posted by DL Byron on March 10 · Permalink
Jason and Jay are at SXSW Interactive this weekend talking blogs, Textura Design, and Hugger Industries. Jay’s got a power session on Monday and I’m here in Seattle working away launching new blogs and trying to get caught up on our client work.
With the two Js in Austin, it’s a good time to announce that behind the scenes, concurrent with our brand refresh, we’ve got a new design that refocuses Textura on an agency model.
That agency is less about me and more about being “a creative force specializing in business blogging for clients big and small.”
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posted by DL Byron on February 23 · Permalink
Where some businesses may opt for a jumbotron or network computers to see their manufacturing schedule at a glance, a couple whiteboards in a meeting room, or sheet after sheet of Project printouts taped to a wall, this company does it with a floor-to-ceiling wall of progress. Periodically, the dark-haired guy next to the plant climbs the ladder and moves arrows around the various levels. When asked about the wall, a salesperson said, “that’s just how we roll.”
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posted by DL Byron on January 28 · Permalink
In-progress and launched, Hugger Industries is the new headquarters for our blogging properties and consumer products: Snow Hugger, Bike Hugger, other huggers, Clip-n-Seal, and more unannounced products. Textura Design, Inc. (TDI) is refreshing into an agency that’s focused on blog consulting, books, and related instructional media.
At ten years old (and amazing that we’ve been around that long — word), Textura Design has split into two separate businesses: consulting and blogs. For a brief history of TDI, check the about page. Going into 2k7, we’ve staffed up with exceptional talent, and will have an incredibly busy year.
At SXSW 07 this year, we’ll chat the huggers up, talk more about the work we’re doing, and give big props to Coudal. Putting considerable thought into how to express our brand, what pure TDI is, Coudal told me, “celebrate the diversity, all that you do,” be a creative force, an agency.
Right on Jim. That’s exactly what we’re gonna do.
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posted by DL Byron on January 11 · Permalink
Considering all the the buzz and blog posts leading up to Apple’s iPhone announcement, the instant message conversations I was having discussed the lack of excitement about another mp3 phone. The larger problem to solve is taking your “home” folder with you and that’s what Apple has done. Just like iPod + iTunes solves the problem of managing music, the iPhone is designed to solve the problem of staying in sync. Fantastic. I posted about how I can’t wait to ride with an iPhone on Bike Hugger.
On spec alone, it looks like the iPhone is actually a smart phone (a laughable marketing term describing a windows OS-based phone, which is anything but smart). Reporting from Macworld, Glenn Fleishman has written a thorough first review of the iPhone, including an update that the iPhone won’t ship with an SDK and you can’t read docs on it.
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posted by Jason Swihart on December 04 · Permalink
I’m in Houston for the first part of this week to help Boeing and NASA at the second annual AIAA Space Exploration Conference. Over at Textura Skunkworks, we built us a plugin for Movable Type that turns it into an audience response engine, and now we’re on site helping audience participation go where no audience has gone before.
Shana Dale—deputy NASA administrator—who announced the new NASA moonbase architecture yesterday, keynotes this morning, and then we enter a two-day space geek-out. Should be fun!
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posted by DL Byron on November 26 · Permalink
Up next on my speaking schedule is Web Builder 2.0 in Vegas from December 4th to the 6th. Web Builder is a “technical conference for professionals building the next-generation of richly-interactive Web sites.” I’ll talk about business blogging and podcasting. What’s unique about Web Builder is that it offers Web 2.0 teachings for the entire team: developer, designer, web master and manager.
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posted by DL Byron on November 15 · Permalink
While in San Fran, I stayed at the Le Méridien and noticed the exceptional attention to detail, including the room key swipe card (shown in photo) that corresponded to a three-month-long light installation by Thierry Dreyfus.
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posted by DL Byron on November 09 · Permalink
The day after the Business Blogging Seminars on November 14th, join your fellow designers, developers, and programmers for the first-ever Movable Type Hack-a-thon.
On topic, at the seminar and hack-a-thon, will be the new Suite Two, an “enterprise platform for blogs, wikis, RSS feed reading, and RSS feed management.”
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posted by Scott Benish on October 16 · Permalink
As Byron prepares for Spain, I’m recovering and catching up from my trips to Colorado and Hollywood. Recent items of note:
FITC Hollywood was fun.
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posted by DL Byron on October 15 · Permalink
Amidsts all the social networks, YouTubes, and Web 2.0s is Petaline, a site “where you’ll find a collection of handmade art, design and craft products made by a variety of independent artisans for your home + lifestyle.” Nice, simple and an effective website where a business find treasures, sells them online, and communicates with a blog.
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posted by DL Byron on October 12 · Permalink
While much of our time here in the past few months has been spent on Intel’s blogs (and there’s more coming), we also worked on
On tap are even more blogs, a new book-related project, and more huggers.
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posted by DL Byron on October 10 · Permalink
The IT@Intel blog went live today. Much collaboration, design, code, meetings (lots of meetings) and thought went into the launch. Textura Design is very proud of the work, especially Scott and Mathew’s design/code, Tim Appnel’s programming, and Six Apart’s Movable Type Enterprise.
I’ll talk more about corporate blogging at upcoming events, including the Blog Business Summit, Six Apart’s seminars, Web Builder 2.0 and Web Design World Boston.
