid-free paper. josh: plea to archive the ephemera. when feds archive, they have to notify, and then the next blog item: “dude, I’m in the library of congress!” carrie mentions the scrapbookers, and they know about the preservation issues.

audience q: how do you plan on archiving the look? browsercam, social bookmarking cache? carrie: flipside of separating content from presentation! she thinks about creating gallery of screenshots, but then the author is also the curator.

alison: will find posts about redesigning, but that design isn’t there. as a writer, would prioritze the content, but the look is also important. she has an archive of design iterations, but she does editorialize, which “messes with” the history of it.

josh: flattening of time. (dude I said that earlier.) lazyweb idea for WP plugin: every time the design changed, creates a cvs or something. figure out the right template for the time period. (I was just having that same idea!) loss of historical aura.

lyceum guy: stores screenshots? (assuming that browsers won’t be able to render the exact same thing, later.) carrie: no, grabs via http all stuff. render formats? if you stick to well-documented formats/standards, will be easier for librarians of the future to render with good emulators. josh: standards keep you out of the dustbin of history.

note of broader concern from audience: the scope, daunting! DoD sent historians to Iraq, but they didn’t have enough hard drives! what’s the hope?!

big shrug-like experience from the whole panel. wells: most pressing issue facing profession as a whole.

josh: one promising thing: the direction the web is going, more and more people can be packrats.

my comment: if grandma had had flickr, we would’ve known what the hell that storage unit of photos was about. josh notes info from cameras, exif, maybe gps.
q: savemyblog.com — legal aspects? waybackmachine does this all the time, why did it take so long to get their project to get permission? all humans doing this. linksvayer: waybackmachine seems to get away with it because they slurp up everything. plug for cc licenses.

josh: talking about archiving the rendered version. two kinds of archiving for digital objects: the final project or the pieces + the system. think about archiving both tools and content. the database, the actual program. provenance of all the different elements.

best panel.

shawn henry. saw her keynote at highedweb. her grey streaks are so cute.

van voor(?). was an accessibility guy at BofA.

derek featherstone.

faruk ates. isn’t he on the WaSP ETF mailing list? very boyish.

show of hands for various things.

acronymage, ending with wtf?

undue burden on developers, according to shawn. content == stuff. developers work through authoring tools. (like this one!) and not just dreamweaver/frontpage. users consume content, through user agents (browsers, etc.), sometimes + assistive tech. and now the line between developer and author is more blurry.

the more the tools can work together, the less burden on content creators.

wcag 1 vs. 2. goals: easier to understand, tech-independent, testable. (hrm.) easy to understand given up for the other two. comparison in the color contrast issue.

“don’t read wcag 2.0″…but she says not to take it out of context. now there’s an “understanding wcag 2.0” — sounds like my idea for a summation of the webadmin guidelines, and that’s intended for the average developer.

sounds like they wrote a lawyer version and a normal person version. aha! has to be testable because of laws. and I can totally see that…we’ll need to “upgrade” the webadmin guidelines.

(if derek & joe clark are both canadians, what is their connection, if any? of course, canada’s a darn big country…)

derek asked shawn about other delivery techniques, flash & acrobat particularly, and sounds like AdoMacroBeMedia is working with WAI.

added: js on/off isn’t really an accessibility issue, but an interoperability issue.

craig (moderator) quotes devil’s dictionary def of web 2.0. asks panelists, who don’t seem to know a whole hell of a lot about it.

derek: “when we use basecamp…when we try to use basecamp” — ouch. (with a blind coworker) with a regular upload form, it’d take him 30 seconds, but trying to upload a word file took 5 minutes in bc. (are the signals guys here?!)

shawn: cover the basics and then work on the hard stuff.

brought back the “tech as utility” metaphor from this morning.

what’s wrong? (nice photo of a moldy orange!)

derek: biggest need is testing.

shawn adds, go test with users! I need to do more of that…keep meaning to hunt down Bjorn. (or maybe I’ll go out to Puyallup and talk to Patrick. I like Puyallup.)

what can we do to fix it?

derek: keeping it simple, getting back to basics. “pristine” html. again with the testing. some things actually work better in flash vs. ajax, because AdoMacroBeMedia has been putting a lot of effort into flash accessibility, at least in the tool, assuming its being used. not so much in the js libraries. faruk adds that most flash people don’t know about it, esp. in europe.

isn’t learning these things hard? (I’ll say that accessible PDFs are a PITA.)

shawn talking about attitude as a factor, the fun of problem-solving vs. making the lawyers happy.

spacing out….

error message or requirement as part of the label, and emphasized. spiffy. if you re-focus on a label on a reload then then it reads the updated bit. (I think.)

…I was really hoping that this would give me something new or something useful. but it didn’t. grumble grumble grumble.