On April 4, I attended The Yale Internet and Society Project's Library 2.0 Symposium. (Side note: it was ridiculously exciting, as a recent escapee from south Florida, to go to an event in another state and be able to drive there in less than six hours.)

Aside from transcription, formatting, and adding some links, these notes are presented as I took them - i.e., uncleaned up, sometimes random or unclear, and I've probably gotten a few things wrong or otherwise misrepresented them. My personal comments and observations are in brackets.

It was quite a good conference overall, but I felt some professional frustration in that the presenters with the more traditional library careers tended to be the ones who felt least current and relevant to me, while the non- (and wannabe) librarians seemed to "get it" much more--that fear of technology is so old hat it doesn't need to be restated in detail, that we need to embrace change, stand up for ourselves and our institutions, and get involved in our communities. There were definitely some exceptions, but that was my general impression.

Welcome

Conference materials will appear on these websites:

• http://isp.law.yale.edu
• http://yaleispblog.net
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/37029140@N05/
• hashtag: #lib20
• Videos will be posted after the conference

Since it’s a digital conference, they created a video to open the day in lieu of formal opening remarks:

Panel 1

Josh Greenberg, Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship, New York Public Library

• How do we digitize librarians and their experiences?
• Example of Jessica Pigza’s craft blog – started virally with no public link, worked with Design Sponge. Craft book exhibit eventually brought 400 ppl to NYPL exhibit, Flickr group created.
• Important themes: IP, changing role of libs, third-party sites
• Red tape involved to get out and do lib work where ppl are
• No lit yet on personal/professional blogging and tweeting and public’s perception of this fuzzy line

John Palfrey, Professor of Law and Vice Dean, Library and Information Resources, Harvard Law School

• 3 criteria of DNs: age, access, skills
• 100% of DNs start with Google then Wikipedia. Some cut and paste; others savvy skeptics.
• News currency: first step grazing; second step going to deeper to blogs; third step smaller group here re-blogs, creates own content
• We need to experiment; pick out what works
• Faculty: some sad about changes; others think we’re not changing fast enough
• Empirical research support
• What materials do we all just provide access to for everyone
• What about unique things?
• Collaborative collecting
• Need to share info about coll. stuff
• Services: moving from cathedral to bazaar model
• Young ppl and fac work in bazaar model – we need to be bazaar guides instead of high priests

Questions

• Q for JP: HLSL in ten years? A: Multi-faceted issue. Unique materials, BD materials, open access, Cohen fellowship – but we can’t do it all
• JG: tension between individual and institutional voices
• Q for JP: hurdles that need to be overcome? A: Local and IP hurdles, fac find OA procedures annoying, implementation is hard, publishing cycle needs to be broken, must be sure about preservation and commitment to archives, collective action opportunity rather than collective action problem. Crucial to push fair use boundaries: use it or lose it. [last sentence echoes in Twitter]

Ann Wolpert, Director of Libraries, MIT

• Books are mature tech; JP’s students aren’t reading books/extended arguments [Twittering law libs don’t think this is a problem]
• MIT fac discussion – committee formed after HU’s OA decision
• Fac view lib as what’s in front of them – each fac sure other disciplines work same way as theirs
• “so sue me” model of using fac’s own work – until they discovered open courseware site was gutted of copyrighted materials.
• Death Star of vendor consolidation [this reference was popular throughout the day]

Charles Cronin, Visiting Fellow, Yale Information Society Project

• An optimist, not a futurist
• Woolf quote about two types of readers
• 40 year crisis in pub libs; popular materials – piano rolls, films
• Problem: ppl not using libs for info [again, some Twittering law libs don’t think this is the problem]
• We need digital Carnegies

More Questions

• JG: paradigm shift needed – model of licensing to higher ed/businesses must be broken
• Questioner notes JP was the only person to mention special collections
• Question for JP: libraries in sky with bazaar at each individual school – how do ABA accreditation stds affect ability to change/re-org? A: JP worried no one will follow us in OA; hubris keeps us from collaborating – we need to stop competing on size of collections and start competing on how well we collaborate [good response to this on Twitter]

