Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

SxSW 2006 Day 3

Sun­day, aside from the after­math of a fun Sat­ur­day night which caused me to miss the first two pan­els (whoops), started out with Dave, Cameron, Kelly and Brian’s Demys­ti­fy­ing the Mobile Web (per­sonal points of inter­est include: there are approx­i­mately 200 dif­fer­ent mobile units ship­ping in the US mar­ket alone; over 40 dif­fer­ent browser types/versions; mobile ver­sions of XHTML/CSS have a decent amount of sup­port).

I’m start­ing to set the media type to “screen” when link­ing exter­nal stylesheets, so that even if clients don’t have the bud­get (or sim­ply aren’t inter­ested) for devel­op­ing a cus­tomized mobile ver­sion of their site, that con­tent will still be avail­able. I use my Treo daily to access many sources of infor­ma­tion online (includ­ing Back­pack, which I use so often I might just go blind…), and the expe­ri­ence is far bet­ter than on my pre­vi­ous phone, but I’m still not con­vinced that it’s worth putting much time into mak­ing spe­cific mobile ver­sions of most sites or appli­ca­tions while the major­ity of the avail­able mobile browsers don’t allow for an enjoy­able user experience.

Next up was Run­ning Your New Media Busi­ness, with Bryan from Adap­tive Path, Evan of Odeo, Jeff, Jen­nifer and Erika. This is an area where I could use a bit of help, since I’ve never con­sid­ered myself much of a busi­nessper­son (and I get the impres­sion that many design­ers are in the same boat). The best thing about this dis­cus­sion was real­iz­ing that I’m not the only one — even Adap­tive Path seems to have had its share of hic­cups, and the run­ning theme seems to be the same as it is with any­thing else in life: plan on mak­ing mis­takes, just learn from them and don’t repeat them. High­lights included advice on form­ing part­ner­ships (make sure you have the tough dis­cus­sions about each individual’s stake in the com­pany, and what will hap­pen when part­ners leave); how to deal with clients who don’t pay on time (note: check contracts/agreements to make sure work stop­page is cov­ered under pay­ment terms); tak­ing the reper­cus­sions of late pay­ment out of your hands by putting things on paper (make it an account­ing issue, not a per­sonal or project-releated issue); and think very care­fully before accept­ing projects from clients who can afford to give you a hard time about billing (usu­ally large companies).

I passed within 1 foot of Arrested Devel­op­ment’s David Cross. Per­sonal obser­va­tion: he’s short.

The next panel was and is my favorite of SxSW: Holis­tic Web Design. Not only did Stan, Eris, Gar­rett, Carl and Shaun present a won­der­ful redesign (realign­ment?) of Plazes (a ser­vice I didn’t know about prior to the panel, but which I’ll actu­ally use if they incor­po­rate the team’s vast improve­ments), but they had the tight­est, most orga­nized over­all pre­sen­ta­tion of any panel I saw the entire week (am I giv­ing away too much before I post my wrap-up of Days 4 and 5? You’ll just have to read them all…). Their goal was to show the level of coop­er­a­tion and inter­ac­tion within a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary team oper­at­ing across mul­ti­ple time zones (5 team mem­bers, 4 time zones), and the best part was that they each had a thor­ough under­stand­ing of the other parts of the whole, and showed that by first explain­ing their spe­cific role within the project, and then one by one dis­cussing the spe­cific deci­sions made that resulted in the final prod­uct. And I’m not just say­ing this because I know every­one on the panel (hey, Stan barely said a word to me all week — he prob­a­bly thinks he just imag­ined meet­ing me… ;)

After a quick snack at the Hilton’s sudo-Starbucks, I headed upstairs for the Web Awards, which (among other things), made me real­ize I’m an idiot for never enter­ing any of my projects in the past (or this year for that mat­ter). Tsk tsk. That aside, the free drink upon entry was a nice touch, and I walked in to find the 9rules table lack­ing a cer­tain je ne sais quoi (Scrivs was in his hotel room, prepar­ing to die), so I decided it was only right for another Florida boy to take his place at the table (and to their credit, Mike and Matthew didn’t object). This also gave me the chance to finally meet James of Forty Media, who was nice enough to make space at the table for me (and move a chair over — cheers James!).

The evening was light enough, though Laura Swisher isn’t the most enter­tain­ing emcee (note to self: con­tact The Daily Show and some­how black­mail them into both cov­er­ing and pro­vid­ing a ‘real’ host for next year’s Web Awards). The real fun, how­ever, was watch­ing friends win their awards.

Bryan won the Best Blog award for Aval­on­Star, which was a total kick for me, con­sid­er­ing I had just met him the day before (his accep­tance speech was price­less), and 9rules won for Best Com­mu­nity Site, for their (suc­cess­ful?) attempt at world dom­i­na­tion through leaves on weblogs. Mike and Matt accepted the award, and ded­i­cated it to the 9rules mem­bers and also to Scrivs, and then they ran up to his hotel room to share the news (which turned out to be very good tim­ing, since they ended up tak­ing him to the hos­pi­tal shortly there­after. It was prob­a­bly all the excite­ment…). Con­grats to my friends and all the other win­ners and finalists!

Now comes the inter­est­ing seg­ment of Day 2, a lit­tle story I like to call “The Event­ful Evening.” Matthew did a nice job of sum­ma­riz­ing the lat­ter half (wherein Matthew was assaulted, and 4 of us received unjus­ti­fied cita­tions for jay­walk­ing… seri­ously), so I’ll just jot down a few inter­est­ing notes about the ear­lier por­tion of the night (wherein: I helped Bryan’s financeé, Jen, gain access to the Web Awards After Party at Club DeV­ille; Gar­rett, Wade and I vis­ited as many bars on 6th Street as pos­si­ble, dodge­balling every sin­gle one; and I got thrown out of a bar before I even crossed the thresh­old). Well, actu­ally, that’s pretty much it, because you really had to be there to expe­ri­ence every­thing that went on that evening. There were a few more “fun” things that went on, but to wrap it all up, I got back to my hotel room around 6:30am. A good night.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Sunday, March 19th, 2006.

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