Courtesy of Omar: The Statesman just reported that Dell Inc. will close its Topfer Manufacturing Center in North Austin by Jan. 1, cutting 800 to 900 jobs. The Statesman goes on to say that the “move would be company’s largest area layoffs since 2001“. Largest since 2001? Anyone care to dispute that?
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GeekAustin: Well, the big news is that Refresh is moving to Buffalo Billiards. I think a lot of folks would prefer a beer or whiskey to an espresso in the evening. I was happy to hear of the change.
Alex Jones: Definitely, we’ve made it a habit to go out for a beer or coffee after each meeting, so this makes it that much easier. A special thanks goes to Leesa who did all of the legwork to find us the new venue
GA: What new things will you be looking to do in this new location? What will moving to Buffalo enable you to do?
Jones: The most important thing will be the ability to fit everyone into the space comfortably. Texpresso, our old venue was a great place to start, but the last few meetings required folks to pack in a little closer than was comfortable. We also hope that it will lead to more post-meeting conversations as we won’t be forced to go to a new venue after 9:00.
GA: Do you know if Buffalo has food as well? pub grub?
Jones: Not only do they have food, but as our meetings are on Tuesday’s we’ll be able to take advantage of half price appetizers and drink specials.
GA: I first heard about Refresh Austin at one of the BarCampAustin parties GeekAustin hosted in 2006. Now days, it seems hardly a day goes by without Refresh coming up in a conversation. I had lunch with someone from Valentine Associates on Tuesday, and Refresh even came up in that conversation. How has the growth of the group been over the last year?
Jones: Tremendous. A lot of good folks have put in a lot of effort to transform Refresh Austin from a loosely-organized collection of events into a smooth running group for Web professionals. We made some decisions early on that have made it easier for people to join and participate, and in that time we’ve more than doubled the amount of people on our mailing list and attendance at our meetings.
GA: There appears to be a core team who manages Refresh Austin. You mentioned Leesa. I’ve met a few of them. Who are the others?
Jones: Leesa, Justin Perkins (who founded the group), Grant Hutchins, Ryan Joy, Paul Menard, Pat Ramsey, Andrew Dupont and Alex Bilstein. These great folks spend a lot of their time moderating the lists, spreading the word, welcoming new members. and ensuring everyone has interesting ideas to talk about.
GA: Most people don’t know that Alex Bilstein ran the Goodwill Computer Museum. I’ve been wanting to interview him.
You mentioned the online list. It seems that the online conversations in the Refresh Austin Google Group cover the gamut: everything from css/javascript to ajax, hosting providers, specking jobs, and how to choose clients. Are you ever concerned that the conversation gets too broad, too general?
Jones: We encourage the broad discussions, as long as they fall somewhere in the realm of Web professionals. Our goal is to foster conversations and ideas across the various areas of interest. Designers benefit when they know more about development, developers gain knowledge when speaking to business folks and business folks will be better at their job if they understand the designers, and of course there are many variants. Ultimately we all participate because we like to share and want to improve. That said, every so often we have to curb conversations that go off topic, which everyone understands and seems to appreciate. Luckily that’s rare.
GA: Many folks don’t know that Refresh is an national…should I say movement? or organization? What kind of interaction does Austin have with other chapters?
Jones: Organization, affiliation or group…they all apply. Every city runs their own group and decides how to go forward. There is a international discussion list, but it tends to be quiet, used to share organizational ideas and questions. Every so often as people move from one city to another, they’re able to migrate between refresh groups, which I think is pretty cool - they’re new to the city, but they already have a foundation of like-minded, friendly colleagues.
For SXSW Interactive 08, Refresh Austin organized a lunch to make it easy for Refreshers from around the world to meet up. It was a great opportunity to meet folks in person and share ideas. Most groups seem to have formed in the same way and discovered the same solutions to the common pitfalls.
Jones: Those interested in learning more about Refreshing Cities, the international glue so to speak, should check out http://refreshingcities.org/
GA: speaking of SXSW, you co-hosted the PhizzPop party with microsoft. How did that work for you? What did you think of the idea of such a design competition? Are you considering similar events for the next SXSW?
Jones: It was a great event for us. We didn’t have anywhere near the resources to throw a bash for SXSW Interactive, much less rent out a place the size of Maggie Mae’s, but we really wanted to get the word out so people could join us if they were interested. Microsoft wanted some local help spreading the word, and were very welcoming. A good time all around. We are definitely planning to do an event next year. We haven’t set any plans yet, but we will.
