Speakers in the News »

5/12/06
CHRIS WILSON

Can and will Microsoft help lead the push to embrace web standards? Absolutely, says Chris Wilson, the group program manager for Internet Explorer Platform
and Security at Microsoft. Writing on his blog, he is adamant about Redmond's support for such programs: "From ten years of experience in championing standards and web development inside Microsoft, I think it’s actually critically important that the reasons for supporting standards in our products – particularly IE – be business ones. Business reasons stand the test of time. Pure altruistic “ethical” reasons are hard to defend to shareholders. I personally believe there is a business case for implementing standards, and I consider it my job, among other things, to make that case internally . . .Yes, I have the power to enact change. Yes, I will continue to improve standards support and compliance in IE, and make the web better. That’s my job, my charter, my vision, and my passion. The day it isn’t, I’ll quit. The day the development of the standards-based platform in IE goes on a back burner again, I'll quit. My management up to and including Bill Gates has said we are back in the saddle with IE, so I have a job to get back to." Wilson spoke on the "WTF: WaSP Task Force Panel -- Getting the Job Done Right" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

10:34am CST | +

5/11/06
LIZA SABATER

Liza Sabater

More and more mainstream newspapers are adopting blogs as a way to keep their content relevant. Unfortunately, the transition from one media form to another is not necessarily without a few accidental slip-ups. And none of these slip-ups are more embarrassing than an incident at the nation's paper of record earlier this week. As described by the Online Journalism Review, "Daily Gotham publisher Liza Sabater discovered an unreleased New York politics blog being developed by the New York Times's website. How? The new blog includes a link to Sabater's site and she found it by checking her referrer logs. (If you publish a website, you *do* check your referrer logs on a daily basis, right?) But... The Times web staff did not configure its new blog, which apparently runs on the WordPress platform, to keep outside readers from claiming writing privileges. So Sabater was able to log in and post to the Times' blog. (She describes the incident in full on her CultureKitchen website. She posts it as a blind item, but the included screen shot makes quite clear that the site is the New York Times'.) 'You've overlooked what I would consider a huge detail in blog development : You never, ever leave the login permissions open while mired in testing and development,' Sabater wrote to The Times in a message she republished on her site." A prolific writer who also publishes Blog Sheroes as well as several other sites, Sabater spoke on the "Better Blogging Brainstorms" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

11:06am CST | +

5/10/06
DEREK POWAZEK

Good design is a lot more than just good design, writes Derek Powazek in an article on A List Apart: "It’s time we designers stop thinking of ourselves as merely pixel people, and start thinking of ourselves as the creators of experiences. And when it comes to experience on the web, there’s no better way to create it than to write, and write well. Let’s look at everybody’s favorite example of Doing it Right: Flickr. Ask a bunch of people what they think of their experience at Flickr and they’ll use words like 'fun' and 'friendly' to describe it. Why? There’s nothing uniquely fun about black text on a white background. There’s nothing friendly about uploading and tagging, no matter how many whiz-bang AJAX tricks you use. Sure, the photographic content lends itself to a personal experience. But nobody ever talked about how much fun Ofoto was. And the community-oriented social networking features lend themselves to an emotional experience, but I think there’s something more going on here. I say: It’s the writing. The friendliness comes from good old fashioned text. When you visit the site, it welcomes you with a random language. Hola! Salut! Shalom! When you log in, the button says 'Get in there; instead of 'Submit.' When you upload a photo, join a group, add a contact…all of the associated text is open, encouraging, happy, and excited. And it has a significant impact on the overall user experience." At the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival, Powazek lent his expertise to the "Bloggers in Love" panel.

10:31am CST | +

5/09/06
LIMOR FRIED

Annoyed by the ongoing cell phone conversation of that person sitting next to you at the restaurant? Then you need a nifty little device written about in today's installment of Popgadget: "Influenced by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby's 'Design Noir,' Limor Fried developed a cellphone jammer, as part of her masters thesis at MIT. (The other part was a pair of sunglasses that darken when in front of a television.) Using a "denial of service" hacker technique, her device bombards the immediate area with junk RF signals that interrupt cell phone communication. The low power jammer is pocket sized, has a range of about six feet, and is technically illegal to use." Jammer inventor Fried spoke on the "DIY Media: Consumer is the Producer" at this year's SXSW Interactive Festival.

10:39am CST | +

5/08/06
DANIEL GILBERT

The New York Times weighs in with a generally positive review of Stumbling on Happiness, the new book by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert. According to the write-up by Scott Stossel, "Gilbert's argument is the cognitive scientist's version of Freudian delusion, with faulty logic — rather than the hidden longings of the unconscious — causing us to misperceive reality, and make decisions that are not in our rational, happiness-maximizing interest. What gets us through life, evidently, is just the right amount of delusion — enough to fool us into feeling relatively good about ourselves (as in Lake Wobegon, we all believe ourselves to be above average; 90 percent of drivers certainly do), but not so much as to exceed our own credulity. 'If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we'd be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning,' Gilbert writes. 'But if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we'd be too deluded to find our slippers.' Can awareness of these cognitive mechanisms make us happier, or at least less deluded? Alas, not really. In fact, that's sort of Gilbert's point: imagination (or projecting ourselves into the future) ought to be the key to predicting what will make us happy, but we're incapable of imagining accurately." Gilbert gave a presentation about his new book at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.