Categories
Monday

American Cancer Society: Applying Disruptive Technology for the Nonprofit Sector

Monday, 12 March 2007 @ 1130

Randal Moss, Mgr of Innovation Based Strategies, American Cancer Society
Erin Anderson, eCommunity Mgr, American Cancer Society
Keith Morris, Electric Sheep Company
David Neff, Director of Online Communications, American Cancer Society

As a steward of voluteer-raised money, the ACS must be extra careful when investing money into the next big thing/tech on the internet.

They use del.icio.us as their web glossary.
They use Flickr to post photos from all kinds of events (e.g., tag:relayforlife). Along with a CC license they use those for promotion.
Blogs are used to create very small communities (e.g., a group of 5 people using TypePad to create a blog to quite smoking).

labs.cancer.org – an idea from Google Labs

They use Drupal (relayforlife.org) because of the vibrant community surrounding it.
Lots of people know PHP and can help maintain/augment the code.

Second Life Relay for Life – all I can say is wow.
http://slrfl.org/

Categories
Monday

Get Unstuck: Moving From 1.0 to 2.0

Monday, 12 March 2007 @ 1000

Liz Danzico, Director, experience strategy,   Daylife
Kristian Bengtsson, Creative Dir,   FutureLab
Chris Messina, Co-founder,   Citizen Agency
Luke Wroblewski, Principal Designer,   Yahoo! (http://lukew.com/)
Jeffrey Zeldman, Founder,   Happy Cog

[This was one of the best panels I have been to, yet. Kudos to its organization and the preparedness of the panel members.]

“Stuck” is relative. A team might be stuck, but the focus of their work may have people moving through it. This panel will focus upon the stuck feeling of the team environment only.

Puts all your ideas out there and people may get it.

Try to hear what people are actually saying when they make requests, specs, requirements, etc.

“It’s better to be a flamboyant faliure then a mediocho success” Malcolm McClarran [check]

Put your ideas out there so that you 1) think it through and 2) others see you justification and ideas (e.g., your supervisor). This gives you control of the memes.
If you put it out there early then you get maximum benefit of people’s feedback. They get the maximum opportunities to see into your blind spots.
Like the Republicans, if you articulate a goal in simple terms it brings the story to other people.
Writing the ideas is the personal process that hones the ideas into the soundbites that catch on with the people you need to buy in to your ideas.

Design can be a problem solving process without calling it design.

SMALL groups who have good communication and are in touch with larger whole.

list specific user needs that are backed up and this will keep the business needs from overriding them.

Constrained resources often forces beneficial selection – better, more focused, simplified design.

Zeldman: “I wrote Designing with Web Standards for your boss…”

[research] Apple’s foray into their initial Apple Stores that failed because they were based upon their product lines rather than lifestyles.

Categories
Monday

Scaling Your Community

Monday, March 12th @ 11:30 am

Matt Mullenweg Founder, WordPress

Problem in scaling community
forum w/out anyone in it – a bunch of empty rooms
a blog w/no comments “hey, what do you think?”
friendster
no comments available blog
slashdot traffic decline

What is scaling?
be as useful fot the last 100k ppl as the fist 100k ppl

have the same experience as a large concert as a half filled room

1. Good Foundation
Start as simply as possible (big party small room)
constitution vs. federal register 900pgs
break down to the simplest thing you can reasonably articulate
“everything that is currently free will always be free”
“we will never sell your email address”
Don’t just promise, visualize

2. Bootstrap
Be your most passionate user!
must be crazy about what you’re doing because nobody else is
Talk to people – get outside to do it.
Caterina of Flickr used to manually introduce people to each other when Flickr was just started out
Pre-moderate before things get bad

3. Let go
your fans know your better than you do – your fans know you (or what you’re doing) better than you yourself
i.e. wordpress ideas – form to put in ideas and vote on them – 487 ideas and 28000 votes
pattern for gathering feedback
*April 23rd WP2.2 release*

