Conference Day 1 - Final from Presentations

This is your code, obey the code.

To a degree, the presentations that I've chosen were geared toward my interests in the Web and where things are going as well as the aspects of designing for the Web and Social Media. My third session was about designing your products/business based on UX (user-experience). This was an interesting session and touched on some points that are fairly obvious when it comes to starting a business or creating a new product. Fundamentally, the issue is about making sure what you want to create is something that your target audience will want.

The fourth session was about storytelling and the impact of social media/"trans-media" on it. This session was a roundtable between Tania Yuki, Alex Barkaloff and Kevin Townsend. For me, this session ended up not being quite as valuable as I had hoped. Two things that the presenters kept coming back to and that I've believed in all along is that if you have a good story, the audience will come and that ratings systems for any type of media should be universal. There are other things that were interesting about the session, but the attitude of Alex Barkaloff and Kevin Townsend were kind of condescending and trite. I suppose that's what we should expect from big time producers. This session did make me think about one issue that I've taken note of. Digital media outlets (and I mean everything from YouTube to Craigslist) almost always start out as a solution to the personal need of the consumer/user. YouTube is a prime example. However, as big media has taken hold and recognized the power of these outlets, it becomes harder and harder to tell what is user generated and what is generated by a corporate giant. This is also evident on sites like eBay, where you can barely find things offered "garage sale" style by real users. So much stuff on eBay comes from business owners who have established ties to some type of warehousing agent or even directly with a manufacturer in China. I have a lot of thoughts on the impact of this, but I'll save those for later.

I also stopped by the expo. It's about half the size that it was two years ago. Makes it a bit tougher to gather t-shirts and other novelties, but it's still fun. Does anyone find it ironic that Microsoft is having a scavenger hunt where you use your iPhone to take photos of the hunt item in order to win a Zune?

Currently we're sitting at the keynotes and they've been interesting, but I'm hopeful that we'll see some knockout thing that no one saw coming.