Panel 2

Mary Alice Baish, American Association of Law Libraries

• She’s not as cynical as she was a few years ago. Everyone seems to figure out answer to this before she says Obama
• Transparency pledge [do we need one from libraries?]
• Open govt directive: it should be transparent, participatory, collaborative (core principles of democracy [and maybe libraries?])
• Govt responsibility for e-lifecycle mgmt of docs: creation, metadata, version control, official status, citation, authentication, permanent accessibility
• EPA example – digitization without standards = bad
• Change of culture after re-opening of EPA libraries – all about community [this should be underlined three times]

Michael Zimmer, Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

• Postman on Faustian bargain with technology
• Long tail
• [can libs really see FB data from those who fan their pages as opposed to friend them personally? I think not.]
• Proposes best practices for Library 2.0
• [Faustian bargain with tech can't be as bad as the deal we've got with vendors, can it?]

Ted Striphas, Assistant Professor of Media & Cultural Studies; Director of Film & Media, Indiana University Department of Communication and Culture

• Focus on booklike aspects of Kindle obscure the ways it attempts to go beyond books
• Why is Kindle always marketed displayed with books/paper materials?
• Book recommendation: Gary Hull, Digitize This Book
• Commodification of audience labor - Kindle users are a mass, unsuspecting focus group

Jessamyn West, Community Technologist, Librarian, and Blogger

• Her slides at http://librarian.net/talks/yale2009
• Ppl who need egovt have the least access
• 2.0 can feel like the anti-local
• Michael Pollan variation: “Use the Internet. Not too much. Mostly _____.” What’s the _____? [I propose Twitter in jest; Tom Bruce proposes lolcats; Stephanie Davidson proposes "read information. Not too much. Mostly non-commercial" which I really like.]
• [Everyone laughed at the picture of Jessamyn’s library building, which I thought was no more laughable than Langdell. Small cottage, big stone temple: both very traditional.]

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

• Was at 1999 ARL and OCLC joint meeting in Colorado – sensed fear
• Library definitions, noun - pooling arrangement to deal with scarcity, first sale doctrine, organized piracy
• Notes JP’s use of lib as verb [my notes unclear here]
• Talks abt “consumption of knowledge.” Is knowledge gone when you consume it? What comes out the other end? A: We call that scholarship
• Project Gutenberg – what a crazy idea to just start typing in books
• Mentions .sig of Michael Hart (of PG)
• Boldness of Google Books – why aren’t libraries doing this??
• Perfect is the enemy of the good [this echoes through Twitter] [why does JZ get what many librarians don’t?]
• Makes fun of WAX [Harvard's web archiving system]
  

Panel 3

Laura Gassaway, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law, University of North Carolina School of Law

• History of copyright act

Jonathan Band, Technology and Law Consultant

• Proposes Fair Use Legal Defense Fund and notes EFF and other orgs already do some of this work

Denise Troll Covey, Principal Librarian for Special Projects, Carnegie Mellon University Libraries

• Book recommendation: Corynne McSherry, Who Owns Academic Work?
• Libraries should exercise and foster civil disobedience and moral courage

Kenneth Crews, Director of Copyright Advisory Office, Columbia University

• Balance is impossible so throw it out and do good stuff
• Copyright is a social interface – law is abt ppl
• Awkward social relationship with copyright
• Private responses and structural responses
• Creative commons – Google Books
• Remember that Google Books settlement is only about books
• Fragmentation in the future of books, readers, publishers, libraries
• New libraries: [need to get text of this slide in full] Expanding universe of… Supernova… Ecology… Gatekeeper… Appeasers… Apologists…

Panel 4

Jeff Cunard, Partner, Debovoise & Plimpton

• Overview of Google Books settlement

Guy Pessach, Lecturer, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Digital archives in Europe

Frank Pasquale, Visiting Professor of Law, Yale Law School

• Similarity between private health insurers and Google. Google as middleman
• Mentions Darnton’s On the Media appearance last week discussing “cocaine pricing” of info
• Book recommendation: Jessica Lipman, Digital Copyright
• [try to find his slides – a unique and interesting take, but my brain was full]

Brewster Kahle, Digital librarian and co-founder of the Internet Archive

• Discusses problems in MIT’s making available digital copy of 1964 book Libraries of the Future by J. Licklider – which had been published by MIT.
• Orphaned works
• We’re very close to universal access to knowledge – let’s not stumble now.
• Book recommendation: Terry Fisher, Promises to Keep</li>
• Google gets libraries to work against each other with non-disclosure [sounds like Westlaw]

Concluding remarks

Yale’s Librarians on Parade movie was played

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_eGdSp47Uw&hl=en&fs=1]

Where are we moving books and libraries to now?

