- ZeFrank is just as funny live as he is online. His comedy styled PowerPoint presentation was hillarious.
- “Web 1.0 was about participation being added to a web site. Web 2.0 is about participation being the web site.” - Jory Des Jardins
- BBQ in Austin is delicious. I’m still thinking about it. The best place was Kreuz in Lockhart.
- “Community on the web was made possible by fanboys.”
- Henry Jenkins - Buy Banana Guard stock while you can. It is about to receive a upswing in sales due to free SXSW exposure.
- An interesting topic, no matter how good it is, is not enough to carry a great panel discussion
- If you knew how much certain web 2.0 apps cost to start and maintain, you’d be shocked.
- Most of the time, presentations are better than panels.
- It is not enough to book Dan Rather as a keynote speaker to an interactive conference. You need to plan what questions you want to ask him that are related to the web/interactive.
- If you are going to bring a laptop to SXSW and you don’t want it to stand out, make sure it is an Apple.
Top 10 Things I Learned at SXSW: 2007
Rich Content and Simple Menus
Have you ever had this experience. You rent a DVD, maybe one you’ve been waiting for. You are so excited to view the movie and you throw it in the DVD player. After the player adjusts itself, recognizes the disc, you wait through a series of warnings and previews. You fast forward or skip past all this content only to end up on the DVD menu. You wait as various scenes of the movie fade in and out, lines from the movie are played, maybe some snippet from a theme song is played, and you wait… and wait… and wait… as the animation has to play itself out. After enduring for what seems like an eternity, the words “Play Movie” slowly appear. But wait. You can’t select them yet. The words “Play Movie” are not done animating yet. They eventually rest in their place. Finally. You click the enter button and are ready for the movie to start. But wait. You now have to wait as all of the elements of the menu animate themselves back out of the screen. First the play movie text fades, then the various scenes and images fly and fade out of view as some line from the movie is played (usually one that also has a double meaning that confirms the user selection to play the movie) and the music fades out. Then the movie starts and the THX or Dolby screens animate into frame… Ughhh.
What is the point of the DVD menu? What function does it serve? Why can’t the menu just appear as a still and give you the option to select “Play Movie” right off the bat? Why the excessive animation? It is not as if the menu is acting as a preloader while the DVD player is preparing something essential for movie play. In that case, that might be sort of useful or entertaining. I’m just guessing, but I believe the only people that enjoy DVD menus must be the people that make DVD menus.
When designing web sites, how much of the design and creative are you devoting to useless visual clutter that has no purpose other than filler. Take for example this site: www.drano.com .
If I were interested in purchasing a drano product, I probably have a serious problem with a drain in my house. Let’s say I have a problem with the toilet in the bathroom. Let’s also say it is an emergency. I’m probably in somewhat of a hurry. Before I head out to the store, I do some quick research online to make sure I purchase the right product.
I visit the drano web site and I notice three choices - bathroom, kitchen, and garage/laundry. I am eager to find the right product so I click “bathroom”. I wait for the site has to load some information. I wait patiently. It finally loads (2mb of Flash files) and what do I see?
I see a video of a lady standing in a bathroom in front of a mirror applying lipstick. Huh? I don’t see any product information but I do see three glowing circles - one over the toilet, one over the sink, and one over the bathtub/shower. I click on the one on the toilet. After I click, the lady looks at the toilet and exclaims, “Oh no!” Then the camera moves into a close-up of the toilet, which oddly enough is not clogged or backed up.
An information box pops up over the toilet and tells me I need to purchase Drano’s Build Up Remover. This little information box isn’t big enough to have all the information I need about the product so there is a button at the bottom I need to click on that says “Learn More About The Product”.