Jones: I love the idea of a design competition and would love to see more of them pop-up, not just with Silverlight, but other platforms and concepts would be amazing.
GA: Did you catch much flack for co-hosting with Microsoft?
Jones: All of our members were quite happy with the opportunity that Microsoft provided us, and while I caught a bit of flack for teaming up with them, it was from people who aren’t local, who felt we somehow ’sold out’. Our members are varied in their platforms and programs of choice, so we stay balanced. Consequently, we’d be very happy to have Apple and Adobe invite us to co-host parties as well..
GA: Well, I’ll send you the contact info for the Adobe guys. I saw them at PhizzPop. However, they seemed mostly focused on locating the MS guys and talking to them about employment opportunities
GA: Tell me more about SXSW. Compared to previous years, how was SXSW for you this year? Anything you would like to see changed for next year?
Jones: Great question! In fact, that’ll be part of our next meeting, half of which will be a group discussion of this year’s South By. People should come join that conversation instead of reading my thoughts here
GA: Speaking of the April meeting, I see that you have Annette Priest speaking on usability. Is that correct? Can you tell a bit about Annette and what her presentation will cover?
Jones: Indeed we do! Annette brings a great amount of experience workign and managing user experience teams responsible for large Web sites (Dell, IBM Tivoli, SBC and the like) in addition her consulting background. She’ll be sharing practical methods to use analytics and metrics to gain insight into the usability of a Web site.
GA: That sounds really useful. I particularly enjoyed hearing Gordon Montgomery of Neudesic speak about metrics last month, and left his presentation wanting more.
GA: Speaking of usability and related topics, in the last year, we’re seeing UX crop up everywhere. UX UX UX — sort of like U2 but with a little X as well. Can you tell me something about the growth of UX
Jones: UX (User eXperience) isn’t a new concept by any means, but it has certainly been gaining in popularity in our industry. Different people attach slightly different meanings to it, but it comes down to focusing on how the person using your work interacts with it, how he or she can find what they are looking for, and the impression they have of the system. Often times it is attached to designers, but a good experience must be thought about throughout the entire creation process from the business folks through the developers and designers
GA: Usability has certainly been in our minds since the early Apple days. I remember stocking many of the Apple user/interface guidelines in my store in the early 90s. It just seems recently that usability and experience has almost become a cult much in the same way the the concept of social media is becoming a cult.
Jones: Like many parts of the Web, interesting ideas gain notice really quickly. The good practices become ingrained (Web Standards for example) and become a part of our muscle memory.
GA: I hope you don’t mind me going down this path…Have you noticed many new ideas with respect to user experience, or simply a greater interest in the subject matter?
Jones: Both. There are a lot of paths being explored and many experiments. One example is how to best solve the problem of presenting long lists of information. Traditionally on the Web these lists are split over a number of pages, but now people are playing with the concept of appending the next batch of results as the user scrolls to the end of the first batch. So instead of waiting for another page to load, or waiting for a really big page to load initially, you see the results quickly and the keep scrolling to see more.
GA: Thanks for taking the time, Alex. Beyond the April meeting, what’s on the Refresh dance card for this year?
Jones: Big plans for the next year. We look forward to working with other local groups like Geek Austin, the Adobe Users Group, the WordPress group and others.
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GA: Looking forward to it. I’ll be seeing you at the next Refresh meeting.
After the Mark Zuckerberg incident, the number two story last weekend was the battlebot that ran amok at BarCampAustin III. For those of you who sent me notes saying that you’re glad I wasn’t hurt, that is not me in the video, but none other than Josh Holmes of Microsoft. Apparently, the battlebot was unaware of Josh’s advocacy of open source.
The air conditioner did not fare so well. It was no match for the Class A battlebot. To help offset the cost of recovery, please help whurley with a digg
From Whurley
All went well save one small incident involving a 340lbs BattleBot malfunctioning and then taking off as fast as it could for the closet Microsoft employees. Thankfully no one was hurt or injured and they were amazingly good sports afterwards:
Many thanks to the folks at Viewzi.tv for the amazing editing job. And, yes we still love Brady and TeamDX! Good luck in the new season on ESPN guys!
Whurley present to receive city proclamation of March 8th as BarCampAustin Day.
BarCampAustin III will be held at GSD&M |Idea City.
