These days the Web seems a bit depressing. The headlines are filled with stories about DoubleClick's nefarious handling of user data, Amazon's pushy patents, massive mergers of old media and new media, and sharply diverging fortunes of the Nasdaq and the Dow. What a blast of fresh air, then, to go to Austin for the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference (March 12-14) and find yourself in the heart of a world you forgot existed -- the intensely creative authors and designers who continue to make the Web a vital place.
"This is the place where people come to see their friends from Burning Man with their clothes on," said one attendee. Notable speakers included O'Reilly author Jennifer Niederst (Web Design in a Nutshell), Vivid information designer Drue Miller, Maxi.com's Molly Steenson, Disgruntled Housewife auteur Nikol Lohr, Salon CEO Michael O'Donnell, Meg Hourihan of the web log service blogger.com, Austin-based motormouth author and social critic Bruce Sterling, and a host of excellent local designers and developers. Not to mention keynotes by the New York Times' Denise Caruso and counterculture philosopher Stewart Brand.
What makes SXSW Interactive the most important show in creative web circles -- a designation that Cnet's Builder conference (sold last year to Fawcette Technical Publications) aimed for but failed to earn? Well, its no accident that the conference is part of a prestigious series of arts festivals -- including a major music festival and an up-and-coming film festival. This conference is almost completely focused on the small independent web developer -- whether the session is "Design Trends" or "Making Money with Non-Mainstream Content" or "Moving your Startup to an IPO."
The conference got off to an inauspicious start, however, with Macromedia CEO Rob Burgess' Sunday keynote. After running through some slides showing the ubiquity of the Flash plug-in (46 million Flash downloads per day, 200 million user installed base), Burgess moved on to what he was really stoked about -- the exciting new content signed for shockwave.com. Touting Flash 4's ability to deliver facial animation as a "legitimate entertainment experience," he proceeded to show a series of mind-bogglingly stupid and tasteless Flash animations, most of which were produced by San Francisco-based Mondo Media. While it remains to be seen what South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone (who will earn 10 percent of shockwave.com for their efforts) and director Tim Burton (his project is called "Stainboy") will produce for the site, shockwave.com isn't exactly raising the intellectual bar of the Web.
(In a recent development, Parker and Stone created shockwaves of their own by turning in a cartoon so raunchy that shockwave.com is considering making the work available only to adults.)
In the second half of the presentation, Kevin Lynch explained that Macromedia is adopting a "Flash everywhere" strategy for their single most important product. Look for Flash in a variety of browsers, devices and bandwidth situations, even multi-user, non-browser applications, Lynch said.
In a session on Web Design Trends moderated by Vivid's Drue Miller, Austin-based Human Code's Randall Macon explained his firm's design process. He showed a grid of audience, business goals, and technology. Both technology and design decisions fall out from identifying audience and business goals, he said. Human Code's working tenet is "don't create barriers to the business model." As a negative example he showed the "massively bad" IRS home page, which features a gigantic graphic of a fake tabloid newspaper with supposedly humorous headlines like "Taxpayer Anxiously Awaits Annual Income Tax-Filing Deadline." Meanwhile functional links to find tax forms are squirreled away at the bottom of the page. If the business of the IRS is helping people find the tax forms and information they need, and the audience is presumably not in a jovial mood when thinking about taxes, then this site's design is topsy-turvy.
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Jen Niederst, author of O'Reilly Web Design in a Nutshell, gave a review of some of the familiar design trends since she started designing for the Web in late 1993. "In the beginning, the Web was very, very cute. Icons were everywhere," she said, showing an early version of O'Reilly's old Global Network Navigator site. "Icons wore thin pretty quickly. They were overused and lost their meaning," Niederst said. "When a globe is used for everything, it no longer has a specific association."
