Inkbase

I started day 3 with “Does Design Matter” and enjoyed listening to Joe Clark’s insights. He really is fun to listen to. Next was “How to Inform Design” with Jeff Veen and Kit Seeborg. It was interesting to see that Jeff spends more time talking to users than he does crunching numbers-it seems to be a much more intuitive process for him. I was quite surprised.

After lunch was the keynote interview with Ana Marie Cox but, since I don’t follow US politics that closely, I wasn’t that familiar with her. I mean, I’ve been to Wonkette, but I no nothing about the people she talks about, so I’ve never paid that much attention. The interview was fun though.

Next was a very interesting session titled “The Flash vs. HTML Game Show”. Now, with my impression of the overall tone of SXSW up to this point, I was convinced that the Flash folks would be slaughtered. I was quite wrong. They actually did a fairly good job and the audience was very receptive to some of their ideas - particularly their reworking of Gmail. The HTML folks did some amazing stuff as well (some of which made it into Flickr), but that was to be expected.

Day 3 ended on a high note… watching silly videos and listening to silly stories with the chaps (the Brothers Chaps) behind Homestar Runner. There wasn’t a lot to learn in this session, but I was going for the comedy anyway. In the evening I checked out Vox Nox / The ‘B’ Side of Technology and the 20×2 gig, but the lack of sleep was catching up to me, so I didn’t stay out too late.

Day 4 began with a session on “Typography for the Screen” and the best part of this session was listening to Joshua Darden speak. It’s obvious that he’s passionate about typography and he speaks slowly and deliberately when he talks about it. I get the impression that he could have done a session on his own and held the audience in his hand the entire time.

Next was “How to Leverage Decentralized Social Networks”, but there wasn’t really any talk of leveraging at all. Everyone talked about their experiences with existing social networks and the “How to…” part seemed to be missing. It was an interesting session though.

The Keynote Conversation with Alex Steffen and Bruce Sterling was great. Bruce, as you can imagine, is a very bright person and he has a very easy going way of speaking. Check out the video to see what I’m talking about.

I finished day 4 with “Spam, Trolls, Stalkers: The Pandora’s Box of Community” hoping I would get some insight into how to avoid them, but the discussion never seemed to go to deeply into it. I guess the point is that there is no way to avoid them.

In the evening, Bruce Sterling hosted his annual closing party, but it wasn’t at his house this time. Instead, it was at the American Legion Hall of Honor, which was unfortunate because the party seemed to lack that personal aspect I had grown to expect. The party started off slowly, but began to pick up once the place started to fill. I talked to a bunch of people I had met throughout the festival and managed to finally meet Will Pate. Oh ya, when I first arrived, I almost bumped into Steve Wozniak. For a moment, I thought I had somehow stumbled into the wrong party. The party ended early and a bunch of people were headed to an after-party, but I had to get up at 4:30AM for the flight back to Vancouver, so I decided to call it a night. Next year, I think I’ll plan to leave later in the day.

22 Mar 2005 |