Once I click it, then I get another page that has additional information. The lower half of the page is divided into three tabs - How it works, Directions for use, and Precautions. Each of these tabs has so little information under them that I don’t really see the point of breaking up the page into three tabs in the first place. The whole site frustrates me as a designer and a user. Why didn’t the design firm focus more energy on animating “How it Works” or “Directions for use” instead of animating a lady putting on lipstick in front of a mirror? That actually would have been useful and interesting. Or, they could have spent more time on the Solution Finder, which doesn’t make choosing the right Drano product any easier the way it is currently designed.
If you are designing a web site. Do not create the equivilant of a DVD menu. Focus your time and energy on the content, including making the content come to life via great design/animation/sound/video. Users want richer content, not lengthy animated menu systems.
List of Online Social Networking Sites
The recent Software Association of Oregon event on Online Social Networking yielded quite the collection of online networking tools. Here’s a list of some of the latest and greatest:
Business Networks:
Link’d In
Ryze
Ecademy
ZeroDegrees
Orkut
Ziggs
Social Networks:
Windows Live Spaces
Classmates.com
Facebook
Facebox
MySpace
Bebo
Vox
Multiply
Friendster
Tribe.net
Ning
43 Things
MediaBistro
Flock (social networking browser)
Live Journal
Educational/Bookmarking Networks:
Wikipedia
Digg
Trailfire
del.icio.us (use the tag SAO.MSIG.OSN to find related information on del.icio.us)
StumbleUpon
blinklist
Bluedot
elgg.net
Mobile Networks:
Twitter
Wadja
Friendstribe
JuiceCaster
Zingku
Moblabber
Zemble
Veeker
Treemo
Dodgeball
Plazes (beta version)
Niche Networks:
Intel Software Network
Dogster
LibraryThing (beta version)
Flixster
SneakerPlay
MothersClick
BeGreen
AdFemme
Merchant Circle
MDJunction
eWomenNetwork
Startpages:
Pageflakes
Netvibes
YourMinis
Ptotopage
Webwag
Places and Events:
Yelp
CollegeTonight
MingleNow
HeyLetsGo
Planypus
ILCU
Vibely
OnMyCity
Do512
eVelvetRope
Eventful
TripTie
TripAdvisor
Gusto
Travelistic
Upcoming
Shopping:
Craigslist
Freecycle
Etsy
ThisNext
kaboodle
Crowdstorm
ShopWiki
StyleFeeder
Hawkee
ProductWiki
Photo Sharing:
Flickr
Twango
Zooomr (beta version)
Webshots
Tabblo
Pickle
BubbleShare
Video Sharing:
YouTube
Gotuit
Metacafe
Motionbox
vSocial
StupidVideos
Blip.tv
iFilm
Eyespot
Google Video
REVVR
Music:
Last.fm
ReverbNation
MOG
Pandora
YourSpins
Rapspace
ProjectOpus
iLike
Splice
MusicHawk
Feed Readers:
Google Reader
Bloglines
Technorati
Yahoo Pipes
Additional Online Resources:
• IBM created online social networking tools suite
• How to Use Online Networks to Market Your Business
• Online Social Networks go to Work
• Social Media Revolution Coming to the Business World
• Henry Jenkins Blog: About Convergence Culture
Additional Offline Resources:
• The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online
By David Teten and Scott Allen
• Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message
By Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba
• Creating Customer Evangelists
By Guy Kawasaki, Ben McConnell, and Jackie Huba
• Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking
By Andy Sernovitz and Guy Kawasaki
• The Tipping Point
By Malcolm Gladwell
• Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
By Henry Jenkins
Secret New iPhone Model Discovered in iTunes Update
I was digging through the latest iTunes update and discovered a link to the Apple web site. I followed it and took this screenshot before Apple took down the page. Enjoy!
The Most Valuable Product Apple Offers Is Free
I am an Apple fan and an avid Mac user. I have been using Macs ever since I witnessed a G3 400 mhz Mac effortlessly work with my digital video footage when a 3 Ghz Pentium 4 Dell struggled, crashed, and crashed again. That week, some 4 years ago, I bought a G4 “Lamp” iMac and never looked back.
