Here’s a little rundown of the panels I attended today:
Web Content Management Systems from a Designer's
Scott Fegette – Adobe
Chris Charlton - xtnd.us
I expect this will turn out to be the most useful of the panel discussions I will attend at the conference, mainly because it was of it’s relevancy to a project I am currently involved in and a particular problem we’ve been struggling to solve for weeks. Scott Fegette started things off by going over specific concerns to be addressed when designing for CMS. His talk included tips on handy Dreamweaver functions that are specific to the process - I’m particularly excited about trying out the ‘Use Generated Markup’ option.
Chris Charlton concluded the session with the more technical details, focusing specifically on designing for Drupal. He shared information about a slew of very useful tools including a free program called Drupal Theme Starter, available on xtnd.us (a quick GUI for generating .info files for Drupal) and a list of the specific Drupal files connected to the theming process. For additional details, check out the back channel.
How to Create Viral Video
Jonathan Wells - Flux
Margaret Gould Steward, User Experience Manager - YouTube
Jason Wishnow, Director of Film and Video - TED
Damian Kulash - OK Go
With memories of how flakey less-seasoned ‘experts’ can get when they start talking about what makes a video go viral, I have to admit had some reservations about this one. Thankfully they turned out to be unfounded. The session was full of simple, straight-to-the-point steps to take to ensure your content has the opportunity to go viral. The discussion by-passed low-brow ‘viral by accident’ content (e.g. Charlie bit my finger) and delved into the much broader market driven by people who ‘do viral video on purpose’. Tactics included: building your audience; enabling embed; using metadata; distributing on multiple fronts; leveraging ‘Superspreaders’; and exclusivity.
Damian Kulash of OK Go kept it cool by sharing his experiences producing music videos with his band. To finish off the session everyone was invited to participate in the shooting of a rip on the ‘Surprised Kitty’ viral video, ‘Surprised Audience.’ “Everyone remember, there are five, ‘Koochie, koochie koo!’s before, ‘You look like a little monkey’. Ready?”
Media Armageddon: What Happens When
Greg Beato – Reason Magazine
Markos Moulitsas – Daily Kos
Amy Langfield – NewYorkology LLC
David Carr – NY Times
Henry Copeland – Blogads.com
I was looking forward to this session as I’d attended a fabulous similar offering at a SIGGRAPH conference a few years back. When all is said and done, however, I don’t have much to say about this particular panel so I’m going to leave it there (it just didn’t have much to offer in the way of content). For information about traditional publishing media outlets transitioning to digital formats see remarks on, “New Publishing and Web Content” panel below.
Keynote address Danah Boyd - Privacy and Publicity
Danah Boyd is an eloquent and passionate speaker who really knows her stuff and I’m sure her presentation was more than appropriate for the majority in attendance. That said, I drifted a little during this one. Working in external relations in higher ed I am well acquainted with the multitude of privacy and ownership issues associated with publishing user-generated content. I hear about it every day, and I mean, every day.
New Publishing and Web Content
Erin Kissane – Incisive.nu
Jeffrey Zeldman – Happy Cog Studios
Lisa Holton – Fourth Story Media
Mandy Brown – Etsy
Paul Ford – Harper's Magazine
Someone on the back channel remarked that Jeffrey Zeldman should moderate every session at SXSWi. Agreed! Zeldman somehow managed to ensure this end of the day panel was paced for worn out conference goers. Quick and sharp enough to keep everyone engaged and relaxed enough to give tired brains a chance to process yet more information.
Most importantly, the discussion seemed to address all the right questions. Where the presenters in the ‘Media Armageddon’ discussion asked, ‘How many of you would pay to access the NYTimes online?’ and received a show of hesitant hands (in what appeared to be a room full of journalists). The presenters here asked, ‘How many of you would pay $3 to access the NYTimes online?' and were answered by a confident and positive response from those in attendance.
In this discussion the pros and cons of media publishing today basically stacked up like this:
Pro: It's a good time to start a publishing company. When you have an industry in the midst of change, opportunities for new models emerge.
Con: ‘It’s a terrible time to try to shoehorn existing content models into the web’. For existing models to exist they need to be open change. Paul Ford’s specific recommendation went a bit further to suggest, that publishers must first ask, ‘How do I serve and interact with people?’, then build publishing and editorial above the conclusions reached.
While I had witnessed the defensive side of this discussion earlier on in the day with one panelist simply seeming to insist traditional publishing models must be allowed to survive or accountability would be in retreat. The discussion here ended on a more pragmatic note to say that if everyone working at a newspaper looses their jobs because someone hasn’t figured it out yet, they will just go work for someone else who has. We don’t know what the future of publishing will look like, but it will come.
All in all, a pretty good day.
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