(March 26 I attended an Apple-sponsored AcademiX seminar at MIT. Or most of it--had to dash back to the office for a meeting in the afternoon and I didn't make it back for the end of the day. What I went to, however, was quite good.

Here are my notes, raw and uncorrected except for formatting, with occasional comments in brackets.)

iTunes U: Case Study Panel
Kate James, Open Course Ware, Production Mgr., Video Coordinator, MIT
Jim Marko, New Media Producer, NJIT

Kate James:
In 2000, questions abt how internet would impact education, what to do about it.

Faculty conclusion wasn’t about money, but because of nature of MIT education (collaboration, etc), they recommended putting materials online for free—because it isn’t degree-granting, representative of interactive classroom environment, no contact with faculty. (Occasionally compelling requests are passed to faculty, but not often.)

OCW is free, will continue to be perm at MIT.

Voluntary contribs from ~80% faculty.

Various stats abt OCW. Creative Commons non-com/attrib/share alike audience.
Permitted to mix math lectures with dance beats

Translations happening

60% of access is from outside North America

Every six months entire site burned to drive and shipped to places like Nigeria where bandwidth and connectivity are issues

Inspiring movement—250 institutions in OCW consortium

Production process

Recruiting faculty
diff ways—superstar faculty, durable content, core curriculum, MIT-unique, distinct pedagogy, more and more fac submitting info

Preparation
wardrobe (no white or checked shirts), props and other things to focus on, third-party materials (can’t have NY-er cartoons), student privacy, not Hollywood (mistakes okay)

Capture
Sony HDR-SR11 10.2mp 60gig hi def hard drive handycam
Wireless mics

Scrub and review
every minute reviewed for IP and 3rd party stuff, student privacy etc.
look for actual start and end
create edit sheet if necessary

Edit & Compress
final cut, iMovie, MetaX (neurotic about metadata)
Sorenson media squeeze for compression

(can email KJ for notes)

Publishing
Moving from (couldn’t catch name) to four different models,
iTunes U,
Loves that iTunes supports PDF notes downloads, but it doesn’t support captioning
YouTube enhanced channel with 893 videos 21,000 subscribers
Will put smaller pieces on YouTube, but not iTunes U
Internet Archive for “pesky Linux users”, old stuff, small stuff (files check in at IA, but don’t check out)
Also video lectures.net

Transcribing
as much as they can
recent addition to process
human transcribes, student reviews
increases discoverability
popular with non-native English speakers
need to find way to bring cost down (lecture browser)

Example of finished course page:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/18-02Fall-2007/VideoLectures/detai...

Jim Marko:
NJIT has tons of legacy materials – started pilot podcasting project in 2005.

iTunes U at NJIT collaboration between Uni Web Services, Uni IS, ??

UWS goal: manage and establish a greater web presence for the university
redesign, embrace Web 2.0, etc.

How do you get from here to there?

Challenge of populating site with quality material? Convert preexisting content, faculty recording , student reporters

Web content writer helped create podcasts to complement stories

Prof on video talking about essay as sole way students report is antiquated. New ways (podcasting, etc.) help them sharpen thinking.

Technical challenges for faculty not such a big deal now.

iTunes compared to network TV, website as premium cable, YouTube as all of the above + public access tv.

iTunes U provided good exposure for early adopters

5 year faculty plan has inspired podcasting.

Take-away tips:
Be a collector, not a curator—you never know what will appeal
Curate for quality and accuracy, but not interest.
Fences make good neighbors—one dept should have keys rather than profs uploading

Convince a professor of podcasting value- that person will get three more profs involved

Things to think about:
• Who will assume ownership
• Technical resources are required to establish a private face
• Getting faculty and university buy-in
(some profs will still think iTunes is only for Mac-using students!)