4. Open Source
about a process and involving ppl, the community

5. Embrace & Extend
Look at what ppl are doing – watch their behaviors – embrace and extend it
“it’s like the shout feature on dodgeball.com”
take a small subset of a successful service

6. You can’t do it yourself
hey, is anyone out there?
creator can’t let go of control.
motivation and delegation

7. Personalization
People want to be unique – let them
customization is more appropriate – take something and make it your own
every action a user does is sacred – they tell you what they love – every tag, every click
Filter! once it hits a certain size there is too much info to take in – ways are needed to filter out the good/bad
Keep it fresh – blogs of the day on wordpress.com – keep it new
Allow for some correction “My Tivo Thinks I’m Gay!” – you want to be giving people the willies – a little magical

9. Bootstrap with popular
people magazine – when brittany shaves her head, we’re gonna look!
Follow the sites that tell you what is cool and new

10. Respect your users’ time
your community/software is a means to an end, they don’t want to use your software make it easy!

Big Questions
Some things have all the right ingredients, but never take off
Have MySpace Livejournal, etc. peaked?
Why do some standards and APIs never take off?
Where is the traffic?
Where is the money?

What is the best scaling software ever?
e-mail – “all software expands till it reads email”

What is killing it?
Spam! – biggest threat to web 2.0

Bonus things
Invest in infrastructure – speed is a feature – youtube has speed as a feature
Be transparent – involve your community in the process – let them know what your problems are – someone can probably help you out.
Don’t believe your own press – you want people at one extreme or the other love/hate
Have fun! – you can tell the flickr ppl had fun when they did it

Categories
Monday

AJAX Kung Fu Meets Accessibility Feng Sui

Monday, March 12th @ 10:00 am

Jeremy Keith   Web Developer,   Clearleft Ltd
Derek Featherstone

Accessibility in AJAX
2 Kinds
Directed at custom people or technologies
General universal accessibility (best)
-a site that can adapt to anyone and any device using that site

Progressive Enhancement (order to do things)
1. Content
2. Structure it – what does this mean? – NOT how does this look?
3. Presentation – how does this look
4. Behavior – how does this work?

You should be able to strip away any of these w/out any problems
What you can use for these:
2. HTML (content)
3. CSS (structure)
4. AJAX (behavior)

Many times the AJAX comes first – this is bad.

What is AJAX?
Asynchronism is cool – don’t need to refresh page to get info from the server – not just pretty expand out boxes

Web = Thin Client

Browser
Display

Server
store
process

Web = Rich Client

Browser
display

**AJAX** use ajax to process – bad because AJAX is required

Server
store

HIJAX
progressive enhancement
content
structure
behavior

Browser (links/forms) -> Server (returns/serves whole page back no mater what the link/form)

Browser (links/forms) -> AJAX -> Server (just sends back via AJAX what is needed) -> Browser just shows the changed elements

Deceptively rich content – AJAX is just the dumb waiter. It just delivers the stuff between the browser and the server. If the AJAX layer is stripped out it is OK because you’re going back to the old way of the server delivering an entire page.

Paradox
plan for AJAX from the start but implement AJAX at the end

Watch for: <a href=”javascript:…”> or <a href=”#” onclick =…>

Patterns good for AJAX
rating things
register (user name is taken)
comments (more blogs should use this)
shopping carts

Feng Shui
Find a way where things can peacefully coexist.

Feng Shui means Wind & Water – Wind and water can be peaceful or very destructive

Accessible Scripting:
’99 – site works w/ or w/out javascript
’04-’05 – accessibility scripting something different
’06 – HIJAX (http://chapters.ca)
is AJAX pop-up worse than a real browser window pop up – a screen reader doesn’t see the AJAX pop up. Maybe better to keep on page w/anchor hidden w/css at bottom

Create a linear pathway through pages if one exists.

