Clues 2005

Forgot to write about this last year and just got reminded of it:

On my way back from SXSW 2004 I was doing the crossword puzzle on the plane. Among the clues:

Alice's Cat

Unravel, as a rope

The answers being my name and the storytelling event at which I'd just performed my "Schwag Queen" duties.

Just the best conference for my money 2005

I'm in Austin at SXSW. Back soon.

Having a wonderful time!

SXSW 04: Thoughts on the way home 2004

Tuesday March 16th [with side comments added the following Friday afternoon]
Afternoon - At the Austin Airport, waiting for the first leg of my flights home.

I made it to one panel yesterday - besides my own, that is - and enjoyed it: "CSS:The Good, The Bad & The Ugly". I took some notes but they're in the bag I checked, so details will have to wait. After that I went back to my room, checked work email, finished my preparations for my panel, had a quick lunch and then dashed back across the street to hang out in the green room to meet my panelists. The panel went fine and, though I had a little worry due to lost communication and my mobile phone not having any network communication for the last day or two, all my panelists were there and helped make it a good session.

Having survived that, I scurried up to Lovejoy's to find the Webmonkey Wake. When I got there, I couldn't find the group, so I headed on to the lovely Club de Ville for the Blogger party, which comes in a close second to Break Bread With Brad for best party of the festival. Things to sit on, good snacks and music not so loud as to prevent conversation are the key ingredients in my book. I had a great time talking to Jim Styn and Teresa from Voter Virgin, plus lots of other short little chats with other folks. Also had the pleasure of giving Dave Shea a drink, admittedly a free drink which had been brought to me in error, but in any case a sincere token of my esteem for his fine work on CSS Zen Garden.

When thunder began to threaten to make the outdoor party a shower, a group of us including Tantek and Photo Matt went to La Zona Rosa. We arrived too late for 20x2 unfortunately - too many good things going on at once! - but I did get to hear a little bit of the band and hang out with the DFW Bloggers gang. Amazingly, the rain didn't start for an hour or so, though it always seemed on the verge. Just when it was clear it was really going to start in earnest soon, Matt and I decided to head over to the Omni Hotel lounge and see what was happening there. It really started to pour and we had an exciting silly adventure taking advantage of what cover we could find from awnings and doorways, wrestling with Matt's umbrella's desire to become an allerbmu, and the occasionally horizontal rain. We got damp and giggly and it was totally fun. The thunder and lightning added to our enjoyment.

Soggy, we eventually arrived at Paradise Lounge (the Omni having been vetoed as "totally dead" according to reports). Matt couldn't get in without ID so we went up the street and found a cool pool bar and hung out there for the rest of the evening. Matt got pool lessons from the bar manager and I got the worst martini ever made. (Don't order anything but beer, straight whiskey and margaritas in Austin is something I really need to remember next year. Not that I'll drink the beer, but it's a useful summation for others, I think).

There was a bit more hanging out in the Hilton lobby then I went up to my room to wind down, pack up and eventually sleep.

This morning I did not have the lazy sleeping in my body wanted, but I did manage to wake up in time to touch bases with folks back at work, confirm I had gotten all my things together and that my flight was still scheduled on time, before heading over to the convention center to meet a good crowd of folks - including one of my panelists and my old pal David Weinberger - for lunch. I didn't get my usual Guero's lunch & margaritas with Brad, but I did have really excellent spicy lemongrass tofu at Mekong River (which used to be called Cong Ly and was one of my favorite places for lunch the last SXSW I was at. It's good and cheap!)

I got to give more goodbye hugs to my pals since there were about 50 SXSWi folks dining there before sharing a cab to the airport with Liz (from my panel).

So here I am, wishing I was staying one more day, but I've spent all I can. It's a double-rent month thanks to four days at the new Hilton, but it was worth it. My room was nice and, for the schedule I was keeping, quiet enough. The staff were friendly and helpful. None of the decor gave me nightmares (though I did have a sexy dream about one of my SXSW flirt buddies. Given the exceeding deliciousness of the people I was hanging out with, I'm kind of surprised I only had (or remembered) one racy dream; I had plenty of good fantasy fodder). [And now, 3 days later, I can't for the life of me remember the dream or who was in it. Romance is fleeting, apparently.]

So I'm going home. I'll have 3 workdays where I don't have to go to work and then a weekend. It will all be over too soon, I know.