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posted by DL Byron on October 04 · Permalink
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the hard work, the promise of code, new ideas, or bloggy concepts, but man do I ever grow weary of betas. Beta this, beta that, delayed or not. It’s like as busy as everyone is, just tell me when it’s done, release it as a preview or whatever you want to call it. Beta as a term has lost any real meaning other than “work in progress, when we get to it, please indulge us, and give us your time.”
At least with Vox, they’re calling it a preview and I like checking it out cause it’s changing all the time — the preview is a constant iteration. For example, today, my login screens shows a Warhol like stack o’ C-3P0s.
And with Newsvine it was cool, cause you got to actually work on a mostly done product before anyone else. Like you were in a club with Mike D, not just featuring requesting and hoping your little peeve makes it into the build.
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posted by DL Byron on August 22 · Permalink
The details of the CSS changes in IE7 have been posted and that’s a “slew of” fixes. In other exciting browser news, see the 4th bullet on the recent webkit features lists that notes “much improved support for HTML editing.”
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posted by DL Byron on July 31 · Permalink
Worse than those, apply directly to your forehead (wash, rinses repeat 3 times) ads are those damn, obnoxious link ads by linksyngergy showing up on various websites, including macdailynews. Not only are they cluttering crap, but also are firing on irrelevant keywords. Let’s hope that either they go away soon or someone figures out how to block them directly in the browser. Specifically, these are the ads that hover on what appears to be link, but it’s not, it’s an ad and from Kontera. Tricking consumers, like with pop up windows, is never good, evil even.
As much criticism as I have for Google’s terribly executed web apps, they do have contextual text ads down.
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posted by DL Byron on July 06 · Permalink
I do dig Vox, it’s cool for social blogging and posting more random topics, but the UI is quickly approaching “whackness” and in danger of suffering from all the whizzy-whiz bangy that plagues Web 2.0. “Form, function, less is more,” even “getting real” all sums up my complaints when there’s so much to do on that cluttered UI. I can explore, compose, edit, join, invite, organize, design and well, geezus, I just want to post about Matt being Mac Book Man.
When I’m in that Vox interface, I imagine it was designed from a meeting room whiteboard that has a bunch of feature stickies plastered all over it and the meetings were like, “we could do this and this and that and wow this.” I’m sure there are thoughtful hard working designers toiling away on Vox and maybe their hopes for minimalism were sucked into the vortex of marketing and VC deliverables. Not sure, but I do hope in later revs to see way less on that screen.
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posted by DL Byron on March 10 · Permalink
While I’m at SXSW working the book, the crew is working on a redesign of the Clip-n-Seal website. The goal is to make it even freshier, updated, and of course sell more Clip-n-Seals! We’ll roll it out soon.
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posted by DL Byron on February 08 · Permalink
User Experience & Interaction Designer and blogger Jason Fields leads a discussion tonight about designing the next-generation of products at the IDSA LA chapter. Jason reviewed and became a fan Clip-n-Seal way early on, noting the study in minimalism.
My question to Jason is if he’s seeing the blog aesthetic in new consumer products. Just like the iMac affecting a whole range of products (including the Foreman Grill), are blogs having a similar affect? Are big fonts and mashupped text appearing in product packaging? Are product designer Getting Real with their goods?
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posted by DL Byron on January 26 · Permalink
Q/A with M. Morton during the virtual seminar
M. Morton
Andrea J.
Bill K.
Blogs I mentioned
Essentials of Business Blogging Seminar.
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posted by DL Byron on January 26 · Permalink
I’m speaking about business blogging today with Anil Dash and Paul Paul Rosenfeld during a MarketingPros Webinar. Anil is covering the technology, Paul a case study about Quickbooks Online Edition, and I’ll discuss design, creativity, and being crazy for the cupcakes cousin.
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posted by Scott Benish on January 19 · Permalink
BORN MAGAZINE : WINTER 2006 RELEASE
www.bornmagazine.org
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posted by DL Byron on January 16 · Permalink
My family surprised me with an iPod with Video on my birthday. Nice! So, I spent a good day discovering all I could do with it, including ripping a DVD and watching it on the iPod
The latest version of QuickTime has an export to iPod function to convert video, including your home movies, porn, or whatever you want. I’m also going to try out my presentations on my iPod and, at the least, use the iPod as a backup instead of burning CDs.
On video in iTunes, Frank Steele noticed that you can now stream video with iTunes. I tried it and it works, but only with video purchased from the Music Store.
Finally, for podcasting, if the formats are confusing, see audioblog’s new on-the-fly transcoding to iPod video format feature. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out why the pugcasts weren’t in a compatible format. It’d be real nice to not have to worry about any of that.
A quick chat with Mike D. and I learned that you can record from the Comcast HD box to your Powerbook and then, of course, to your iPod. See this tutorial from MacTeens.
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posted by on December 22 · Permalink
It’s a reflective time of year - when we look back over our lives the past year and think about what’s gone wrong, and what’s gone right.
For Boeing this year, a lot has gone right, as Randy Baseler recently wrote on his blog, Randy’s Journal. In particular - he was happy to report about his first year in the blogosphere:
Finally, for me, on top of all the highs of the year, and all of my travels, this has been the year of the blog. This little experiment - launched on the eve of the first flight of a superjumbo in France - has taken off in ways I don’t think any of us really expected. Over the past 11 months, we’ve had nearly 200,000 visits to this site, from blog readers around the globe.
You’ve certainly told me when you think we’re off-base. And your suggestions have made this a better blog. Many of you have cheered along as we made history with the 777-200LR, and the launch of the 747-8. Your thoughtful and intelligent comments and your continued interest in the world of commercial aviation are what sustain this Journal. And I can’t wait to see what the next year brings for blogging, aviation and Boeing.