I have a Mac at home and a Mac at work. Both my wife and I have an iPod. I create all of my presentations with iWork. I purchase music, TV shows, and films through iTunes. I have created photo books, greating cards, and slideshows with iPhoto. I have authored multiple movies and DVDs with iMovie, iDVD, and Final Cut. I even generate my family’s blog with iWeb and own a .Mac account. It makes me cry when I think about how much of my money has gone to Apple. They have me hooked. If you are a family member or a friend of mine, you’ve probably had the Apple conversation with me. Too bad they don’t have some kind of pyramid scheme like Amway ’cause I could have made some serious money by now.
Anyway, this post is about what I consider to be their most valuable product. It isn’t anything they sell - no ipods, no computers, no iPhoto, Final Cut, iWork, OS X, or .Mac. The most valuable product Apple has and freely distributes is iTunes.
iTunes is the true digital hub, a free download, and available cross platform (OS X and Windows). If you want to use it purely as an MP3 organizer, you can do that and you never have to give Apple a penny. It is easy to use, looks great, and is full of very usefull features like easy sharing of music libraries with others on the same network.
iTunes is free but it plays a critical role in tying together Apple’s strategy as a whole. Each Mac and iPod is sold with iTunes included. Within iTunes, you can purchase music, tv shows, music videos, and movies. You can subscribe to podcasts, video podcasts, and internet based radio stations. iLife is built around iTunes. iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, and Keynote can all easily incorporate tracks from iTunes. iPhoto can be used to create photo slideshows set to music or podcast images in GarageBand. GarageBand can easily publish out those podcasts or music tracks to iTunes and sync your latest music creations with your iPod. iWeb publishes podcasts and video podcasts directly to iTunes. When you purchase movies and TV shows, you can bet many of those were edited with Final Cut. It all ties together. As Macworld ‘07 approaches, Apple will surely announce their new “iTV” product that I’m sure will auto sync with iTunes just like the iPod. Many rumors are also circulating that an “iPhone” is about to emerge and a must have feature is iPod functionality that syncs with iTunes.
As I think about this genius strategy, making your most valuable asset free and charging for everything else, it makes me wonder why so many companies are focused on iPod killers and iMac killers and not setting their sights on Apple’s most valuable asset - iTunes.
The Difference of HD
For Christmas this year, I asked for only one thing… money to go towards an HD video camera. When purchasing a camcorder last spring, I knew that HD was just introduced for consumer camcorders and promised better resolution but I was unimpressed with the Sony HD model at Best Buy. I just couldn’t see the difference when reviewing the image quality. I thought I would save some money and just invest in a better Mini-DV camcorder that offered wide screen. I figured if the footage is eventually all translated down into dvd format anyway, there really wasn’t justification for spending the additional $600 for HD. I purchased a non-HD Wide Screen Mini-DV Sony camcorder and was fairly happy with my choice.
In November, a collegue of mine, Kelly White, was asking me about camcorder choices. He was expecting a new child in December and was considering purchasing a camcorder. My advice has always been to buy a relatively cheap digital camcorder (one with few features) then purchase a Mac. He is a Windows nut (programs in .NET) and so the Mac advice fell on deaf ears, but he also questioned my advice on the cheap camcorder. He mentioned Canon’s new HD camcorder and asked me if that would be a better choice. He mentioned a website where Canon published actual footage from this new camcorder, the HV10. I checked it out that night and I could not believe what I was looking at. It was stunning. I must have watched the test video for an hour or two.
The next evening, I ran down to the local Best Buy and checked out this HV10. It was small, solid, and had a very impressive picture. I came home speechless. Alisha, my better half, asked me what I was grinning about. I let her know that for Christmas this year, all I want is one thing - money to go towards the purchase of a Canon HD HV10 camcorder. I told her to divert any money, funds, gifts intended for me from her or anyone in either of our families to this item. My wish was granted and for Christmas I did receive a shiny new HV10.