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Although he used to come to my bookstore, I didn’t meet Christopher St. John until a few years ago. Because he lives in Dallas, we usually only connect in person during conferences. You can follow Christopher’s blog at artofsystems.blogspot.com. |
Lynn Bender: Chris, good to catch up with you. I heard the word Semantics, and got exited. Tell me about what you will be presenting at BarCampAustin III.
Christopher St. John: I’m getting together with Taylor Cowan (from Sabre/Travelocity) and Dan Connolly (from the w3c) to do some outreach for some big-S semantic web technology. Mainly RDFa (a clean way to annotate HTML with semantic data), but probably also GRDDL (a way to extract all sorts of semantic markup, not just RDFa, from web pages). Assuming he survives the bike trip down, Jay Fichialos (also from Sabre/Travelocity) will be helping, too.
Bender: when I first read about RDF I was thinking people were referring to pre-RSS type feeds. (I was still running rdf on GeekAustin until last week).
ckstjohn: Strangely, RDF really was the basis for one branch of the RSS technology tree.
Bender: so we’re talking about the same rdf? I’m just a few generations back?
ckstjohn: The RDF for feeds was one application of the underlying RDF technology.
Bender: Tell me more about GRDDL.
ckstjohn: GRDDL is a way to attach an XSLT stylesheet to a page. Instead of making the page all pretty for presentation, the stylesheet parses out all the semantic markup and formats it for automated processing. It’s sort of a stylesheet for the computer instead of for the user. There are GRDDL stylesheets for the “official” microformats, for RDFa, or you can write your own. It’s a cool technology that helps unify the big-S and little-s semantic web efforts.
Bender: What kind of users will benefit from these semantic efforts?
ckstjohn: The hope is that all of them will, but, the focus of the presentations at BarCampAustinIII is going to be on practical uses for real, working web designers and developers. The goal is to present techniques and tools you can use right away, without having to become an expert in formal logic.
Bender: It looks like that there will be quite a bit of discussion on microformats this year at BCAIII. Can you tell me anything about the other discussions?
ckstjohn: Well, a little hard to tell from the sessions page, but my suspicion is that techniques like microformats for adding semantic data to the web are moving from being novel to being just an accepted part of any new development. At least I hope so. RDFa and the surrounding technologies like GRDDL are more arrows that should be in any good web developer’s quiver.
Bender: What sort of tools are there for embedding semantic data to web docs? And are we all going to have to become ontologists?
ckstjohn: I sure hope not, but to some extent, any good developer already is an ontologist. The normal sort of stuff you do in information architecture (or less formally for any web site) is exactly the sort of thing you do in putting together an ontology. The nomenclature might be different, but the basic work is the same: understanding user needs and the problem domain.
I suspect there will be pre-canned semantics (like microformats) for many common tasks, but one of the points of the we’re going to try to make in the BarCamp session is that RDFa comes with a whole set of tools that make it (relatively) easy for any group of people to put together a shared vocabulary and deploy it to the web. Even if you haven’t got a problem domain amenable to official formalization, you can still get the advantages of semantic markup and data sharing.
Bender: Is there something peculiar to the BarCamp format that helps facilitate these type of presentations/discussions/workshops/ .
ckstjohn: In this case I think the informality and wide mix of people are a big help. Normal conferences tend to attract certain specific sorts of people who show up with a pretty specific focus (SXSWi for web designers and developers, something like Semantic Technology 2008 for the big-S semantic web geeks). BarCampAustin gives both groups a chance to sit down together.
I’m glad Taylor Cowan and Dan Connelly are going to be there. Taylor has spoken before on these topics, and of course Dan is a W3C heavyweight. It ought to be a great session.
Bender: Chris, I really appreciate the time you took giving me some info on this. I will probably be there most of the day soaking it in.
ckstjohn: Cool. Thanks for the opportunity to share, looking forward to it.
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Browsing through the SXSW Panels, I saw that Vignette’s CTO Conleth O’Connell is leading a panel called How Many Clicks to the Center of…? Given that Conleth has been with Vignette since the early days, and Vignette was one of the first companies in the enterprise content management space, I felt the title was a bit of a tease. So I contacted Conleth and asked him to elaborate: |
Lynn Bender: Conleth, thanks for taking the time. Please tell me about Success in 3 Clicks.
