Speakers in the News »

1/06/06
JORY DES JARDINS

Jory Des Jardins

Blogher has announced their dates for 2006: this second annual gathering of female webbloggers will occur July 28 and 29 in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Blogher will have a big presence at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival, as organizers of the event have helped to put together several panel sessions including: "Increasing Women's Visibility on the Web: Whose Butt Should we be Kicking?," "Meet Judy Jetson: How Technology is Transforming 21st Century Teens," "Public Square or Private Club: Does Exclusivity Strengthen or Dilute?," "Respect Your ElderBloggers," and "We Got Naked, Now What?" Blogher organizers who will be speaking at this spring's SXSW include Elisa Camahort, Jory Des Jardins (pictured above) and Lisa Stone. Kudos to these three and the many other tech-savvy women who have helped increase the presence of female panelists at SXSW 2006.

11:58am CST | +

1/05/06
VINCE YOUNG

Who can even think about technology when everyone in Austin is still focused on Vince Young's absolutely amazing performance in leading Texas over USC in last night's thrilling Rose Bowl game. Members of the SXSW Interactive crew joined SXSW Film's Matt Dentler (above right) and Jarod Neece (above left) plus 150 of our closest friends to watch the game at local watering hole Tambaleo. Long live the Longhorn dynasty!

2:22pm CST | +

1/04/06
EVELYN RODRIGUEZ

Need a little reality check on real priorities for 2006? If so, then browse the insights of Evelyn Rodriguez, who recently returned to Thailand. She compares these experiences to those she had a year ago when she was a first-hand witness to the devastation of the tsunami: "Nothing outward bellows a New Year here in Phuket town as I sit in an Internet cafe where no one seems to speak a speck of English. Yet it does feel like a new year. Yesterday I happily (not guiltily as it was my first dip in the water since I arrived in Thailand) snorkeled off the very beach that almost swallowed me up. A new chapter begins. I leave you with a short New Year's (paraphrased) blessing that I'm passing on from a monk I met on Christmas Day: You can have anxiety or wonder in the face of the unknown. With loving-kindness for ourselves, we would make that choice easily. And another spoken from a true survivor as seen from the whiteboard of the Apache Bar on Phi Phi island: Enjoy your life, Anything can Happen." Rodriguez will talk about her experiences blogging about this disaster on the "We Got Naked, Now What?" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

10:59am CST | +

1/03/06
CURT CLONINGER

"Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground" author Curt Cloninger writes about one of our favorite topics in the current issue of the quarterly magazine "Intelligent Agent." He notes, "South by Southwest Interactive or SXSW Interactive, as it is more geekily known) is the Mecca of US blog culture . . . To give an idea of the level of blog activity at the conference, people were blogging their notes of the panel sessions in real time via wireless during the actual panel sessions. I spoke at the conference, and I was able to read online reviews of my talk within the day. By the second day, late-coming bloggers were quoting the previous day's bloggers in reference to my talk (meta-meta-commentary). More interestingly, the attendees weren't just blogging their opinions of the scheduled speakers. They were blogging about the evening awards ceremonies and the para-conference club events and their own personal dinner engagements and just walking around Austin. So far, so what? Bloggers regularly give multiple, iterative perspectives on common world events ad nauseam. Bloggers also regularly give personal, idiosyncratic coverage of their individual (and often banal) lives ad nauseam. In the first instance, there is a common event, but it's thrice- removed and heavily mediated before it ever reaches the average blog. In the second instance, a non-mediated, experientially immediate event is being covered, but it's nothing that the blogger has in common with anyone other than himself and maybe a few close friends. What makes the SXSW blogging phenomenon so unique is that it combines these two usually disparate aspects -- a common event with a first-hand experience." Cloninger will lead the "How to Maintain a Design Playground" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

10:09am CST | +

1/02/06
KHOI VINH

As announced on his blog subtraction.com, Khoi Vinh is leaving boutique design house Behavior LLC: "In a few weeks, I’ll be starting work at The New York Times as the Design Director for NYTimes.com. I’ll be heading up their staff of Web designers, helping to bring new improvements and features to the Gray Lady’s formidable online presence, and also working to define the role that design will play in the paper’s increasingly digital future . . . Ultimately I made up my mind that, for me at least, this was a golden opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. It’s certainly over-simplifying the story of how far Behavior has come to say this, but in my estimation, those events — while full of singular circumstances, extraordinary participation from my colleagues and tremendous strokes of good luck — are something I’ll be able to re-create at some point in the future if I ever want to return to the life of a design studio. On the other hand, the chance to help shape the design language at what remains, for all its imperfections, the most well-respected news organization in the world… that’s not something that falls into one’s lap with anything close to regularity." Vinh will be part of the "Traditional Design and New Technology" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.