Examples
Form advisories
tables prevent screen readers to get them – not part of form
just style <em> to pus it to the side as part of form
if there is an error style a <strong> to indicate
Screen readers will see this as part of <label>

A <label> can also be added to submit bottom saying there is a problem

Where Next?
href=”#nextstop”
TabIndex = “-1”

Always an option not to use AJAX – consider alternatives or possibly make a “no ajax” preference

“Accessibility is just as seXy!”

Questions
How do you deal with this when using a CMS or server language that doesn’t handle this?
Maybe find something that does or build your own if accessibility is important to you

Where are screen readers headed and why are they so slow to keep up?
They are getting better, but they are slow, they have to stay backwards compatible. Standards bodies are helping in this. Just a wait and see thing.

Categories
General

Trade Show

trade showThe SXSW trade show opened at noon today. The session I had prior to it opening wasn’t that great, so I was in line when the doors opened. There was a nice collection of vendors, and an even nicer collection of swag to be had.

There were actually quite a few large city film associations (the interactive and film conferences share the same trade show). There were also a decent number of DVD/CD pressing companies as well. None of those really interested me.

Google had a nice booth there. I thought it would be funny to go up to them and pretend that I didn’t know who they were. “So, what exactly do you do at G-g-google? Am I pronouncing that right?” I had a hard time keeping a straight face and blew the whole thing. They at least pretended to think I was funny and gave me a mouse pad. firefox tattooAnother great booth was Mozilla Firefox. They were giving out free t-shirts to anyone who would be a temporary Firefox tattoo on their neck or face. They were also selling shirts so I just bought one. The girl who sold it to me seemed a little disappointed that she didn’t get to put a tattoo on my face. I figure Firefox is a good cause and I’m happy to give money to them. I’ve looked at getting a Firefox shirt several times in the past, but just don’t really like the navy blue one they sell online (the one I bought was a brown ringer tee). The Creative Commons had a booth where I also purchased a shirt (again, another organization that I’m happy to give money to). Another interesting booth was a company I’d never heard of before today called LuckyOliver. They’re a stock photo shop similar to istockphoto, which I’ve used before. They use a token system (I got 4 free!) to purchase photos. They also accept photo submissions and will sell your photos for you. The site looks (good collection of images) works very similar to other stock photo sites, so at the very least, it’s another alternative when i can’t find that perfect image. The last booth that stood out for me was the Make Magazine booth. They’ve just launched a new magazine called Craft which is more on the crafty side of things where Make is more of the hacking and building super-cool ray-guns side.

It was a good trade show, and there were plenty of booths giving out candy so I’m sure I’ll stop by from time to time throughout the week to have a little snack.

Categories
Sunday

Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design

Sunday, 11 March 2007 @ 1700

Cameron Adams, Web Technologist, The Man in Blue
Sally Carson, Interaction Designer, Yahoo!
Dustin Diaz, User Interface Engineer, IMVU
Jonathan Snook

Business – User – Development : The three areas that you need to bring together to get designs to work

If one of these three things fails, the site will fail.

Each of these three needs to know what the other is up to in order to get buy-in.

From the designer’s POV, “naive” questions can get you answers to uncover political currents.
Be ready with facts to support your reasons for your desires.</common-sense>

Generalists may seem out of fashion so specialize, but you need to understand how it all fits together.
Web designers are often becoming “T-shaped people” – broad knowledge, but a depth of knowledge in some areas.

Generalists will become far more important as we move forward.

Small teams are good teams.

Team bonding – Agile development makes people want to contribute.

Making people happy
Agile and extreme programming gets other minds to interact with that are focused upon the exact same issues.
Quick meetings – standup meetings make for fast, focused meetings (“…if this meeting goes longer than fifteen minutes then you are doing it wrong”)

Categories
Sunday

Ten Ways to Run a Startup Like Genghis Khan

Sunday, 11 March 2007 @ 1605

Kevin Hale, Co-Founder, Infinity Box Inc

I did not mean to go to this presentation, but it was a great history lesson in Mongolian strategy. Oh, well.