KJ: value of iTunes U is album unit creation. In YouTube, most lectures are found by other means than the channel—frequent comments from ppl wondering where other material is. YouTube announcing education channels maybe tomorrow.

(March 26 I attended an Apple-sponsored AcademiX seminar at MIT. Or most of it--had to dash back to the office for a meeting in the afternoon and I didn't make it back for the end of the day. What I went to, however, was quite good.

Here are my notes, raw and uncorrected except for formatting, with occasional comments in brackets.)

[This particular presentation was the highlight of the day--very inspiring.]

The Center Cannot Hold: Living, Learning, and Leading in a Networked World
Dr. Paul D. Hammond, Director of Digital Initiatives, Department of English and Dr. Richard E. Miller Chair, Department of English and Executive Director, Plangere Writing Center Rutgers University

Very exciting for English teachers to speak at MIT.

Explanation of title – Yeats, advent of WW2 [I don't know why, but it's weird to see Yeats in Keynote template]

Hammond’s work on American apocalypticism.

Unprecedented economy, environment, government

We need to begin to imagine how to teach differently – not squeeze same old thought into new tube of toothpaste, but fundamentally different.

Miller notes that change is unprecedented because it is global. But wait: crisis or opportunity? That’s what we in education are asking ourselves.

Leopard screenshot: this is the machine of our age. But computers won’t solve our problems. Education experiences with unkept promises of tech. “If we can just get our students to Twitter about WoW in Second Life, we’ll be set.”

Turning off everything doesn’t work any better.

Hammond notes spent 8-12 hrs in lib in graduate school, but hasn’t been back yet…but reads more than ever.

Our info access is unprecedented, as is ability to get work out there. Beginning of a closing of a circle.

Teaching of writing has always been bedeviled by audience being untrue. Teacher says “think of your audience” Student says “I do…it’s you”

Ability to transform passive experience

Printing Press got us out of oral mode, but not into interactivity.

Getting students to engage with problems with our times—problems that don’t have solutions, but ways of being understood.

Enabling ways to drill down deeply beyond superficial aspects. Understanding of not only complexity but depth.

Books are not the main vehicle for people communicating the most important issues at this time. Books great tech for thinking, allowing for extended thought that is clearly endangered by (youtube example). Lends itself of grotesque triviality.

Best news we can get on Comedy Central.

Enabling students to see how things are put together, how do they take access to info and work on it themselves.

Our responsibility as humanists, compositionists is to teach our students to use this stuff. We haven’t done it well.

Designed a controlled experiment. Writers House.

• Access to ubiquitous computing
• Pedagogies that foster creativity and collaboration
• inspiring teachers of new media composition
• spaces that foster collaborative learning

We won’t be teaching keyboarding, MS Word—likely Final Cut, whatever it’s called then.

Delayed reaction to joke about ubiquitous computing in US.

Encourages us to spend time going to local high schools. Stories from comm. college professor abt what our nation has done to public education were shocking.

Education has always been designed first/foremost for convenience of teachers. Student-centered ed isn’t about petting Bobby, but putting him face to face with fundamental experience of learning--frustration, challenge, pushing through that.

How do we transform learning space from 100 years ago to create learning spaces for now?

There’s a diff btw computer labs and experimental labs

Need to teach students to think with tech the way we teach them to think with writing. Vast majority of use for tech right now is for goofing around.

Q: how hard is it to get teachers (on board)?
A: (Hammond) Central stumbling point is acknowledgment that 20 yo mimeographed notes don’t cut it. [Yes. I had some easily 20 year old overhead sheets that had been poorly transferred to PowerPoint in one of my library school classes just over three years ago. Not Cool.]

A: (Miller) When we say center cannot hold, need to move from 1.0 [sage on stage] to 2.0. How many PhD programs have changed in light of all this? Answering questions doesn’t mean we can think. We need to be experts not at content management but at facing the unknown – how do we fix the economy? [possibly I have really mangled this answer]

A: (Hammond) Notes that we don’t know what the implications for this are.

Q: What’s the role of Shakespeare in these kinds of projects?
A: (Miller) New bucket for carrying info to students, have to realize this (Keynote, PPT) is NOT like the slide projector. You don’t get from Ptolemy to Copernicus just by moving a few words around. Does not mean Shakespeare is not relevant. We will never have anything to say if we don’t know something deeply. Universities need to stand for knowing something in depth and complexity.

