Day Two. Looking for that Pot of Gold
(subtitle: at the end of the rainbow)
Some random observations. About half the notebook computers, maybe more, are Apple Titanium Powerbooks, or variations of iBooks, but mostly Apple. Might be me. But I counted less than a dozen other computers out, and the Apple notebook seemed rather prevalent.
Conference attendees: mostly male. 80%, and of that 80%, 90% or better were white.
Guessing at ages, I’d suggest the preponderance of numbers were in their 20’s, but that’s just my estimate. Web movers and shakers. The web is is the natural home for geekiest. My people, as some of my associates would suggest. Still, makes me feel old.
I didn’t follow any one track, I just meandered in out of workshops, picking and choosing the titles that sounded either appropriate or informative.
What sucked: “Web Traffic Jam” workshop. It was an outline with a tepid Power Point “three bullet” slide presentation. Got all that data on the handout, which included the presenter’s upcoming book title, to be released this summer. Doubt I’ll buy that book. What I learned, and this isn’t new information, was about meta keywords, crap usually buried in the header of a web page. Seems that search engines check the keywords then see if they occur in the page itself. I’ll be trimming my keyword list, and playing with a few other sites I manage, to see if it helps. But there was one useful tidbit, I’ll put a “subscribe here” slot on the front page, in about a week when I can roll out the new layout. The data in the workshop didn’t suck, I was just offended by a really uninviting set of slides.
The next workshop was about publishing, delving into the fine line between print and web publishing. Okay, side note here, I first encountered Ben Brown in an SXSW workshop a few years ago. He was an inspired kid, obviously still brimming with youthful, somewhat misplaced enthusiasm. Different kid these days. Older. More piercings. Slightly better groomed. And he’s now running a micropublishing company. Handmade books. Cool stuff. Plus, he acknowledged that he has the same trouble with local media that I do. I felt an instant bond, “Yeah buddy, the local ‘alt weekly’ isn’t really that alt, is it?”
He also pointed out the power of the diversified web. When “The Onion” reviewed one of his books, he sold a half dozen copies. When Jason Kottke wrote about the same book, So New Media sold, “like, a hundred.”
Interesting.
The other panelist, and I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to chat, but I had a bus to catch, was the Rogue Librarian. Support your public library.
Humor, presented by this Aquarius who was really funny. But the audience missed some of the humor. When he got to showing some of his sites, I realized that I’d linked to several of humorous pieces over the years.
What really caught my attention was one of his opening comments about his mother being “a super anal, like, triple Capricorn….”
Since his day job was a “secret projects at GM,” I had to ask if flying cars are in our future. “I get that question of lot. Look: they can’t even parallel park, what happens when you add a Z vector. No way.”
I snuck into the last few minutes of the “adult webmaster” workshop, and I picked up one quote: “A friend runs a spanking website; it’s aimed mostly at women.”
Pud, over dinner after that workshop, admitted he was a little disappointed because most of the adult presenters were folks who ran the businesses as sideline or a hobby.
Dinner was pho, and there were a couple of big time folks there. I begged out to hit the “H-town bloggers” and DFWBloggers” happy hour. I saw one stand up two-minute act by a local critic, and I left with a pounding headache and very tired feet.