After icons came metaphors -- villages, offices, places, even magazines, such as the original Web Review, which boasted a "cover" complete with cover photo, cover blurbs, corner flags, and more. After the concept of web "pages" was settled, we saw a series of design trends, left-hand nav bars (Cnet), top tabs (Amazon), and breadcrumbs (Yahoo), in which the user's path through a hierarchy is displayed.
Macon advised attendees to "find a great information architect." Human Code works in teams of designers, engineers, and usability experts. He joked that one strategy would simply be to "lock all these people in a room" and force them to work together.
While some panelists said they chiefly relied on information from the client in identifying the target audience, Vivid's Miller cautioned designers to validate this information. While one Vivid client, an arts sales site, described their target audience as the "wives of CEOS who don't know much about art but have a lot of money," Vivid's own research found that the market was in fact CEOs who were very interested in art. They brought this research back to the client, who wouldn't listen to this evidence.
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Although Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, was never mentioned at the show, the ideas put forth in that book seemed spread like you know what. The premise of The Tipping Point is that popularity works like a virus, and that a virus spreads very, very quickly when certain important individuals are exposed to it. For instance, Paul Revere was able to spread word of the British invasion while another messenger was not, because Revere was known by most of Boston society and he was well-respected. Thus, spreading a virus is not just a matter of getting the word out to people, but getting it out to the right people. When enough influential people are infected, the virus spreads incredibly fast, seemingly infecting the whole country. This is what happens in toy marketing all the time, from Pokemon to Tickle Me Elmo to Cabbage Patch Kids. The subtleties of this argument were largely lost on many speakers at SXSW, who saw viral marketing simply as a matter of getting people to spread the word about a given site or service.
Matt Hulett from atom films, for instance, refers to their strategy as a "Grateful Dead approach": pass your content around and it will gather a grassroots following. At New Line Cinema, they obviously don't give the content (the movie) away, but they spend a lot of energy online doing pre-release publicity via the Web. For instance, for the second Austin Powers movie, they released Austin e-postcards, browser skins, and short 60-second episodes based on the movie, all of which are easily shared around the Net. All of this is in an attempt to develop those "viral applications" that will make a movie a phenomenon.
At the other end of the spectrum are sites that are inherently viral. News of the site spreads with very little effort on the creator's part. For instance, Nikol Lohr had no idea that her Disgrunted Housewife site would be so popular; it just happened, in no small part because of a feature called The Dick List, in which women (and presumably men) can post about the men they learned to hate. The list is now massive, and extremely sordid. "People are essentially voyeuristic and exhibitionistic," Nicole said in a panel on making money from non-mainstream content, noting that appeal of The Dick List is that people can speak without repercussion.
While Disgruntled Housewife was a personal, decidedly non-mainstream site, it is now part of the ChickClick network of girls' and women's sites and earns Nicole a decent monthly payment from advertising revenues. Even so, she has no desire to become an Internet millionaire ("I actively don't want to be a millionaire," she said). One questioner asked how these Web auteurs juggled earning money with finding time to work on the site. Nicole recommended "working for an investment bank" or any job where "your boss doesn't really know what you do." She said she worked on her own projects four hours a day while at work!
For Denise Caruso, the Net is less about viruses than it is about cults. In fact in her second-day keynote, "Of Bonding and Bondage: Cults, Culture and the Internet" she called the Net a "cult machine."
"American culture has uploaded its weird proclivities onto the Net," she said, and the result is a "verticilization of everything." The many attributes of the Net all add up to its being a cult machine, she said. She doubted that there was a substantial difference between the Heaven's Gate cult and the cult of consumerism that is Amazon.com. "The mainstream Internet is a commercial cult," she said. "Consumerism is the one true religion."
This explosion of consumerism has fostered a counterculture among the religious right, who are dropping out of the consumer media. This counterculture puts a focus on morality and ethics and posits the commercial net as unethical.
Even so, Caruso concluded that the Net is still the most powerful tool for freedom we have ever known. And she cautioned, "If you use these powers of persuasion, use them with integrity. If you have to act like a schmuck to make money, what's the point?"
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