Q: [missed it]
A: Loss of newspapers, disappearance of snail mail are not modest changes. People say “sure, GM can go out of business…but why is my research budget cut?” These ppl have no center to their world. [extreme paraphrase]

Young people’s facility with technology grossly oversold. We don’t find curiosity, despite having access to everything. Creativity also missing. Collaboration may take place only in WoW.

[how does the library inspire curiosity at HLS?]

They are trying to invent genre of idea-driven visual essay.

We're missing the idea that you can think in these media (but we know you can entertain and sell crap)

Miller admits that they have taught a lot of terrible classes…new pedagogy, creativity needs failure. Hammond: like in science, there’s a lot of screwing up, doing over

Miller: question he asks sometimes: how many of you work in English departments with 5 IT people? (He does, but it took 12 years)

(March 26 I attended an Apple-sponsored AcademiX seminar at MIT. Or most of it--had to dash back to the office for a meeting in the afternoon and I didn't make it back for the end of the day. What I went to, however, was quite good.

Here are my notes, raw and uncorrected except for formatting, with occasional comments in brackets.)

Open: The New Deal for Education
Dr Vijay Kumar, Senior Associate Dean & Director,
Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT), MIT

Gathering storm of open ed movement and it’s potential for transformation

Movement characterized by open content, open tech, open knowledge

Shout-out to Social Life of Info [my favorite library school read]

Open courseware – almost 2000 at MIT. Two remarkable things when initiative announced: first: whoa, this is big. Second: none of us knew what it meant.

(Side benefit: figuring out how many courses they had.)

Benefit for educators: saving time and lowering stress

Benefit for students: students elsewhere can check out notes for better understanding
Open courses also serve as model, benchmark

We typically think of higher ed with this stuff, but there are notable K-12 efforts

MIT has “highlights for high school” open courseware channel featuring material that might be of use/interest to that group.

(the preceding section is “Metaversity Part I”, more about content, stand alone stuff)

Metaversity Part II: Harvesting the Collective Advantage

Examples in this section launched from MIT, but involve other players

MIT Online Laboratories
iLab provides access to actual labs via internet—not simulations

Communities form to discuss results

Transformative dimension: iLabs not just about making equipment available, alters econ of lab instruction—equipment is expensive (equipment, time, etc). iLab provides potential for 24/7 access. You must believe first-hand lab instruction important to education experience

MIT students have access to labs elsewhere too

Research tools for learning

Spoken lecture browser (lecture browser – spoken language systems)
idea is to search lectures to get relevant snippets

Shakespeare performance in Asia video presentations is another app of this

MIT Visualizing Cultures - http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/home/index.html

Wonderful to have various apps, many repositories, but need to bring them together

This isn’t just about e-learning, but also national efforts.
India National Knowledge Commission Recommendations for Open Education Resources (OER)
http://www.knowledgecommission.gov.in/recommendations/oer.asp

Open ed movement offers way around problem in India of insufficient schools (could build a school a day and not catch up)

Indo-US Collaboration of Engineering Education (IUCEE)
http://www.iucee.org/

OER value proposition
• open high quality digitized content, tools, communities
• available anytime, anywhere, free
• localizable and remixable
• allows for collective improvement and feedback
• alternate way to learn: accelerate/deepen learning
• scaling excellence
(also allows a lot of feedback to improve on what you do)

“We know how to share our research, but not how to share our pedagogy”

Open Ed vision elements – two important dimensions it enables
1. Blended learning - intelligent combination of physical and virtual
2. Boundary-less ed – beyond geo-political, off campus, research teaching, disciplines, etc.

This is not a pipe dream--however you interpret pipe!

MIT Council on Ed Tech Strategic thrust
promote active learning
bolster… [missed catching this slide, but it was good]

Collectivity culture expressed by what we see (web 2.0 logos slide)

Group of Gen Y students who want to work for NASA, belief about the NASA culture they want to work with, their set of slides. (Why isn’t a whole generation connecting to NASA?)