Until then, I hope it’s a great holiday time for you, and we’ll have more fun discussions in 2006!
We would also like to wish you all a very happy holiday season.
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posted by Scott Benish on December 20 · Permalink
Byron just restored my username (lost in the big server switch) and I'm back for my bi-yearly post. This time with a bit of Born Magazine news:
Born's art director, Gabe Kean, witll be speaking at Flash Forward in Seattle on March 1st, 2006. Full details after the link...
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posted by on December 13 · Permalink
Boeing has changed the look of its site, getting rid of the old FLASH site and moving to an XML format that is much more standards compliant.
Said Boeing Web Designer Chris Brownrigg, “although not perfect, this redesign represents Boeing’s effort to highlight our products and services in a scalable, accessible and sophisticated format.”
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posted by DL Byron on November 04 · Permalink
The hive is abuzz after Molly and I had a sit down with Microsoft to talk about standards, their upcoming tools, and specific questions from Dave Shea about IE 7. As Molly noted, “Bridges have been built, and we at the hive are confident that we can continue to be an encouraging, supportive resource for Microsoft developers, no matter where their business strategy might lead.” We’ll meet again, live, on stage at SXSW the WaSP Task Force panel.
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posted by DL Byron on November 02 · Permalink
A day of contrasts with Microsoft: Molly and I meet with MS to discuss their new designer/developer products and at the same time Office Live is announced. After such a great meeting, I couldn’t bring myself to look at Office Live, expecting it to be, well, horrible. A see no evil approach, at least for today.
Where the team we’re meeting with is really doing good work with Standards, Ray Ozzie is announcing Sharepoint on the Web, all bCentral style, a small business portal document thingy. Wagstaff interviews Fried about Office Live and I wondered
I’m sure when Scoble’s blog is back up, a steady drumbeat will start about Office Live and how officey and live it is, while I bet most of us, would rather just log into Basecamp. As Jason said, “Simple tools that do a few things really well.” Not a bloated application, bloated even larger on the web.
Molly blogs the WaSP/MS meeting
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posted by DL Byron on October 13 · Permalink
Later this month, on October 29th, I'll speak about blog design at the Business Blogging 101 Seminar. Steve Broback, Molly E. Holzschlag, Robert Scoble, and Buzz Bruggeman will join me and we'll cover, "everything you need to know to get blogging now." The cost is $195.00 and you can register now.
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posted by DL Byron on October 04 · Permalink
View any of the Gap sites in Safari or any Apple browser for that matter and watch the bizarro loop happen. If you switch your user agent to force the site to think you're MSIE 6.0, you get in, though the layout is broken. This is the site that has been lauded in the tech press for coding some break-though, all-in-one page, e-commerce thingy. Their engine works great, if you can like get to it. The dangers of browser detection, redirection, and just plain stupid development have been discussed ad-nauseam for as long as I can remember. And this comes just when you'd think Standards-based design was making gains, as discussed on Robert's Talk.
Most interesting, is when the site launched a few weeks ago, you could get in, it worked OK, and it uses Standards-based design techniques. My guess is that the developers noticed, "hey this code is broken on Opera or whatever, " we've got to detect and redirect them away to another site with less of the million dollar code we just wrote. As flawed as that logic is, you don't actually go to another less Web 2.0, superfantastic site, but instead a loop of nothingness. Even worse is that dreaded, "your browser is not supported page," which is where the loop is probably trying to send you.
Part of what I lecture about at the Blog Business Summit is how Standards are built into blogging and the difference that makes to bloggers because they don't have to think about it; instead, just worry about all the content you're going to write. Standards matters now, more than ever, because of all the convergent/divergent devices that people are using to browse the web. There's absolutely no good reason to lock your code into one platform or browser. You can learn more about Standards and browsers at WaSP, A List Apart, and an An Event Apart.
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posted by DL Byron on September 19 · Permalink
inFlightHQ officially launched today and props are in order
inFlightHQ is part of our small network
Note: more than 3 blogs make it’s a network …
inFlightHQ has been soft-launced for a while, like an ever-present beta, and Gadling noticed, as well as Fast Company Now.
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posted by DL Byron on September 16 · Permalink
There couldn’t have been a more eloquent follow up to my Microsoft and the iPod Nano post. The reports from the PDC and then BusinessWeek’s Troubling Exits At Microsoft that asks, “anyone listening?”
My car was being serviced at a Bellevue dealership, that’s Microsoft country, and the dealership shuttle driver asked if I was Microsoft. That started a conversation that eventually concluded with the driver telling me that there’s a darkness over the Microsoft employees shuttled around everyday from the dealership to the Redmond campus and back.
The driver got a bit spiritual and went on to say that there’s a real disconnect between the passion of the employees and the bureaucratic managers. “The lifeforce, down in the gut, can’t make it up to the brains that are driving the company. So that creativity is lost in the fat of the company.” She went on to describe a few lost souls that were so tied into the trappings of Microsoft that she was sad for them. They’d told her they really wanted to be someone else, but were lured into the opportunity that Microsoft presents.
Microsoft certainly does present opportunities with incredibly smart people, but then you read a quote like this from the chair-throwing Ballmer
“We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web.”
That statement has already been parsed by Molly and she responded with a fiery post and I agree with her, “No Mr. Ballmer, you will never win the Web for one very good reason: We the people will make sure you never do.”
