March 2011
20 posts
Everyone's a cheat. A little bit, at least
I think I misunderstood the nature of this event. When I read the title “Flexible morality of user engagement and user behaviour”, I thought it was referring to Guardian commenters. This, I thought, was the panel for me. As it turns out ‘users’ refers to all of us though, at least all of us who have been put under the observation of Dan Ariely.
Ariely is a behavioural economist who...
My Tabloid exposé
Errol Morris found the subject of his new documentary Tabloid in the pages of the Boston Globe. To British eyes the Globe is one of those American broadsheets that sticks obdurately to high-minded journalistic principles> Principles that are a world away from those of our much scorned British tabloids. Here’s a question though. Don’t get me wrong, principles are great and all, but...
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Music and hack days: Where the girls aren't?
A couple of notes to preface this entry: Firstly: I’m indebted to Jessica Hopper of Punk Planet, whose famous column “Emo: Where the girls aren’t” I’ve shamelessly plundered for this entry’s title Secondly: much greater minds than mine have written extensively on the subject of women in programming and I can only claim to be a mostly uninformed but interested...
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Tweeting On Weekends: Are We Becoming Socially...
For at least two years, my Twitter bio simply read “Shut up. You tweet too much”. While I may indeed be situated at the snarkier end of the web geek spectrum, it’s a motto I stand by. Twitter is a strong tool for communication and snappy messages, but with great power comes great responsibility. It was with this in mind that I made sure to sign up for the session on...
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Jeffrey Zeldman's Awesome Internet Design Panel...
Web standards pioneer and general icon of the internet Jeffrey Zeldman was one of the first names on my must-see list when skimming through the conference listings. His session this year was titled ‘Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Design Panel’ and the big man began by explaining that the SXSW people demanded he add an adjective to the title, hence ‘Awesome’. With...
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Keynote: Christopher "moot" Poole (13/03 @ 2PM)
A packed out Ballroom D was the scene for 4chan founder Christopher “moot” Poole, and despite a twenty minute delay, he was warmly received by a mix of delegates, most of whom looked like they’d never browsed 4chan before. Indeed, I had to give a BBC staffer sitting next to me a brief summary of the site, and warned him not too look too closely.
When moot finally took to the...
If you are broke, how to fix it?
A half-empty ballroom at the Hilton hotel was the venue for a discussion about the estimated 30m working Americans who can’t make their paycheques last to the end of the month. ‘The future of consumer lending’ paired a panel of entrepreneurs with chair, Paul Leonard, an advocate for responsible lending. The result was an hour that revealed shocking statistics about levels of...
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Some tips on iPhone app development from a random...
One of the coolest things about SXSW is bumping into random strangers and striking up interesting conversation. While grabbing a sandwich this morning I was joined by Jeremy Olson who shared my table. Jeremy introduced himself as an iPhone app developer and after a few minutes of back and forth about the relative merits of iPhone versus Android (I’m a Google man myself) Jeremy was showing me...
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The Politics Behind HTML5 (talk by panel, 13/03 @...
Another particularly technical talk aimed at web developers and specification nerds curious to know when the much-publicised HTML 5 will ever be finalised, and what it means for the web. Chaired by Charles McCathieNeville of Opera, John Foliot of Stanford University and Paul Cotton from Microsoft Canada, this talk promised not to answer questions on how to use HTML5 on your own website, but...
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Behind the Curtain: Secrets of Mobile Application...
Perhaps inevitably, I had to attend a session that just wasn’t all that. Unfortunately for Paul Gelb of Razorfish, that dubious honour was his. His talk sounded promising and I had visions of being told how to build the killer app I dream of, while at the same time conquering the embarrassing risk of only having three people download the damn thing.
Gelb broke out some interesting (if...
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Ordering Disorder: Grid Design for the New World...
As the New York Times’ Khoi Vinh acknowledges at the start of his packed-out talk, “thanks for coming to hear me talk about lining things up”. Grid systems are at the sexier end of the melting pot of glamour that is page layout, so it was unsurprising that enough attendees cared to fill up Ballroom A during lunch. Vinh’s talk in 2006 on the same subject was famous for its...
Drawing back the curtains on CSS implementation...
For my first real ‘technical’ talk of the conference I thought it would be appropriate to attend something somewhat relevant to my job. CSS, for those not of a web development background, stands for Cascading Style Sheet, and is basically the code a web developer writes to control the layout and formatting of a webpage. It’s more challenging than it sounds because different web...
I am aware
That Matt Andrews is writing all this great stuff about design and George Orwell and yet has the misfortune of having my face plonked next to his words. Apologies, Matt
How Print Design is the Future of Interaction...
Kicking things off bright and early on day two was Microsoft’s Creative Director for Windows Phone, Mike Kruzeniski, who was talking about the lessons learned from print design as interpreted digitally. This was the most populated talk I’ve seen so far, with the expansive Ballroom A packed out by a mix of graphic designers, interaction designers and general developers and tech...
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The Singularity is HERE (talk by Todd Marks, 11/03...
Conversations with a colleague back home first introduced me to the concept of ‘The Singularity’ via an essay by scifi hero Vernor Vinge. This promised to be a geekfest even by SXSW standards and I was fairly excited to hear about mankind’s impending doom at the merciless hands of steely cyborgs. For those not of the nerd persuasion, the singularity is essentially the...
Wordle of notes from talk on "The Singularity is...
Full review coming soon.
-Matt Andrews
Tale of two queues
Not so much a tale as a brief observation.
The first queue is one I spent half an hour in tonight, in the hope of seeing Source Code at the Paramount Theater on Congress Avenue. Sadly the time was wasted and the premiere of the kooky time travel drama went ahead without me.
The second queue was 100m down the road and quite noticeably longer. But while my line had lots of people in line hoping...
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Programming and Minimalism: Lessons from Orwell...
While my colleague Josh Halliday accurately described the title of this talk as ‘headline porn’, video encoding entrepreneur Jon Dahl’s SEO-baiting talk was actually a pretty well-constructed set of metaphors.
Dahl began by comparing the act of programming to music and art – a person has an interesting and simple idea, people build on it, build on it, build on it… then it...