.What I Learned at SXSWi 2010
SXSWi was just as hit or miss as always. The best panels flop and the stumble upon talks open doors in your mind. But as always it was about the extended conversion with dynamic people sets that make it one of the most worthwhile events of the year. On any given day I felt like I only learned a couple items of value. But collected together it equals roughly a month or two of research work accomplished in a couple days.
Here’s what I learned at SXSWi 2010 this year that I thought would be helpful for others.
20% of all books sold on Amazon cost $0.01. Used book sellers do that as they can make a profit on shipping alone. Amazon get a good cut of the shipping payment too so they don’t care if you buy a book new or that same book used for $0.01. Advice for a book seller that gets on a best seller list is to remove the book from Amazon to keep the book from flooding into the used sellers.
The amount of data created by humans in 2009 exceeded that of all data created by humans prior to 2009. [Updated. Source: Andreas Weigend / HBR via Rob Gonda's presentation.]
Fashion-related sites are very in-style. There are too many of them, but they’ve been so poor for so long, many are trying to rectify that. Polyvore is recommended as is ModCloth and ChicTopia, and Burda Style. However the virtual “try on clothing” sites do not seem fully baked … yet. I expect great things in that space, however.
Games and game mechanics are becoming a part of everything as a way to engage customers. I think this will be mostly ephemeral outside of actual games but is trending like a wildfire now.
The Semantic Web is a attempt at contextually organizing data on the web and it is mostly as semantically meaningless a name now as it’s always been. There will be big advances, but at least for the coming year if you hear people preaching or promising about how the Semantic Web (sometimes even referred to as Web3.0 or Web4.0) is about to blow up, you can tune them out for at as it’s just not there yet. Semantic web developers aspirations are very worthwhile, and there are some VERY interesting projects underway to expose data and information motion on the web in ways other then a traditional search engine. Wolfram Alpha is the best example. Ask it where the space station is right now or how old the earth is and it will use the data it accesses from across the web to actually calculate the it’s position. But there’s still more hype then reality in making more sense out of the data we already use to find info on the Internet. But in 5 years keyword-based searches will only be a small percentage of the ways information is retrieved from the Internet.
CCS3 is very interesting and is on the cusp of being supported by all browsers. Here is what CSS3 makes possible w/o hack or the support of other elements (such as images or javascript).
• rounded corners
• drop shadows
• color gradients
• Canvas (see canvas below)
• display text anything at a rotated angle
• Customize display of just first or last items in a list.
• displaying text in non-standard fonts (caveat: that font has to be downloaded, not that universal yet.)
Here’s a nifty site to test it out.
HTML5 is also very impressive but it will be months or years before all browsers support it. Here’s what you can do with HTML5
• display videos neatly on a page w/o using Flash
• The addition of specific content tags that act like div’s but explicity clarify the section’s purpose: <head>, <nav>, <article>, <footer>, <section>, <aside>. The benefit here is that search engines or anyone can know for certain what is what on the page. Seem trivial but will offer a lot of utility IMHO
• build canvas pages (See Canvas below)
• It’s very feasible to serve HTML5 pages that gracefully downgrade to HTML4 if the browser doesn’t support it. The Google homepage does this already.
IE 6/7/8 are the browsers with the least support for CCS3 and HTML5 though they do have many of these functions available via proprietary scripting/formatting options. The big news here is that on Tuesday Microsoft announced that IE9 is in the works and it will be CSS3/HTML5 compliant
Canvas is a browser-based presentation format that uses CSS3 and HTML5 which allows a drawing surface that can be embedded in a page with a tag that you can then draw into using JavaScript commands (thanks @Hoopz for the clarification) for the display of highly dynamic content such as games, real-time charts, design tools. These are all things the can be done very well in flash, but no longer require the flash plugin to work (great for mobile phones) Canvas won’t be mainstream anytime soon, but it already a great option if you know your user base user a CSS3/HTML5 Canvas-enabled browser.
Digg is about to overhaul the way their popular service works. This is as risky are New Coke, but I think it’s going to be very popular and something they had to do. If you don’t change on the web you become irrelevant. The announcement was important enough for CNN news to put it on their homepage so take some time to understand what their doing:
• Each user will see a homepage custom-tailored to them
• They’re replacing their 20-odd content categories with a limitless structure open to whatever people want to classify. (This is what has worked for StumbleUpon for so long and I’m sure will be appreciated)
• A user’s weighted authority will be based not just in on-site participation, but on their social activities all over the internet. Thus if you are new to Digg, but have much respect on twitter or Facebook then Digg won’t treat you like an untrusted agent. (I wonder if they’ll include Reddit and StumpleUpon eventually ;)
• They’ve also entirely redone their back end to allow for significantly better scaling and ability to launch new code anytime to any section.
• They are going to add back to their site the ability to see a number of ranking displays they strategically suppressed previously. It was suspect that feature removals were to weaken power diggers control, so it says a lot they are returning them
• Also of note is the day after the announcement they had already communicated with the changes and announced for the first time the resumption of some features they had taken from the power users. This is VERY smart. While it’s gaming of the system by power users that is forcing this overhaul, it’s also the power users that bring so much content and quality to the popular items. If you throw them out with the bath water you’ve lost your baby.