I already have dinner planned with my friends who got married last week [had to cancel due to water heater explosion] and another dinner with my other friends who'll be getting married this fall [still on, so far as I know]. I was going to have a date this weekend, but I have a gut feeling that's gonna turn into a friendly hanging out or I'll be going alone [or missing the show since it turns out to be at 10pm on Sunday night]. I might go to MOMA. I might go shoe shopping. I will probably go see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when it opens; I like the premise a lot. [I have done none of these things, but I have had a restful time at home.]

Once again SXSW has reaffirmed my belief that the world and the Web is full of good, creative, fascinating people. I have lots of URLs to visit and panel notes to read and pictures to flip through. I have my own posts to add links & photos to and increased interest in working on my own site.

It's good; it really is all good. And it isn't enough to keep me from wishing I had all this and someone with his sweet arms around me and his lips on mine. [Who needs a secure signature file, now you know it's a Dinah post.]

He is so dreamy, indeed 2004

Eric Meyer captured this great moment of Min Jung and I separately spotting Scott walking up the hall (I'd been watching for him and hadn't managed to find him until this moment) and then rushing into his arms squealing with delight:

SXSW 04: Notes for my panel, "Streetwise Librarians and the Revolution in Public Information" 2004

Panel: Cindy Hill from Sun, Tanya Rabourn from Columbia University, Liz Lawley from Rochester Institute of Technology, Jon Udell from Infoworld and moderated by me.
Monday March 15th, 5pm

Here's my notes on what I planned to say:

Welcome to Streetwise Librarians and the Revolution in Public Information. Many people now know that librarians are not the old stereotype of the "shushing bunster". In fact when I told one gentleman whom I respect highly which panel I was moderating, his first reaction was "Mmm, librarians. I need to find myself a hot librarian." So though people know some of the important qualities of the profession - integrity, discernment, respect for privacy, hotness - many are still unfamiliar with the work we do now.

We believe that understanding what those trained in library and information science do can help others in the interactive community work in partnership with us to reach a broader audience, particularly those who might not otherwise be reached. Who knows, you may get inspired to go to library school yourself.

Our panel today represents some of the spectrum of librarianship and a non-librarian who is creating bridges from the rest of the web world to libraries. My name is Dinah Sanders and I am the product manager for one of the world's the worldest most popular online library catalog solutions. For those who aren't familiar with the term, online catalogs are the web sites where all the work done by librarians in the background to identify and describe resources comes together with making them accessible to the library's patrons. If you've ever looked up a book on the web and made a hold request, or renewed a book online, you've used a product like the one I work on.

Elizabeth Lawley is currently a professor of Information Technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology, she worked as a librarian in the Library of Congress in a not-so-past life. Liz, could you talk for a couple minutes about your work and projects?...

Tanya Rabourn graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 1996 with a Masters in Library and Information Science specializing in digital resources and rare book librarianship. She has worked on several digital library projects with a number of research institutions including Columbia University and The New York Public Library. She is currently an Information Architect with MetLife. Tanya, how does being a librarian fit in with being an information architect?...

Representing special libraries, we have Cynthia Hill. She manages access to information and content via SunLibrary for Sun Microsystems, Inc. She also teaches Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. Cindy, tell us about being the librarian for a high tech company like Sun...

Jon Udell is an author, information architect, software developer and groupware evangelist. He was BYTE Magazine's editor-at-large, executive editor and web maven and he is currently lead analyst at InfoWorld. So where's the library in all that? Well, one of the very cool projects Jon did was a bookmarklet (or favelet, I am learning to say) called "Library Lookup". Jon, tell us about that project and your connection to libraries...

Thank you all. As you can see, librarianship covers a wide range of activies. Now I'd like to turn to the main question for our panel "How do you use the power of the network to create connections between resources which are inside libraries and those beyond?"...

One more question for the panel and then we'll open up the floor:
There have been some interesting developments in different parts of the world which relate to freedom of information and the average person's relationship with knowledge & learning.
Britain now has the goal of rapidly becoming the world's leading knowledge economy and is executing enormous projects to educate the entire population. In the United States privacy and freedom of access are hot issues in the face of the Patriot Act and other political changes. Could you each talk a little bit about how you view the future of librarianship and public use of information?...

Who has questions for us? Come on, we're librarians; we know how to find answers...

From the attendees perspective, you can read David Weinberger's notes on the session.

And found via the trackbacks to David's post, here's Jenny reacting to the panel via the discussion in her social network.

***

Oh and I just found some notes I scribbled down during the panel:

Liz: "Most people don't want to organize info, they want to create."