When the shuttle driver asked me if I was Microsoft, I said, “No. I did my time there and I think it’s better for me to be a voice that isn’t Microsoft.” To do my part, with Molly, to make sure Ballmer never wins the Web. I also remembered Riding With Asp.Net and meeting Eilon and the goodwill with Microsoft. It’s just getting harder.
Todd Bishop reports on the reaction to the BusinessWeek article, including quotes from Scoble, and “Microsoft’s Deep Throat”
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posted by DL Byron on September 12 · Permalink
After reading the Time article about how Apple made the ipod Nano and this quote
What's really been great for us is the iPod has been a chance to apply Apple's incredibly innovative engineering in an area where we don't have a 5%-operating-system-market-share glass ceiling," Jobs says. "And look at what's happened. That same innovation, that same engineering, that same talent applied where we don't run up against the fact that Microsoft got this monopoly, and boom! We have 75% market share."
I thought that Microsoft should issue all of its employees a Nano and then have them report back a week later on why they can't make a product like that. Microsoft has the funds, the smarts, but the creativity is burdened by the weight of their monopoly. That's never been more evident than with the Nano. You go MS with another bloated Word feature, while the world embraces the modernism, the simplicity, form and function of the Nano. Even a post a day from Scoble can't get the sales figures up on Tablet PCs. And tell me again that design doesn't matter. 75% market share based on best-in-class design proves that claim wrong.
Another quote to pull from the Time article is this one about how Apple replaced a hit product only 11 months into its life cycle.
It was a gutsy play, and it came from the gut: unlike almost any other high-tech company, Apple refuses to run its decisions by focus groups.
Coincidentally, I just finished reading the Brand Gap. It's a great book that talks about bridging the distance between business strategy and design and doing some of that with focus groups. Apple dispenses focus groups for guts, intuition, determination, and a small team. Makes you wonder how focused grouped Tablet PCs, Windows Vista, and more are.
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posted by DL Byron on August 17 · Permalink
I'm at the Blog Business Summit this week talking about design, selling products, and blog engines.
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posted by DL Byron on August 12 · Permalink
Going into the Blog Business Summit next week, a few full-circles are worth noting
And a few more topics
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posted by DL Byron on July 22 · Permalink
Born Magazine's Summer 2005 issue is up at: www.bornmagazine.org. Lots of great stuff in this issue.
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posted by DL Byron on July 19 · Permalink
I speak this morning about blog design at Web Design World Seattle and then will join my fellow bloggers on the Stratoblog for the Blogging the Stratosphere event. The event is an exclusive flight onboard Connexion One, a Boeing 737-400 used to demonstrate the Connexion by Boeing signature high-speed in-flight Internet service.
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posted by DL Byron on July 14 · Permalink
I meet Eilon, an asp.net developer, on a bike ride yesterday. Funny sometimes how small this world is. I flatted and he stopped to help. We started talking and waddya know, it lead to Internet Explorer, Web Standards, WaSP, tabbed browsing, and geek talk. I've been chatting and meeting with his bosses to collaborate with Microsoft to promote web standards.
Nice guy and good to continue the goodwill with Microsoft. I also noted, how he we stayed wheel to wheel, up the climbs and on the trail.
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posted by DL Byron on July 11 · Permalink
Anticipating the Blogging the Stratosphere event next week, I updated the Stratoblog with participants, Technorati Tags, and a trackback ping page. The event is an exclusive flight onboard Connexion One, a Boeing 737-400 used to demonstrate the Connexion by Boeing signature high-speed in-flight Internet service.
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posted by DL Byron on July 11 · Permalink
The embrace and extend term didn’t go unmentioned when Microsoft announced its support for RSS. While you didn’t hear much of it from the RSS Lovefest that was Gnomedex, it was quickly added to the WikiPedia, moved up in Google, and the Register. Today, the PI reports on how MS employees are creating podcasts and calling them blogcasts to avoid mentioning Apple’s iPod.
When Wired published Hide Your IPod, Here Comes Bill , you could read about an MS culture clash, lead, in part, by Scoble who responded to the Wired article by proclaiming, “I’m not supposed to have an iPod? Hogwash!” In that post, Scoble says, “I think it’s a positive thing to study your competitors and figure out what they’ve done well and look at what you aren’t doing well and improve it.” Exactly and that follows the changes in communication that Scoble and Shel are writing about in Naked Conversations. Then how does renaming pop technoculture, or creating a nonApple umbrella brand called Plays for Sure (everything but Apple), to suit your business do that? It doesn’t.
Eric Rice chatted with me about this topic today and said that, if given an opportunity to start over with a name, he’d call it “spacecasting.” On Pug Blog, we call it “pugcasting,” as a dog joke and on the Stratoblog we’ll call it “stratocasting.” Unfortunately, it’s too late for a better name for “podcasting and when Microsoft bloggers do it, just to not mention iPods, they’re bullying the blogosphere. Embrace and extend is their own blog burden to bear and they should know that.
While Scoble leads the charge of the blog brigade at Microsoft, it’s apparent there’s dissension in the troops and an underlying idignant “not invented here.” Is Microsoft listening to Scoble or just to themselves? Scoble and more Microsoft bloggers will be at the next Blog Business Summit and this topic is sure to come up.
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posted by DL Byron on July 07 · Permalink
The Pottery Barn spams me. Like everyone else, I get spam everyday. The difference with Pottery Barn is I wondered why a company that wins awards for their branding is spamming me and why don't they stop.