Austin, Texas experienced an 0.8% employment growth from Dec ’07 to Dec ’09. Austin did not have a recession. Home prices below $1 million did not go down. The population is growing by 50 people a day.
I saw a working FitBit for the first time in use by a couple friends. Sleek and small and discrete (even the display area is hidden) they track distance walked, calories burnt and current caloric burn. They both said putting a number of their distance and caloric burns strongly motivated them to do better each day. The device also has a bracelet you wear at night that can monitor how long and how well you slept by your hands movement. I want one, but apparently they have severe production challenges that keep them waiting lists long and delivery dates floating.
Whales communicate at a frequency of 20 hertz. Historically they used to be able to communicate over thousands of miles due to the way sound waves travel in water. Since the advent of the combustion engine (which blasts out sound waves in the same range) whales can now only communicate over 150 miles max.
If you want to blog regularly you should do it every day. If you do it once a week, it’s easy for it to become once a month. Even if you don’t have something profound to write every day, write something. (Advice from the successful daily writer Jon Steinberg who got it from the prolific Fred Wilson)
Pea shoots are a Shanghainese specialty that are at many restaurants that they never put on the menu, that they’ll deny they have if you order in English. You’ve got to know the Chinese name for them. The explanation is that they are so fundamentally chinese that a westerner couldn’t understand them, like giving a Fabergé egg to a baby.
Different needs for planning now vs soon: Plancast works better for coordinating future activities. Foursquare and Gowalla work better for coordinating current activities. For what it’s worth my greater circle of contacts are more active on Foursquare then Gowalla.
I’ve also learned it’s about time we redesign this blog. It’s added to the list.
What browsers are you seeing left out IE6/7/8?
And, @chasse has you covered on ordering pea shoots in mandarin.
Thanks Ted – this is great. Thanks for sharing it.
mike
@scott. Good point I updated the entry. 6/7/8 are in fact the dominant laggards. However on Tuesday MS announced at SXSW that IE9 is well under way and will be CSS3/HTML5 compliant.
And yes! Ordering them in mandarin is apparently the only way to get them! If she’s suddenly missing one day, I have dragged her to dinner.
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @sacca RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
What I Learned at SXSWi 2010 http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @sacca RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
Correction: display *anything* at a rotated angle:
http://antimatter15.com/misc/rotatedgooglecss3.html
(and doesn’t have to be in 90 degree increments)
Also, proof read your stuff, since you lost the very tags you were trying to describe.
Aaand, your description of Canvas is really wrong. Canvas is not a “presentation format” and does not involve CSS3 or HTML5.
It is simply a drawing surface embedded in a page, like an tag which you can draw into using JavaScript commands. It does not retain any information about its contents. Think Photoshop, not Illustrator.
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
Thanks @Hoopz for the clarifications.
“The amount of data created by humans in 2009 exceeded that of all data created by humans prior to 2009.”
Is there a source for this factoid?
HTML5 for mobile already does almost everything and will replace a lot of app applications. I think for apps you live in: apps. For passing through, I’m a big fan of HTML5 on devices. It has almost all the functionality of an app today…even on the desktop Google is abandoning gears.
Ted Rheingold – What I learned at #SXSWi: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
You have no clue about what you re saying… Semantic is about to play a huge role in the near future. Don t think web 3.o is only about open linked data. It s much more, especially in a social web. Read http://www.semanticweb.com to keep you up to date !
Sorry about that Julien. what I had originally meant to write was “you do not need to care about Semantic web for the next year,” but I must have cut off the ‘next year’ part when editing. Apologies.
I think Semantic – though an unnecessarily vague term – is *very* important as a whole.
But the impression I have is that the big changes are not going to happen this year with the current strategies being attempted.
Thanks for the link.
@felix. I’m trying to reach the presenter who stated that fact.
CSS3 is on the cusp of being supported by all browsers http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
Olá, Singularidade: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
Lots of good tidbits here => “What I Learned at SXSWi 2010″ http://bit.ly/cAiJWl (via @GreatDismal)
“The amount of data created by humans in 2009 exceeded that of all data created by humans prior to 2009.” http://bit.ly/cAiJWl
@Gommit http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
Interesting topics discussed at SXSW 2010. http://bit.ly/cAiJWl
Helpful (eclectic) summary from SXSW http://tinyurl.com/yanyx44
#sxswi insights from dogster’s @tedr sorry i missed ya, thanks for the recap http://bit.ly/cAiJWl
Please give us the reference about the data in 2009.
I agree with @felix, the quote about 2009′s data is memeing (that can’t be a word) all over the place and it seems a little suspect without any actual (no pun intended) data to back it up. It’d be great if we could get a source. Thx!
@felix, @adam & @amy,
I dug up the source and added it to the post. It comes from a post the Harvard Business Review by Andreas Weigend. I saw the fact from a slide in a presentation by Rob Gonda
RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/
RT @BenShaw: RT @tedr: What I learned at SXSWi this year: http://blog.dogster.com/2010/03/17/what-we-learned-at-sxsw-2010/