Libraries as Switzerland

Annotation as an overlay

SXSW 04: Panel notes for "Wireless Future Scenarios" 2004

Panel: David Isenberg of The SMART Letter and Derek Woodgate of The Futures Lab
Sunday March 14th

This was a rather dry panel and could have done with a little bit of introductory framework. Also they used some videos to try to get part of the message across, but they did not add value to the presentation - just bullet points with music & animation, no additional insight. If they were going to re-work it, I'd recommend transforming it into more of a roundtable discussion; since it's all speculation, get the audience involved in the speculating earlier in the session.

Notes:

isen.com

if you have the choice to do something in the middle or at the edge, do edge. = end-to-end principle.

Googan: the perfect network is perfectly income repellent (cited by isenberg & weinberger)
[They talked a lot about the conflict between consumer desire and current business models]

talking about rethinking the natural monopoly, what if the base layer was a utility? [I thought: and what if the library ran it?]

evaluating possibilities: function, benefits, drivers, delivery

any time, any place, any device

SXSW 04: Keynote with Eli and Zack from Moveon.org 2004

Sunday March 14th

It was a really good keynote, but I didn't take notes.

Molly Ivins introduced them and said that bad information "poisons the well of public debate", which seems like a good argument for getting more librarians involved in identifying good resouces. It may be time to do a joint project with Google and a bunch of library organizations.

They gave someone one minute of their keynote and it was an ideal choice. Teresa from Voter Virgin gave a great presentation. Check out her project, it's a very cool way to get more people interested in civic participation.

SXSW 04: Panel notes for "CSS: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" 2004

Panel: Brian Alvey of Weblogs Inc, Kimberly Blessing of AOL, Doug Bowman of Stop Design, Eric Meyer and moderated by Tantek Çelik
Monday, March 15th

Notes:

The Good:
Tantek: Start paying attention to CSS 2.1 Candidate Recommendation instead of CSS 2.0.

Tantek's slides for his great presentation:

- avoid hacks
- fewer is better
- further from content is better
--- clean content
--- clean style sheet
--- import style sheet with the hack

There are some great bookmarklets (a.k.a. favelets) out there to make your testing easier. Eric showed off some I really liked for adding styled borders to the tables and highlighting images without alt tags and things like that. Unfortunately, he didn't say or I didn't catch where he got them. They don't seem to be on his CSS reference page or part of Tantek's Favelet's page. Anyone know? (Yes, they're probably something I could figure out after a while how to make, but it'd be nice to have these examples I want to use to improve my CSS and then I can figure out how to do favelets for style changes later).

Someone, Eric or Brian I think, gave some nice examples of bad use of styles in lists where each entry in an unordered list with class="foo" has a class="bar" in its LI tag. You could just do
ul#foo li {style rules}
instead of having a "bar" style defined and having to declare the style in all those tags.

Someone said to assume that display:none will cause that element not to be read by many if not most screen readers. This makes Fahner Image Replacement a non-accessible solution.

Kimberly showed some very interesting things they're doing at AOL to make it easier for staff adding new content to insert it into the design without having to understand how to write clean CSS. She showed a very stylized grid of possible positions and sizes for content in the basic page layouts. Selection of a position seems to bring up an input box for the information (headline, image, main text, links for further info) which is then put into the template. Very clean and produces very consistent look & feel with a variety of folks doing the actual input. It reminds me of a more sophisticated version of the administrative interface SoftDevices made for Kevin Smokler's Central Booking site.

See also the much better notes from Matt May which were helpful to me in sorting out who said what in my brief notes.

SXSW 04: Notes from panel "Accessibility Is For Everybody" 2004

Panel: Wendy Chisholm of the W3C, Dr. John Slatin of University of Texas, Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path, and Sharron Rush of Knowbility moderating.
Saturday, March 13th

Notes:
[keyboard shortcut] access keys need consistency and need not to steal existing ones (recommend using 0-9 instead of alpha characters)

read article "Art of Alt"

wgbh has examples of inserted descriptive commentary in video

[Veen showed examples of sites making use of CSS]
stopdesign.com
wired news
cinnamon.nl
sprintpcs.com
view these with and without css [there are nice bookmarklets (a.k.a. favelets) to easily turn on and off CSS. I need to track one of these down. Probably via Doug Bowman or Tantek]
in newer and older browsers
and visit veen.com for these & other interesting examples

prioritizing incremental change:
home page navigation
most common tasks
test and find what are current problems (then prioritize those and grab low hanging fruit)
put good stuff into templates (and fix errors in templates)

accessify.com

Chisholm: simple way to [do a very rudimentary] test: just don't use your mouse

read new draft of next WCAG guidelines

freedomscientific.com - JAWS [accessible browser software which is expensive, but which you can get a sample of]

frames must have title labels which are meaningful to humans
and skip links to jump between frames