The number one bullet item on the next Brand and Position PowerPoint presentation Pottery Barn executives see from their PR firm should be, "don't spam" and then "check yourself on Google." Why? See Dell, Travelocity, and more who discover (or are clueless) that their customers hate them.
What annoyed me the most is that I went as far as calling Customer Care and said, "take me off your list." I'm sure customer care lady just said yes and it ended there. I also "unsubscribed" just to see what that would do and nothing, just more summer glassware sale emails.
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posted by DL Byron on July 05 · Permalink
Webvisions 2005 is next week and I'll be speaking about blogging and convergence and digital devices, which is the theme of the event
Join the giants of the Web world to explore the future of design, content creation, technology and business strategy. From podcasting to universal usability, you'll discover how the Web is interacting with digital devices to change the way we communicate, access information and do business.
Webvisions rocked last year, with huge crowds, a good vibe, and a stellar lineup.
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posted by DL Byron on July 05 · Permalink
WaSP formally announced a collaboration with Microsoft to promote Web standards and help developers build standards conformant Web applications. WaSP’s goal is to provide technical guidance and advice as the company increases Web standards support in its products including Microsoft Visual Studio and ASP.NET. There’s an official press release and Molly is accepting comments and trackbacks on her blog.
As a member of WaSP and the Task Force, I can say much work has gone into the announcement and there’s more to come. The Task Force and our new relationship with Microsoft came out of SXSW, as blogged by Scoble. At SXSW, Scoble felt snubbed (he wasn’t), excluded and surprised by the Acid Test, and from there we emailed, flamed, posted, argued, calmed down and then starting talking productively. I had lunch a few weeks ago with members of the IE team and can say that as passionate as WaSP is, if Microsoft wasn’t serious and genuine, we wouldn’t be talking and working together. They are, we are, and it’s going to make a difference in developing standards conformant Web applications.
As we’ve seen with blogging applications, the real growth in Standards-based design, besides all of us that toil by hand, is in the tools.
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posted by DL Byron on June 30 · Permalink
I’d been joking for months in IM convos about a new macroformat, Porno Markup Language, or pml, and DaveZilla posted on it today. Dave riffed on the joke and wrote the faux spec. Responding quickly, DantedCubed, offered some compliant code.
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posted by DL Byron on June 20 · Permalink
Damian Conrad - the man behind the Clip-n-Seal photos - emailed me last month and inquired about adding a blog to a site of his. Well, the Textura Design team is no stranger to blogs and in short order we put together the recently launched Haydn Student Trumpets Blog.
We advised that one of the best ways to gain an audience is to post frequently and provide high quality content that people will enjoy. He's already off to an impressive start and hopefully trumpeters around the web will quickly discover this great new resource.
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posted by DL Byron on June 15 · Permalink
A few minutes outside of the Montrose Airport, driving past strip malls, I spotted the Happy Penis logo and didn’t stop to take a photo. On the way back, I insisted we stop, did a quick u-turn, and shot it.
I missed the judging for B3TA’s Phallic Logo Awards, but think the Happy Penis may have won. It was awesome at full neon road-sign size. The reader board next to the logo said, “Dinner Smothered Pork Chops,” which seemed appropriate.
MSNBC recommended Starvin’s earlier this year, but failed to mention the attention-grabbing logo. Same thing with TruckerPhoto.com, who raved about the found.
Side note, Tom the Trucker offers full-on blogging with trip reports, photos, and podcasts.
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posted by DL Byron on June 08 · Permalink
I posted the slides from my keynote in Colorado to sampleblog.com, a blog we created just for presentations and lectures. I'll also photo blog there with more on Telluride, riding at 10K feet, and the gondola ride.
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posted by DL Byron on June 06 · Permalink
The next Blog Business Summit will be in San Francisco, August 17 - 19. A Blogging 101 seminar has been added to the event. The speakers and sessions will be announced as soon as they're finalized. I'll be speaking about design, blogging business, and just hanging out in San Fran.
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posted by DL Byron on May 31 · Permalink
Next week I'll be in Telluride, Colorado keynoting the Annual Meeting of the Colorado Ski Country. I'll discuss 11 years of the web, where it's been, where it's going, and why blogging matters. I'll also cover how blogs are changing business and the way we communicate.
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posted by DL Byron on May 21 · Permalink
I spoke at the AIGA Currents9 Influenced conference yesterday and created a sample blog for the event. It's appropriately called, "Sample Blog," and includes slides and links on Blogging your portfolio and Designing with standards. The blog was created in part to show how quickly you can start blogging and as a blogging sand box, where I'll sample various blogging technologies, memes, and more.
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posted by DL Byron on May 17 · Permalink
I'll be speaking about Standards-based design and blogging this friday at the AIGA's Currents9 event. The organizers have put together an impressive schedule. I'll have Clip-n-Seal samples and deals on Photoshop training DVDs with me. Please say hello and I'll see you there.
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posted by DL Byron on May 10 · Permalink
Apple’s Dashboard and widget’s may prove to be even more important to computing and design than Spotlight. I saw it this morning, when my daughter checked the weather widget to plan what to wear for the day. She also clicked around on a few others, including the time and creatures in my head. With widgets, all those little computer utilities are in one convenient place. That’s not a new concept, a desktop portal, but I think for the kids, it’s just click on this icon, and another, get what you want, and go about the rest of your day. There's a change in how we access information. It’s going to desktop portals and search and that’s going to impact the way designers think about information architecture, user experience, and design.