Categories
Sunday

Accessified! Practical Accessibility Fixes Any Web Developer Can Use

Sunday, 11 March 2007 @ 1530

Patrick Lauke, Splintered
Ian Lloyd, accessify.com

The first part of this was Ian Lloyd merely talking about the tools afforded at accessify.com. I am downloading something so I do not want to move from any point where the wireless is actually working.

Page heading and document outline are useful in the WebDev Toolbar

Use semantic markup even if it is not, to your knowledge supported by an accessibility tool.

Javascript is not necessarily evil. To check, again, the WebDev Toolbar allows you to turn off js.

alt text:  normal stuff.
Basically, download the WebDev Toolbar for Firefox and use it.

graybit.com – turns your site into greyscale – pretty cool.

Firefox plugin – Color Contrast Analyzer
Tool: FAE

Unobtrusive accessibility: doing the right thing without your boss noticing: hidden skip links and form labels and table headings

Categories
Sunday

Everything You Wanted to Know about the Mobile Web, But Were Afraid to Ask

Sunday, 11 March 2007 @ 1400

Brian Fling, Dir of Strategy, Blue Flavor

[I am sorry about the poor notes. I was taken in by his cool slides and an attack of ADHD.]

His presentation can be found here: http://www.blueflavor.com/sxsw2007/

Check out:

Mobile web will explode because of LBS (location-based services).
This contextualizes the web to a much higher level.

3 Cs of the mobile web: Cost, content and context

Clickstreams: where on a mobile page will the user go based upon clicks

different screensizes – about 500 different devices sold in the world

Do not design for smart phones or PDA – they are such a small part of the market, currently.

In his presentation, he meant “design vertically” when he says “design horizontally”.

Mobile web standards
XHMTL-MP (Extensible HTML – Mobile Profile) – this is the new WAP (old WAP:bad, new WAP:good)
XHTML and MP are VERY similar – standard tools can work with it.
Wireless CSS is more complicated, but his standard advice is to keep it simple
He recommends doc styles over style sheets because of flashing of the page during loading.

Recommendations:

  • only about 5-7 links per page. This gives you more than enough access keys
  • keep forms to a minimum
  • focus on five devices: treo, razr, nokia 40-series, ,
  • mobile stylesheets can detect devices with the handheld attribute

Testing devices remotely:  deviceanywhere.com

Categories
Sunday

Non-Developers to Open Source Acolytes: Tell Me Why I Care

Sunday, 11 March 2007 @ 1130

Elisa Camahort, Pres of Events & Mktg, BlogHer
Dawn Foster, Dir of Community & Partner Programs, Compiere
Annalee Newitz, Freelance Writer
Erica Rios, Internet Project Mgr, Anita Borg Institute For Women and Technology

[After leaving the previous panel, I came to this one in progress…]

Myths/Issues:
Lack of support:

  • A major part of choosing an OS solution is the quality of the online community: documentation and peer support.
  • You can actually see a contributors code work before hiring them.
  • Many times you might be able to purchase support piecemeal for OS.

Code inclusion violations:

  • Just know the license under which the code is released.

Lack of security:

  • [insert standard arguments here]

Cost of making it usable/customer service is a hidden cost:

  • This sticks. Free software is free as in freedom and not free beer to paraphrase Richard Stallman.
  • There need to be financial resources dedicated to OS solutions.

OS is anti-capitalist:

  • On the contrary, there is a VERY healthy dose of capitalism fueling OS.

OS as an ethical choice:
“Microsoft is in the Dark Ages of their evil…Google is the new evil, but they use open source so maybe they are a good, new evil” – Newitz

OS is the public library of the software realm. It is all about access to use and contribute. Particularly to groups that have systemic barriers otherwise.