Q: Are there opportunities for open learning coming out of stimulus bill? A: we think so – variety of responses from institutions. (tongue in cheek – tell your legislators!) Q followup: any particular leaders supporting this? A: great awareness of possibilities, industry leaders, people of influence serving on various boards, Hewlett and Carnegie foundations as champions of open education.

(March 26 I attended an Apple-sponsored AcademiX seminar at MIT. Or most of it--had to dash back to the office for a meeting in the afternoon and I didn't make it back for the end of the day. What I went to, however, was quite good.

Here are my notes, raw and uncorrected except for formatting, with occasional comments in brackets.)

Welcome and Opening Comments
Scott Morris, Learning Services & Communities,
Strategic Education Solutions, Apple Inc.

Four AcademiX sessions happening around the country - not Apple marketing, abt learning what ed customers are doing.

Digital learning environment: create, access, distribute - held together by collaboration. Innovation happening outside LMS

People of the Book v. Digital Natives. – we here today are mainly former

What would we know if none of us had ever read a book.

We can’t predict what big things are happening, but we can be involved

Distribution:
In oral cultures, edu required proximity – now it’s everywhere at all times.

Literacy enables other rational discourses

What are time/space constraints, biases of digital world?

Access:
Mobility changes this. (No parking app joke)

Wikinomics quote: new promise of collaboration is that with peer production we will harness human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence more efficiently and effectively…

How do we create next gen of professionals/citizens, getting them to stand on shoulders of giants.

Instead of editing the previous post...

Pogue's keynote was rousing and inspiring, even for those of us who were familiar with much of what he was talking about. It was beyond fantastic to have such a tech oriented, tech-powered (perfect use of presentation software, videos, live demos) session at AALL--and at the keynote, no less. Big kudos to whomever helped select and bring him in.

While I was eating lunch, I realized Pogue's keynote could just as easily have been a session at SXSW, and that made it rock another time over.

I've never actually liveblogged before, but I'm sitting with some fellow geeks at the AALL keynote and just paid for wifi access, so why not? The twist: I'm also knitting a sock and Twittering.

Honorary badge: "ich bin law librarian!!!"

Mac nut - yay! (Law librarians need more Mac evangelism.)

Slide graphic: "everyone's going to think I'm into Dianetics"

Will focus on five or six macro trends.

Last telegram: an ad for herbal viagra

I didd a lot of research - googled for six minutes

The future: nobody knows. End of Keynote!

Not.

VOIP. Why isn't Skype on a cellphone?

T-mobile hotspot at home - transitions seamlessly to T-mobile network. (This was announced June 29.)

Watching Grand Central commercial. I heard about that one years ago--didn't know it was still around.

Text 466-45 with query to get closest query match from Google.

Other things: weather, flight number, stock quotes, movie name and zip, definitions, driving directions, unit and currency conversions.

Pogue demo-ing Goog411.

Cha Cha. (I know someone who signed up to do this. She is not a librarian. I wouldn't want to do that!)

X-treme sarcasm: voicemail directions "when you're finished, you may hang up" Pogue: NOOOOOO!

Voicemail alternatives/text transcription services: callwave, phone tag, spinvox.

Big news about iphone is not what it is, but how it came about - carriers not consulted. Cingular CEO didn't see iPhone till two weeks before launch. Everyone copying model.

Hulu - one 15 sec commercial. Better than TV, but you're sitting at your computer looking like a dork.

Splintering graph includes mystery items phlogs (phone blogs) and Krogs. Anyone know what a Krog is?

Comcast: 9000 hours/month of on-demand everything. Why should shows come on at a certain time? (Since technical limits are no more. TV as giant jukebox.

It doesn't matter that blu-ray won format war, since it's not going to be about plastic discs - but this may not happen for another decade before 50% of households don't have high speed internet.

We need national movement for 27-hour day--or common sense. (Me, I'd bet on the 27-hr day)

Skpe phones: cost $175, then no fees again, ever

Trend coming: wireless everywhere, everything. Cameras, kindle, etc.

Eye-fi wireless card for camera - will automatically transmit high res pictures to your computer and ~20 photosharing services. An endless memory card.

Talking about Web 2.0. "I don't know if you're aware of web 2.0..."