An example of this change in thinking is 37 Signal’s Backpack, a great new web-based PIM. I tried it out last week, clicked around for a few, and then thought that all of the meetings where I would use it are with clients and I don’t have access to the internet when I’m on site with them. A Backpack widget that I could use offline, then upload and share when connected would help me with clients, in meetings, and on the plane. Even better if that widget could be synced and Spotlighted. Then I wouldn’t have to search the Backpack site for my meeting notes, but could Spotlight them. Discussing this topic with me in an instant message, Nick Finck said, “information is going towards microinformation … when we want to know what something is we don’t want to have to dig through a whole encyclopedia. we just want the short 2 sentence result.” Right. Check the Web 2.0 article on Digital Web.
Note, Backpack is a great product that users are raving about. My thoughts aren’t intended to point out any defect in their product, but instead are forward looking. I’m also thinking about blog design in the same way. Will users want to click through your blog, it’s categories and permalinks, or just search for topics. Clip-n-Seal is included in a chapter of Scoble and Shel Israel’s blogging book and I can’t find it on their book blog. The chapter was there last week and it’s somewhere now, but it would be nice if I could search that site, rather than click through every page. When Spotlight is extended to RSS then we’ll really have something. As Nick continued, “imagine… search: kottke, independent … 6,200 results, here are the top 5 most popular ones verified and 1 through 3 are emails between you and him about it.. maybe 4 is a paypal receipt of the money you sent him.. and 5 is the original post he made on his blog about it.”
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posted by DL Byron on April 21 · Permalink
Lucky I didn’t delete the email from Right Brain Terrain in my spam filter, ‘cause they’re selling Alternative Motivational Posters (AMP) that do good for the creative types in the office. There’s no guy leaping a dangerous gorge or soaring eagle imagery in these posters. Instead beautiful, poetic, design that’s coming from people that obviously love what they’re doing. Scroll through their blog and find a collection of designy sites that have linked and posted on them as well. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but I think we could say that Clip-n-Seal is an “Alternative Bag Clip.”
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posted by DL Byron on April 20 · Permalink
One of my favorite passages from the La Vida Robot story I blogged about a couple weeks ago:
"Why don't you have a PowerPoint display?" he asked.
"PowerPoint is a distraction," Cristian replied. "People use it when they don't know what to say."
"And you know what to say?"
"Yes, sir."
I wonder if Cristian is a fan of Tufte?
That's not to say that you can't do good or interesting things with PowerPoint, but I wish more people saw it as the crutch that it is.
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posted by DL Byron on April 13 · Permalink
In another example of why I design, develop, and test for Internet Explorer last, Dave Hyatt responds to the release of the Acid2 Test by jumping right in, testing his browser, and blogging the whole process. Compare to that to Scoble’s initial response and the lack of any word yet from Microsoft and you can nearly conclude that MS just doesn’t care. I say nearly because Scoble has been working on connecting WaSP and the IE team, but soon the time will come when the creative professionals and developers may say, “put up or shut up.”
The reasons to speculate on why MS doesn’t care are endless. They’re not cool, there’s no money in Standards, they’re too big, security, etc. What I’ve concluded is that IE is a huge dev time suck and I’m not alone. My clients feel the same way. Early this year, we delivered a project that was spec'd specifically for Firefox and not IE. One client emailed
"I'm a Mozilla convert. Not that I liked IE that much anyway, but I really dig Mozilla. If it only worked for MS active-x crap then I could ditch IE all together."
It’s guaranteed in a project that IE will be the most troublesome to deal with and you can find comments in code like:
And those comments are rather tame. View source on sites and you'll find worse. Talented and smart developers work at MS and updates to their dev products are expected to improve standards support. Those guys, including Robert get it, but IE is still their Achilles’ heel. Our struggles are nothing to compared to what I expect a software company, especially Microsoft, must have when dealing with IE.
Congrats to Dave Hyatt and the community for a positive response to the Acid2 Test. Microsoft, you're up next. Robert and all of us have done our part. The time is now.
For more on Acid2 Test, see the WaSP press release. Also note that I'm a member of WaSP.
Dave Hyatt's has nearly completed the test and Dean Edwards is tracking it on his site and predicting a horse race. Mozilla is tracking and discussing Acid2 on Bugzilla.
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posted by DL Byron on April 11 · Permalink
Here are slides for the 21 Century Coaching SIG seminar today
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posted by DL Byron on April 07 · Permalink
I've been working with a company on their business blog and we soft launched it earlier this week. An email quickly came in wondering why code shows up in the browser when you click on a newsfeed link. The discussion continued to orange buttons and I explained that there''s more to the orange button than a pretty button.
By using a text link instead of a button you call less attention to a geek feature and still meet the needs of advanced users. You can link to a what's a feed page or use Feedburner, which preprocesses the feed into html. You also stay neutral on a standards debate and offer all syndication forms. Considering a broader audience on a business blog, it's better to not call a reader's attention to a shiny button that'll just confuse them.
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posted by DL Byron on April 05 · Permalink
There's a great story in this month's Wired about 4 immigrant kids from Phoenix who beat a team from M.I.T. (and everyone else) at the national underwater bot championship.
I thought is was a great story - funny, heartwarming and inspirational - and I dropped Joshua Davis (the author) an email to let him know how much I enjoyed it.
Josh told me the teachers have set up a scholarship fund for the kids. I happily donated some money and humbly suggest you 1) read the story, 2) donate and 3) spread the word: La Vida Robot Scholarship.