Conleth O’Connell: For a packed iPod of 400+ CD’s alone, try finding a specific song to play, it’s a lot of thumb scrolling (or clicks), now that’s on 80 Gigabyte iPods, it won’t be long before we have Terabyte iPods (1000 Gigabytes). Something has to give so we as humans can find what we’re looking for with a simple interface like an iPod. Vignette’s background of personalization and managing and delivering huge quantities of information over the Web sees a new wave coming called Personalization 2.0. We believe Personalization 2.0 will impact those interfaces and take into account the user, their mood, their environment, their patterns and their “persona” to help filter out what’s not relevant so we could actually achieve what the wise owl answered in the Tootsie Pop ad: Three. Success will be when getting to any information is within 3 clicks.
Bender: When choosing how to access their growing library of content, many people are choosing to assign tags to everything, rather than create a folder hierarchy. Clearly, folder tree will never get you everywhere in three clicks. However, unless you use multiple tags with boolean like operations, they don’t seem to be a solution either. How does one get to this three click success?
O’Connell: First of all you’re right. Classification and organization is still a static orientation based on a point in time even when the user is doing it themselves. When new assets come online (never been tagged before) or when older assets go offline, your tagging density changes and that may affect what’s prominent. This is important dimension is the classification and organization of the content. Now the question becomes how does it get used? That’s where the user’s intent must be taken into consideration. The user’s intent is affected not only by their own actions within a point in time, but also what others are doing around them. One of our panel members represents a firm, Baynote, that specializes on using the intent of the user to improve activities like search. We call this social search. Understanding what’s valuable when you search for a term (like a form in turbo tax) goes beyond the raw relevance rankings, it’s where did the crowd find value that matters the next time that query is issued.
Go to www.netapp.com and using their search box, search for storage. Network Appliance is a storage vendor, so you might expect a plethora of results. In the results page, you will see on the order of 250 or so results, and if you scan the results you see they are mostly product types. Now they have a link there that says “Raw results”; select that, and now you can see the difference in action. If you were looking for a storage product (a large segment of visitors do that in their case, probably even competitors), you went from search to finding the product line – 2 clicks. If all they had were the raw relevance rankings. It’s where the crowd finds value that matters the next time that query is issued.
Another example is www.nyc.gov. They realized presenting information how they are organized internally wasn’t working, so they added alternative views: Did you Know and Most Requested sections help bubble up information based on users coming in. Furthermore, they used user segments to organize the site: residents, business, visitors, etc.
Similarly, the state of Michigan (Michigan.gov) uses “How do I” and other task oriented organizations to present information on their site. Three clicks was our measure of success for them.
Bender: Tell me more about Personalization 2.0. It seems to center on providing multi-channel access to content. However, the content you describe would all be delivered from, or pass through a central spoke. How do you address the problem of multiple information silos?
O’Connell: Separating content from presentation is a fundamental tenet of making this work. A centralized hub is used to manage the metadata and the logistics of placing the content into the right environment. However, the delivery application that adds the presentation to that content is where the specific experiences are applied (mobile versus Web browser versus kiosk). There’s a corollary to this separation tenet which is always have a single system of record. By that I mean, edits only take place in one information source. All other uses of that information are then updated (the need for a powerful content management system includes knowing where content has gone). The importance of multichannel is the empowerment to take action by the user. The user is providing the disruption here by taking more control on how to use the technology. Not the technology dictating how to use the content.
For us multichannel includes all of the different ways users communicate and interact, beyond mobile and multi-device. It’s the convenience factor usually associated with mobile devices that clearly demonstrates the impact as can be seen in this Citibank mobile commercial on Youtube. This shows the wife persona-shifting to make a car payment (from passenger to financial caretaker). Rather than pulling into the bank or stopping at a hotspot, she uses her phone to call, but to make the payment using a Web application. Multichannel access allows action to be taken. We manage the content (single source of the truth) across all those different distribution channels. If you go to anytime.sky.com, you can see this in action. Customers can access the same videos available to them at home (set-top box), over the Web or on their mobile phones
Bender: You spoke of Personalization 2.0 as providing a unified login — do you see this utilizing an existing standard such as OpenID, or do you see it requiring a new standard?
O’Connell: I wasn’t presupposing any specific technology. I also don’t expect a unified login to occur as opposed to a “master login.” Between Microsoft’s passport and the Liberty Alliance and now other activities around CROWD and OpenID, I’m sure a solution, if not multiple, will be found and if users gain value out of it, then it will be accepted like wildfire. The overall effect I was trying to portray was that human capacity to ingest information hasn’t changed yet. The Web in its generic sense is growing beyond our capacity to absorb, so it will need to get personal to the point that there is “My Web” which will end up being a virtual representation of what I care about at a point in time, but it will never be static because I’m not static. J
Bender: It seems I see more about Vignette in the European tech news than I see here in the states. Is that my imagination? Does this have anything to do with the advances in the euro telecomm networks?