Below are some sample pictures (simulated and reconstructed from the hv10 to demonstrate apples to apples shot comparison) from my original Digital 8 Sony Camcorder purchased in 2002, the Widescreen Mini-DV Sony Camcorder purchased in spring of 2006, and the new Canon HD HV10 camcorder received this Christmas.
Comparison of details between the three camcorders
Sony DCR TRV-230 - standard picture
Sony DCR HC-46 - standard wide picture*
On Christmas morning, I plugged the camcorder into Alisha’s parents huge 61″ 1080p HD television and the footage looked gorgeous. The funny thing is, Alisha and I don’t even own an HD television. We still have an old 27″ conventional television (non flat or widescreen). I figure when we upgrade to an HD television in a few years, we’ll have plenty of great HD footage to enjoy of our two young boys. The biggest challenge right now is trying to figure out how to manage the 45gb of space each hour of hd footage takes up on the hard drive!
* What has always bothered me with this camcorder is that it isn’t true wide screen resolution. I noticed that the camera actually just crops the standard picture to artificially create a wide screen format. Whenever I was shooting with this camcorder, I would have to stand further back from the subject just to fit them into the shot. This is much different with the Canon where I can stand at a normal distance from the subject and fit them and the background into the shot.
Basecamp: Blessing or Curse? Part II
Well, it was far too long of a time from the last post to this one. I planned on writing the followup to my previous article the next day. Oops! I truly do enjoy Basecamp much more than I am frustrated by it. Now that the blog has grown a bit stale, I’m afraid I may have given the wrong impressioin. I’m here to set the record straight, so, here it goes… again…
The Blessing
1. RSS-A-Plenty
The RSS integration is very useful, in fact, I would say it is necessary to truly enjoy the power of this application. Whenever there is a change to our BaseCamp account with a new milestone, status change, file uploaded… I am alerted via RSS. I use the built in Safari reader and it works great. It even does a nice job of filtering per individual or by project based on search queries. When some other individuals here at Pop Art expressed frustration over not having visibility into who actually checked off milestones, I was amazed to see that the RSS feed displayed that information and more. There is no field or status message when you log into BaseCamp, but if you track the RSS feed, it not only shows who the milestone is assigned to, but also who it was authored by and who completed it or checked it off. Very useful. I would think that using BaseCamp without a decent RSS reader is truly experiencing only half the product.
2. A Little Dash of This, A Little Dash of That
The dashboard view, for all projects and for individual projects is nice. It is easy to understand latest activity and the organization of the different functions of BaseCamp. There is little client training needed with understanding BaseCamp as compared to other project site tools I’ve used in the past. The minimal features make it easy to understand. It is more like an iPod and less like a tradition 6 piece home entertainment center.
3. Getting It Right with WriteBoards
WriteBoards are incredible. They are like one page Wikis. They have a simple syntax that is very easy to learn and the instructions are always accessible. The versioning is simple and powerful with easy to view changes across time. It is also relatively easy to link writeboards together. We have used this on our team to prototype out site maps. We used to create them in Illustrator and the WriteBoard approach is SOOOoooo much easier. It has dramatically reduced our time in generating sitemaps for site architecture decisions and clients have enjoyed getting in there too and making edits and tweaks. Our CSS guru, Ryan Parr, has done a nice job making a stylesheet to transform the writeboard into a more traditional looking style sheet. I’m so glad we are out of Illustrator. This alone has made BaseCamp a killer app for our team.
4. Piles of Files
The file sharing area of BaseCamp is very handy. Before BaseCamp, email or DropSend was the only way to go. Now with BaseCamp, sharing files with contractors and clients is very easy and straightforward. Little touches to the interface like app icons and refresh file links make it very easy and rewarding to use. Not a ton of features, but all the right ones.
