My advice for putting together a conference lineup of speakers.
“Topless Meetings” (meaning laptopless meetings), the term I coined back in 2006 but that got a lot of publicity back in April, was a finalist for Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the year this year, beaten out by “hypermilling.” Crazy/weird.
I unwittingly entered Bizzaro World yesterday when the LA Times put on its front page a story about Todd Wilkens’ War on Crackberries which mentioned a term I’d jokingly come up with two years ago: the “topless” (as in laptopless) meeting. United Press picked up the story, and before you know it, we had three news crews in the office asking me about going topless.
I made a mistake today, an undoable one. I accidentally marked every single RSS feed I had as read. Some 700+ unread posts on the 130+ feeds I read.
Needless to say, I survived. Once I got over the “D’oh!” feeling, it was actually pleasant, a weight off my shoulders. I can actually tell at a glance what is new.
I need to do this more often.
I decided yesterday, partially inspired by Adam Greenfield’s IA or Not IA post about the conservatism of our industry, to shake things up and get rid of the RSS feeds of blogs who only said things I already mostly knew. (This was about 30 feeds!) Then I went and found blogs that were saying interesting things about subjects about which I only knew a little bit, but wanted to know a lot more: mobile and devices.
I’m in Sydney for a week, first giving my Designing for Interaction workshop at Web Directions 06 on Tuesday. Then, next weekend, giving a talk on Documenting RIAs and leading a workshop on Models of Invention at OZ-IA 2006. Hope to meet some of you there! (Wait for it…) Put another shrimp on the barbie, will ya mate?
I’m headed to Portland early Thursday morning for Webvisions 2006. If you are there, come to our panel: Let Go, Jump In: Community Marketing Strategies for Empowered Customers or just find me and say hi. I’m easy to spot these days: Elvis Costello glasses, orange bag, blue spot in my hair. I’m staying at the Jupiter Hotel, so likely I’ll be found at its late night bar, the Doug Fir. I’m also bringing a bunch of peyote so we’ll be sure to have some webvisions.
After reading some of Ryan’s posts about the state of modern comic books, I ventured, for the first time in probably 20 years, into a comic book store: the legendary Al’s Comics here in San Francisco. I’m trying to understand comics again.
There’s a different sort of patriotism in San Francisco than is commonly espoused as “patriotism” in the US, a type of patriotism that borders on annoying, so filled is it with passion and conviction. It’s the patriotism of Jefferson and Paine–men who believed in the separation of church and state, local governments, and the need, occasionally, for revolution.