Microsoft's blog - minesweeper/mimesweeper

Pogue giving us a copyright challenge quiz. When Pogue gave this to a college audience, not a single hand raised.

Ethics/credibility issues related to blogging, YouTube--LonelyGirl15.

Net neutrality. (Glad Pogue discussed this, since the proposed net neutrality program got turned down.)

Rattling off amazing examples we haven't heard of: Prosper (ordinary people making microloans), Kiva (same thing, but third-world countries), Goloco (ridesharing), E-petitions.uk, Who is Sick? (probably the first time the words "bloody stool" have been uttered in AALL keynote.)

Keeping up, overwhelmed...

Give it time, things settle down, people push back (e.g. net neutrality)

Pogue singing history of music downloads in 2 minutes...sing me a song, you're the music/tv man [Steve Jobs]...Tube, I've got YouTube...young man, you've just been sued by the R.I.A.A....people behind me are singing along.

And a well-deserved standing ovation.

Panel blurb: Want your web site to display more quickly? This book presents 14 specific rules that will cut 25% to 50% off response time when users request a page. Author Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. Even sites that had already been highly optimized, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines. The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. Other sources of information pay a lot of attention to tuning web servers, databases, and hardware, but the bulk of display time is taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of that process.

Panelist: Steve Souders, formerly Chief Performance Yahoo!, now at Google
A slower version of Souders's presentation that incorporates his slides is available at Yahoo! Developer Network Theater. A complete list of the rules and short explanations are also available at the Yahoo! Developer Network.
-----
Ahhh, yes. My second SXSW panel, and it was mostly over my head. I thought that was great. Yep, I'm at a technology conference. My notes are quite short for this one:

• Souder's book contains 14 best practices for speeding up webpages
• Speed matters
  
• Bug checking tools: Firebug and YSlow (YSlow was originally developed in-house for Yahoo, and is now also available as a Mozilla add-on.
• Keep scripts as far down as possible on pages, and put style sheets above scripts - MySpace pages break these rules [no surprise there!]
  
• Stuff about caching
• Focus on front-end
  
• Two quick fixes: add expires headers and use Gzip components
  

The book reading sessions were fast-paced half-hour segments that took place in the day stage, a room that had both a traditional audience set-up and scattered tables and chairs. There was a small cafeteria line set up in one corner, where I incidentally got the best food I've ever had at a convention center: a (non-Taco Bell) taco. It was a convenient and comfortable place to casually drop in, get a snack, and check email while listening to snippets of interesting content. I popped into a couple others, but this is the only one I took notes on.

Panel blurb: Vitruvius, the first Roman Architect to write about architecture, asserted that any well-designed building must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas or be durable, useful and beautiful. Can these same three tenets be applied today to help us design better interactions in a digital environment? This presentation will first touch on the similarities between designing buildings and designing digital interactions. Then, there will be an introduction to Vitruvius and his book, De Architectura. In his book Vitruvius writes about this notion of a well-designed building being durable, useful and beautiful. Those three qualities will first be looked at in their historical context, but then will be examined to see how they translate into the contemporary context of interaction design.

Panelist: Jennifer Fraser, Lead User Experience Designer, Corel Corporation (Fraser has degrees in building architecture)
Presentation slides are available at SlideShare.
[edited to add] Presentation audio

Notes:

• Interaction design is a profession in its infancy
• Vitruvius was a theorist, not practitioner - we only know of one building he designed plus his treatise De Architectura consisting of ten books
• Trivia: Leonardo's famous Vitruvian Man drawing is called that because it is based on Vitruvius's principles of ideal human proportions [I'd always assumed the proportions were original to Leonardo]
• Three design qualities: durability, convenience, beauty
• An example of what we might start with when approaching a project: the Winchester House
• Various foundations for different designers: OS, browsers, Facebook apps, mobile devices, etc. If not carefully built, project/product turns into house of cards
• Importance of failing gracefully. Examples: Twitter's 404 page and error pages, Firefox's "restore session" feature when restarting after crashes
• Not so great: MS asking you to send crash data
  
• No south-facing libraries in ancient Rome because of damp south winds
  
• Rooms = webpages
• Matching is important - don't mix Doric and Ionic features
• Adhere to established vocabularies and conventions, or at least be aware of them
• Good: MS Office 2007 minibar that shows up just when you need it and fades away after a moment
  
• Modern interpretations of Vitruvius's three design qualities: usable, useful, desirable
  
• Fraser used an equilateral triangle with points B, C, and D (for beauty, convenience, and durability) to illustrate. The aspiration is to be in the middle (in most cases--some products/projects will vary). Try to figure out where your project is in the triangle. There will be tension and pull between internal and external stakeholders.
• It is terrifying what people will do with products!