5. All Projects Under One Roof
It is so nice to be able to have a dashboard that combines all projects. When I have meetings with team, I just print out the dashboard and we review upcoming milestones. Before, each team member would have to bring their own milestone list for each project and it was hard to see who was working on what or what committments we had made as a team. If I were to set it up again, I would have put each department in the company under its own Company category. It would make it easier to see dept views, not just company and individual.
6. Very Inviting
The company/people section is very well done. It is easy to see all available resources in the system, which ones are on an individual project, and to quickly set up a new person on a project or projects. With a few clicks, a new account can be set up and an invite sent out.
7. Behavior Modification
BaseCamp saved our skin when we embarked on a crazy project where we designed 24 sites in 30 weeks. It was an ambitious project and we needed to be able to see what upcoming milestones were across all 24 sites. Without BaseCamp, we probably would have become very frustrated and confused. Granted, it was a pain for the project manager to manage all of those dates in a web application, but it was very much appreciated. Other project managers in our company have also used BaseCamp with varying degrees of success. Many have come to despise it or find it too simple and web based. When I see email still being used as the primary way to communicate and send around files, I think how simple and powerful this web app is and how clients who were introduced to it, rather enjoyed it. To be honest, I was hoping it was going to help change how we worked as a team, bringing us closer to the project and the client. The biggest mistake made was to agree to use it as a replacement for our old ticketing system. BaseCamp is not good at ticketing or issue tracking. Even thought it might not have been the organizational success I was hoping for, I still really enjoy it. I don’t know if we will stick with BaseCamp as an organization, but if we do decide to replace it, I hope the next tool is just as powerful with its simplicity.
Basecamp: Blessing or Curse?
When I first saw Basecamp, it was a couple of years ago at a different company and we just started working with contractors. We didn’t have any good way for the team to communicate with the contractors other than via email. It was inefficient, scattered, and not easy to get off track with the various projects. When Basecamp was released, I thought it was amazing and exactly what we needed. It helped us organize the various projects with outside contractors and gave us visibility into the status of the various projects.
Fast forward two years. Now I work in a very different environment. With my previous company, we had maybe two to five projects happening concurrently. At Pop Art, we have at least 20 or more happening at the same time. When various customers had difficulty accessing our extranet, I suggested Basecamp as an alternative. “Suggested” is probably a gross understatement as I truly fought hard for Basecamp. What I didn’t realize was how Basecamp would both be a blessing and a curse in this new environment.
Basecamp had grown up in the year and half lapse since I had used it last. It added many new collaborative features. It extended the features centered around the message board and the file repository. It also added a great new feature called Writeboards that turned Basecamp into a Wiki like tool. I would bring it up now and then when we had internal discussions about how to improve our extranet that only worked for some customers. None of the features were reason enough to switch but their possibilities excited me.
In December of last year, a project came a long that was unlike any other. We had just jumped head first into web standards based design and started on a project where we were to design 24 web sites for SelecTrucks dealers in 30 weeks. With two designers, one CSS architect, two developers, one project manager and a whole lot of drive, we were going to need a tool to keep the project on track. Sending 24 different schedules to the team for the dealer sites was not going to work as there was going to be a lot of overlap with dates and deliverables. We needed a simple yet powerful tool that could centralize the schedule for the two dozen sites. We chose Basecamp and it was a huge success. Without it, I don’t know if we could have stayed on schedule with the project. It had some issues, especially with moving deliverable dates around but overall it helped the team stay on course.
Eventually when other small projects surfaced, we threw them into Basecamp as well. When the director of the PM department saw how much the design team loved the tool and it helped projects stay on track, she decided to give it a try (with a lot of convincing on my part). What happened next both exposed the strength and weakness of Basecamp as a tool for an agency like ours.
Once we adopted the tool, we went all in. It didn’t make any sense for us to only put some of projects in. It was a lot of data entry but with everyone willing to give it a shot, we were soon up and running. It was a success. Even with some issues here or there, the centralization of all current projects in one simple tool was very empowering. It was so successful, that we also moved over the information from our two home built maintenance task web apps. It was at this point that Basecamp became both a blessing and a curse.
