Speakers in the News »

3/03/06
HEATHER ARMSTRONG

How passionate is the extensive audience that reads Heather Armstrong's blog dooce.com? On Monday of this week, she celebrated the fifth birthday of her site. To mark this anniversary, Armstrong's February 27 post explored the issue of working out of her home while raising her daughter. She writes, "The real crime here is not that educated women are choosing to stay at home with their children, it’s that many women who want to stay at home aren’t able to because of their circumstances. I know how lucky I am to have options. And it is in those options that I as a woman have power, power to choose the direction of my life, power to wave my middle finger at anyone who thinks it is their right, their moral compulsion, or their obligation to a seemingly fascist ideal to tell me how to live my life. What I want to know in comments is what did your mother do? Did your mother stay at home? Did she work? And how did you feel about what she did? If you could change anything about what she did what would that be? Also, what do you hope your daughters grow up to do?" Armstrong's questions have drawn a tremendous response -- at last count, this post had generated more than 1500 comments. She will talk more about the questions raised in this essay at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival when she participates in a special keynote conversation with Jason Kottke of Kottke.org on Sunday, March 12.

12:11am CST | +

3/02/06
KEITH ROBINSON

This time of the year, our SXSW e-mail inbox grows by leaps and bounds. Therefore, the recent essay in lifehacker.com about e-mail triage seems particularly relevant. Advises Keith Robinson, "The first action you should take is to clean up and clean out your inbox. You might be saying, 'But, Keith, I’ve got, like, 982 e-mails in there!' I know it can be a pain, I’ve been there, but it’s got to happen. Sort, respond to, delete, archive and/or file every single e-mail in your inbox. This’ll give you a clean slate to start with. Next you’ll want to create folders to help you sort and file new and future messages. There are lots of ways this can be done, and sometimes it takes some trial and error to get it right for you. It can also be tricky if you’re like me and have multiple addresses. What I do is have a top level folder for my each of my main alternate addresses. Within these folders I’ve got sub folders broken down various ways, depending on the needs of the address. These folders are for archival purposes only. I use them to store e-mail that doesn’t need action but may need reference. I then have two top level folders for things that may need action. A 'Waiting-Followup' folder for things I’m waiting on someone else for or things that aren’t urgent, and a 'Needs Response or Action' folder for things I need to respond to. I’ve got sub folders in these to split things up by e-mail address. I usually mark messages in my “Needs Response or Action” folder for an added reminder. So, once you’ve got folders set up to organize and archive your messages, and you’ve got a clean inbox, you simply need to establish a process and stick to it." If you think Robinson is organized with regards to his e-mail, just wait until you see how he pulls together a panel. At the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival, Robinson will lead "Design Eye for the List Guy" on Monday, March 14. This session is a followup to last year's "Design Eye for the Idea Guy," which was one of the most highly-rated panels from the 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival.

12:10am CST | +

3/01/06
ADAM GREENFIELD

Adam Greenfield, author of "Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing", explains the basic concept behind his new book in a fascinating interview on Boxes and Arrows: "'Everyware' is computing that is everywhere around us, yet is relatively hard to see, both literally and figuratively. Broadly speaking, it is what you get when you take the information processing we associate with the personal computer and distribute it throughout the environment—embedding it in walls, floors, appliances, lampposts, even clothing. I also use the word to refer to the relatively novel interface conventions everyware requires: gestural, tangible and haptic interfaces, and to some extent, voice recognition. The fact that it is so powerful—so insinuative and at the same time so hard to discern—makes it different in kind from the informatics we’ve grown so used to over the last twenty or twenty-five years of the PC era. 'Everyware' has a lot in common with the contemporary discourses of ubiquitous computing, so why coin an entirely new term? Each of the terms already in use—'ubicomp,' 'pervasive computing,' 'tangible media,' 'physical computing,' and so on—is contentious. They’re associated with one or another viewpoint, institution, funding source, or dominant personality. I wanted people relatively new to these ideas to be able to have a rough container for them, so they could be discussed without anyone getting bogged down in internecine definitional struggles, like 'such-and-such a system has a tangible interface, but isn’t really ubicomp.'" Hear Greenfield talk more about ubiquitous computing when he delivers a solo presentation on this topic at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival. Following this session, he will sign copies of the new book.

12:20am CST | +

2/28/06
DEREK FEATHERSTONE

Read the newly-published interview with Derek Featherstone on Digital Web Magazine. A leading advocate of accessibility, he tells the publication that much of his current focus is keeping up with the newest wave of web-based innovation: "My biggest challenge is to help make Web 2.0 applications more accessible. Because these applications are so new, there hasn’t been enough research into how they cooperate (or don’t) with assistive technology, nor has there been extensive testing with users to test out how some of the latest advancements behave. I hope in the short run to provide some (oh, I can’t believe I’m about to say this…) 'interim techniques' that help current applications be more accessible while we’re waiting for assistive technology, browsers and development techniques to catch up with each other." Fitting to this statement, Featherstone will be part of the Web 2.1: Making Web 2.0 Accessible panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

08:56am CST | +

2/27/06
MENA TROTT

The February 24 issue of BusinessWeek features "The Future of the Blog", an interview with Mena Trott of Six Apart. Asked what is the next big issue in blog design, she responds, "We'll focus on the idea of more select and filtered readership, and how to allow people to read certain posts. That to me is interesting: how different people want different views of the blog. A big issue right now is how to take that idea in account when designing blogs. Another new challenge is the trend toward adding a lot of assets. People are adding photos, video, and music to supplement the text. How do you make it possible for bloggers to present as much as they want to present without creating blogs that are too cluttered or confusing?" Trott will elaborate on these concerns when she participates on the "Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.