O’Connell: Our efforts on focusing on the Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment space with the Vignette Digital Services Hub solution began in the European, Middle East and Africa geography. Consumers in those markets are used to being served rich, interactive experiences over their mobile devices, and Vignette has a lot to do with that. We’re working with companies like British Sky Broadcasting, Vodacom and SABC to ensure their content is available to subscribers at any time on any device.
Vignette is well recognized aboard as a leader in content management and delivery for mobile devices. In the U.S., we’re best known as the pioneer of Web Content Management and have received a great deal of recognition for our innovative Web Experience Platform.
Bender: what are you looking forward to seeing/doing this year at SXSW?
O’Connell: I always find it fascinating to see how technology gets used in unexpected ways. We are really focusing on the next wave of experiences and interactivity from a mainstream perspective, so attending and participating in the Interactive festival itself is a great way of seeing a bit into the future.
See Conleth O’Connell’s Panel How Many Clicks to the Center of…? at SXSW Interactive
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If you ever wanted to have a free 5 day drunk, this is the year for it. I have never seen so much corporate money poured into sxsw since 2000. Hey, remember 2000? It was right before 2001. |
If you can resist the free corporate booze that is going to be thrust in your direction every night, you’ll be witness to the largest SXSW Interactive Austin has ever seen. There are so many evening events, both official and unofficial, many of my friends are already resigned to the frustration that there is no way to be all the places they want to be. Imagine having a ticket to disneyland, and only an afternoon to visit. Aside from everything going on in the daytime, just look at all the parties.
(10:46:44 AM)linearb@gmail.com/Home: I was thinking of tagging all the corp parties at SXSWi “corp booze”
(10:46:57 AM) linearb@gmail.com/Home: then linking to the tag in GA
(10:47:08 AM) linearb@gmail.com/Home: but then thought nahhh, bad idea
(10:47:21 AM) whurley: rofl
(10:47:23 AM) whurley: you’re so back :D
Many of the parties will require SXSWi admission. For everyone who has bitched about the price of SXSWi admission, check out the cost of other similar tech events O’Reilly’s ETech is a couple thou — and the big cherry TED conference is about ten thou (if you’re lucky enough to get an invite). Think how much liquor you will be pouring down every night at SXSW. Yes You. Now imagine if you had to pay for that liquor. Now, look at me with a straight face and bitch about the price of admission.
Word is spreading pretty fast, but in case you hadn’t heard, Austin Ventures startup Pluck has just been purchased by Demand Media. Pluck CEO Dave Panos says the jobs of his 70 employees will remain untouched. Heh. It wasn’t but a few weeks ago that Pluck announced a major deal with Hearst Publishing. As you know, Hearst owns MySpace. and the CEO of Demand Media is none other than former MySpace Chairman Richard Rosenblatt. Raise your hands if you saw this one coming.
As part of moving Geekaustin from Slashcode to Wordpress last weekend, I was reviewing the most popular posts over the last 7 years. I discovered that the most popular posts were from people trying to get advice about connectivity — who was good, who was bad, how much SBC sucked, how bad texas.net sucked, etc. Some of the events we witnessed were the buyout and subsequent closure of Jump.net, and the discontinuation of most independent ISDN and DSL offerings in town — like those from Realtime Communications, Illuminati Online, Texas.net, Eden.net, Constant.com. We’re really down to a few choices. Even Speakeasy was bought by Best Buy.
After 7 years on a pre-BrianAker version of SlashCode, GeekAustin has been converted to WordPress. The decision to go with WordPress was based on several things: 1) It’s beautiful code, 2) There is a tremendous amount of WordPress talent in town. 3) I didn’t want to spend months working on a heavyweight solution, and 4) I want to jam with Matt Mullenweg. I am getting pretty good at this jazz piano thing, and would love to back Matt up. What do you say, Matt?
A tremendous amount of thanks goes to Paul Menard for recreating the original GeekAustin template in WP.
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In the very near future, Cafe Medici, purveyors of the absolutely best espresso in town, will be opening a new location on the drag. Now all the campus needs is a decent bookstore. |