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posted by DL Byron on March 22 · Permalink
I've been speaking lately, on the road, with more gigs coming up. Following the SXSW Panel, which rocked, yesterday's session didn't go so well. I didn't feel that I was connecting with the crowd and figured it out 1/2 way through when an audience member said, "what's RSS, what's a podcast . . . I'm lost." And damn, there it was, the session was going over their heads. Molly will speak today on the How/Why of Blogging and that session should've come first in the schedule. It was my mistake to be so involved in blogging that I forget to go over the basics. I also learned to be ready with the soft shoe, a little time-stretching entertainment, to keep a presentation going, when the crowd response is flat. Some humor and a good laugh could help.
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posted by DL Byron on March 22 · Permalink
As noted during my Web Design World presentation, we're going to build the CS Tutorials Blog live during the next few weeks. You're welcome to tune in and see how it evolves from the standard Movable Type template to this comp. For more on the presentation, see the slides.
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posted by DL Byron on March 22 · Permalink
I've been a skeptic of podcasts, as yet another meme to pay attention to and if it would actually take off. When speaking and evangelizing, I'm reminded constantly of how small blogging actually is. I just spoke to a crowd at Web Design World and 1/2 of them had little idea of business blogging or blogging in general. We're making progress, as noted by all the recent press, but it's not as mainstream as we hope. RSS and Podcasts are even smaller.
Today, the news broke that Warner Brothers is sponsoring the Eric Rice show. That's Warner fucking Brothers. Eric is on a mission to change the world with podcasts, even if a little, and that's a big win. I expect more sponsors to follow.
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posted by DL Byron on March 14 · Permalink
I was flattered and a bit concerned about seeing Zeldman, stage left, 3rd row back, sitting directly in front of me at the SXSW Panel. I thought, at any moment, he could make a face, mouth the words, "assface" or "Madonna's cone bra," or something, and totally crack me up. So, I reminded myself, "do not look at Zeldman." Later, once the panel had a good groove going, I did catch a smile and a nod from Z-man and thought, "Cool. This is going well." Highlights for me from the panel were asking Scoble who designed his site and Jason's insistence that you drop the f-bomb on your business blog. (SXSW)
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posted by DL Byron on March 13 · Permalink
Malcom Gladwell’s keynote was pretty good. He had some interesting things to say and was a good speaker (animated, engaging, funny).
I understand why he spoke at SXSW (as the introducer said, interweb geeks are in to his stuff), but I was left thinking: where do we go from here? How do we apply these ideas (snap judgements & how/when they are good and/or bad) to the stuff we’re doing? Or, what I’m doing (mostly designing web sites, CD-ROMs and web applications).
People make snap judgements - sometime good, sometimes bad, but they happen nonetheless. OK - fair enough. So, maybe we can follow that idea and say people make snap judgements when they first look at a web site. Let’s say that they not only make these judgements about the web site, but about the company, and it’s products or services. This is a theory I’ve espoused to clients for awhile. Your web site can’t suck because it’s a reflection of your company/organization. Sort of a no-brainer.
And assuming this hypothesis is true: so what? What can we do about that? Well, we can make sure that sites are well designed. But we’re already trying to do that, so I’m not sure there is anything new here.
Then there is the idea that sometimes people make better decisions with less information. Maybe you can boil that down to: less clutter (information), more clarity. Again, not an unfamiliar idea. But when does this apply and when doesn’t it? Good designers already advocate reducing unnecessary information - the question becomes: which things can we get rid of. That is a very difficult question. Clients always want to add more stuff, include everything they can (“It’s the web, we can put everything up there!”)
Knowing that less information can be better is one thing, being able to determine which is the important stuff is quite another. And my sense is the answer is never quite the same.
In the example of the doctors who more accurately diagnose heart attacks with only 4 key pieces of information, it took extensive research to figure that out. I haven’t read Blink, so I don’t know if there are other examples where the solutions were a little easier to get to. In the interactive world do we have the time, money, desire and patience to do a bunch of research about how removing seemingly necessary things might help improve a web site? (“Seemingly necessary” being the key phrase there - this assumes that we’ve already gotten rid of all the obvious cruft.)
I know most (all?) of my projects don’t have the resources to chase such an elusive, uncertain goal. What if we do all that work and simply discover that there is no way to improve on what we already have? Or what if the results show that different people respond drastically different to various things? People process things differently and look for different things, how do you serve all those needs elegantly? With so many variables at play, is it even worth the risk?
Gladwell is clearly a thinker, and he has great stories, but to what end? Can we connect the dots and forge some insight? Can these ideas actually improve the way things are done in the interactive world?
I obviously don’t have the answers and I’d be curious to see if anyone has any thoughts on this. It’d be nice to come away with something more than “Huh, interesting stories.”
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posted by DL Byron on March 13 · Permalink
Just finished the How to Build Your Brand with Blogs Panel and think it went really well. I posted the slides. Check the last slide for resources.
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posted by DL Byron on March 10 · Permalink
In 16 hours I leave for Austin. Byron and I will kick it, SxSW style, and I'll be on a panel this Saturday called How to Foster New Culture Online. Also on the panel:
We'll talk about art, culture, community, media, etc. Or some subset of that. Or things related to those. So far we've kicked a lot of ideas around via email and once we meet face to face we'll decide which topics hold the most potential for a kick ass panel.
In 2000 I went to SxSW for the first time. I flew out a couple hours after finishing a piece I did for Born Magazine. Five years later, I return to Austin to talk about art, culture, the interweb and all that is good (or bad) about those things.