Thoughts:
Fraser's session was mainly theoretical and abstract, but managed to be practical at the same time. She said that she had been curious how traditional building architecture principles could be applied to interaction architecture design, and chose Vitruvius after considering several others.

Fraser's content was fantastic, but I wish she hadn't tied herself so closely to the prepared text. She made nice use of humor, but I'm not sure how much of the audience caught it in her delivery. That said, presenting solo to a SXSW crowd is an act of bravery I'm not sure I'd be up for.

Photo © Luc Viatour GFDL/CC

Even at a conference with good wifi nearly everywhere,* I still don't know how people keep up with posting about conferences as they happen.

* Alas, I was in the overflow room during Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's now infamous lame interview/keynote by Business Week's Sarah Lacy, and couldn't access Twitter, so I missed the backlash. I left after 20 minutes anyway, because it was boring. The groundbreaking message: "Facebook helps people communicate more efficiently." Wow, huh? Robert Scoble nailed it when he twittered that Lacy was asking too many business questions, and Zuckerberg was giving too many PR answers.

Some reports I've read point to sexism as part of the reason the audience reacted as they did, but I don't think that had (much) to do with it. Zuckerberg simply needed an interviewer more mature and experienced than he is, and instead he got one who was less mature. I'd never heard of Lacy before, and I wonder how many live interviews she's done in the past, or if she mainly works in text.

Back from the digression, a few items to note:

• Got to play with an XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child program at the session on the future of textbooks, which was fantastic. It's pretty neat; I hadn't realized it's a tablet PC!
  
• Kathy Sierra was incredibly inspiring. I went up to thank her afterward and had that nervously-interacting-with-a-celebrity-feeling(!), but managed to get out what I wanted to say.
• After two sessions for which I felt I'd got our money's worth, I went to the LOLWUT? session, about the story of Icanhascheezburger.com. Definitely the sleeper hit of SXSW. I think a lot of people expected it to be silly, but it was a coherent, informative, and all-around excellent presentation. Bonus: they bought cheeseburgers for the audience! Will blog more about it later, but funny factoid: all the librarians who'd been in the textbook session were there!
• The exhibit hall is small compared to library conference exhibit halls, but it's good. I got lots of cool stickers, a Mapquest T-shirt, checked out some interesting products, saw the most amazing mini-planetarium show, and bought the coolest flashdrive in the galaxy. Oh, and got some pens from the Google booth. They don't work. I'm trying not to read too much into that.
  
• It took being here two full days before we ran into a local with an accent. I haven't felt much like I'm in Texas, which I haven't visited before. Austin is a strange blend of cultures. I suppose that explains the exhortation to keep it weird. :) It also seems to have a certain Mom-and-Pop town feel that a lot of similar towns and larger cities have lost. I'm curious how much of this has been constant over the last 30-40 years, or whether there's been much revitalization involved along the way.
  
• The People-Powered Party sponsored by Threadless and Etsy last night was fun. I spent most of the evening chatting with a group of New Zealanders, including a couple who were here on their honeymoon! My breakfast waitress had mentioned them to me that morning, so it was funny to run into them.
  
• This morning, I went to see Crawford, about the impact of George W. Bush's move to Crawford, TX on its residents. Lots of humor, an inspiring history teacher, and some moving moments. It made me want to visit, though I'm not sure that was its intended effect!
• I am enjoying hearing words and references in sessions here that I couldn't imagine hearing at library conferences. :)
  
• I finally tried Guitar Hero in the exhibit hall. (There are Guitar Hero and Rock Band stations all over.) It wasn't pretty.
  

Until I get back, I have unprotected my Twitter updates, and will continue to post most of my observations there.