The Curse
1. What project manager?
In an agency of our size, the role of the project manager is critical to success. Basecamp doesn’t recognize roles and this is a problem. The only roles that Basecamp is aware of is “Private” and “Public” - usually translating to “Team” and “Client”. It is easy enough for any team member to log in to Basecamp and filter by their milestones or to filter by one of their projects, but there is no convenient way for a project manager to filter by their key projects. Either they get all of their projects that they are a part of or only their own milestones. Another problem is that other than through RSS feeds, a project manager has no way of knowing when milestones or to-dos are checked off. This has led to the strange practice of our designers and developers sending the project managers an email to let them know something is ready to be checked off. The more we use Basecamp, the more I realize that Basecamp is designed to be the project manager instead of helping a project manager.
2: Tickets please
When we moved our maintenance tasks over to Basecamp, we soon realized that there was no good ticketing system included. To simulate a ticketing system, you have to put in a milestone, then associate a message with it, then assign it to the first person. When that person is done with it, they need to change the milestone to be assigned to the next person or they need to check it off and create a new milestone for the next stage of the task. Even if they try the former technique, they need to change the milestone date. This can be very complex for such simple functionality.
3. Can anyone To-Do this?
The To-Do feature is powerful but it cannot be assigned to anyone nor have a due date. In an agency, there are deliverables which the client is aware of and internal deadlines which the team is aware of. It would be great if the to-dos could be assigned to internal resources and we reserved the milestones for client deliverables. Because of this limitation, To-Dos are rarely used and internal tasks are created with milestones. This makes the milestone queue very dense and eventually prevents the sharing with clients, limiting one of its most powerful features.
4. A dashboard is worth a thousand words
The dashboard for all projects in Basecamp works great if you have a few projects that you are associated with. When you are involved in 10 projects or more, the dashboard becomes almost unreadable. Milestones do not have project titles associated with them so on the same date in the dashboard it can say “Design Comps” and “Design Comps” and until you click on that milestone you don’t know which one is for which project. This forces our project managers to put abbreviated titles for our projects at the beginning of milestones which just makes the process of entering and managing milestones that much more complex.
5. Miles of milestones
The worst side effect of any project management tool is when their is maximum effort required to change the project schedule. If the schedule is too difficult to change, then an artificial resistance to change can be introduced into the project. Basecamp has an all or nothing feature where milestones following any milestone can either be shifted as many days or not, but this is not “smart” enough to make a project manager efficient.
With all of these issues, does Basecamp have its place in a creative agency? Yes!
Next post: The Blessing
Letter Boxing
It has been an exciting week at Pop Art as we have just moved into our new office. One of our welcome additions has been the HDTV plasma screens we have available in our conference rooms. Setting up the widescreen tvs lead me to think about one of my pet peeves - incorrect use of aspect ratios on widescreen tvs. It seems everywhere I go - banks, malls, stores, airports - I see widescreen tvs set up incorrectly and it drives me nuts! C’mon people, you just upgraded to a nice widescreen. Use it correctly!
Here is a quick guide to help you out if you have a widescreen tv.
Widescreen Content
When displaying widescreen content on a widescreen tv, do not letterbox the content anymore than you need to (fig 1). This creates a distorted image where the content is squashed vertically. The entire reason for widescreen display is to not need the letterbox bars anymore! Remove them and the image will look so much better (fig 2).
Standard Content
When displaying standard content (4 x 3), do not stretch the image to fill up the entire screen (fig 3). I know you are really proud of your new widescreen, but this image distortion is hard to relax with. Instead, change your picture settings to use vertical bars to squash the image to a proportional resolution (fig 4). This makes it much easier on the eyes.
I hope this little guide helps a few people out there correctly set up their widescreen tvs.