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posted by DL Byron on March 09 · Permalink
This weekend I’ll fly to Austin for SXSW Interactive and moderate a panel on, “How to Build Your Brand with Blogs” Joining me will be
I’m just getting caught up on the SXSW Blog, all the parties, and figuring out what to do. I’ll miss Zeldman’s Opening Remarks, but will maybe he’ll offer a dramatic re-enactment later at the New Riders Vox Nox Party.
When asked about SXSW, I always say, “It’s an event that builds partying into the schedule. You can’t front on that.”
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posted by DL Byron on February 20 · Permalink
The persistent, self-obsessed, blog-ethics hand-wringing continues (we’re about due for a Calacanis rant on this) this week with a somewhat rambling and derivative article from JD Lasica’s that concludes, “Just don’t call yourself a journalist when you’re cashing that check.” Dear J.D., “I’m not a journalist. Nor do I play on one TV.” This call for credibility and ethics criticism seems to always come from the journalist side of blogging, a side that is coincidentally under attack from the blogopshere. Another volley in that attack occurred this week with Jeff Gannon, a Blog Cabin Republican, being outed as a fake reporter and gay porn star. I hope JD et al watches the Daily Show’s take on blogging and hears Steve Colbert say, “They have no credibility, all they have is facts.”
What I wonder, considering business blogging and ethics, is when will a company get taken down by the blogosphere? Will the next Enron be exposed by corporatecorruption.com? Possibly, but until then, companies will hopefully learn from the blogosphere and not publish sites like Wal-Mart facts.
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posted by DL Byron on February 20 · Permalink
Earlier in the week, a request came for Marqui to, "find some leads," and I responded
"And there's the thing. I think if Marqui had a blogging component, the referrals would roll in. Businesses want to talk to me about blogging, not CMS, but then blogging is a CMS, but Marqui is not a blog engine (an enigma wrapped inside a riddle). So, roll out the Marqui Blogging Module, using an API and phat referrals, at least from me, are more likely. What's missing in the corporate blog install and what comes up in every convo I have with business, is how to manage all of that blogging. There's no managed communication workflow with a blog. Incredibly simple publishing yes, but nothing is managed."
Well, the emails flowed for a while after that and the next day the PI ran a story in their VC notebook on corporate blogging and a product called Blog Unit, which is not to be confused with the blogging subsidiary of the G-Unit -- note to marketing departments, I wouldn't market any product with "Unit" in the name, as those gangstas are very likely to kick your VC-funded, white, geeky ass. An interesting aside on the article, check the blogging Nexus: GM, Boeing, Sun, Clip-n-Seal, Scoble, Anil Dash and more.
The Blog Unit offers controlled blogging and most be targeted to the clueless Vice President of Stupidness, much like the Ministry of Silly Walks. When I said managed, I meant, fit into your campaigns, or communications channel, or editorial schedule -- that's what Marqui does. You can not and should not control blogging. Marqui is addressing their blogging component and is promising a response. At the least, as the Head Lemur noted, their system should publish an RSS feed.
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posted by DL Byron on February 15 · Permalink
And he said so 15 times. I just noticed that in my RSS reader. Nick had complained about link and photo RSS feeds earlier in the week with his post, Show me the content! I like Eric, he’s a rockstar pimp, I'm sure his friend George pictured in that photo is cool, and I set all of Eric's links to rel=”follow”, but I don’t really need to know that he’s posted 15 photos a day. I hadn’t yet ripped on del.ici.ous, but there’s another example of a time suck. Social bookmarking and photo sharing ceases to be fun, when it sucks up bandwidth and is post after post of, “cool link,” or “me with this other blogger.”
If you want to post away on that, cool with me, I'm just not sure there's value in that for an RSS feed. At least, give your subscribers a choice and that's got to be the next feature blogs need to offer: Custom RSS feeds (see Apple's example). Pick and choose from what you want on the site. Like for Scoble, I can filter out all of the nonstop Tablet PC plug posts, or not get Eric's Daily photo, or read just what Zeldman thinks is cool for the day and not ALA posts, etc.
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posted by DL Byron on February 11 · Permalink
The Lincoln Bicentennial site is up and powered by Marqui. I was interested in the site, to check Marqui’s code, and see what their system is outputting. For a company that gets blogging and the blogosphere, they sure don’t get Standards-based design or valid code. I’m normally not a standards-nazi, but viewed the source and checked the validation. A note to Marqui’s developers, just because you declare an XHTML document type, doesn’t mean the document is. I can excuse using tables for layout, ok, probably banged it out quickly, but the lack of character encoding, mixed tags, and more is just plain sloppy.
While Marqui maybe helping their client to educate the public about Abraham Lincoln’s accomplishments, they’re certainly not doing anything for them with that code.
I've been evangelizing Standards-based design for years and sites like that just make me sigh. What are we not doing as evangelists to get the word out to a CMS developer that character encoding is important?
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posted by DL Byron on February 08 · Permalink
Almost 3 years ago a friend forwarded me a job posting from a Seattle based freelance list. The posting was from Byron, and he was looking for some Flash help. We ended up doing that project, then many more (launching Clip-n-Seal, doing the web site for the Blog Business Summit and a bunch of other things).
The friend that forwarded me Byron's email that fateful day was Gabe Kean, so it seems appropriate to post a recent message from Gabe here:
"The volunteers and staff of Born thank you for your continued
