Seybold SF, Day Two
Christian Crumlish
First of all, the WOW party at Chevy's last evening was really fun.
I met some cool people from NCI (the National Cancer Institute), part of the US government's department of Health and Human Services, who have developed a comprehensive set of web development best-practice guidelines that they will be distributing free soon via PDF. They surveyed most of the important research in numerous related fields (which should save a lot of "reinventing the wheel") and have identified some areas where the evidence isn't rigorous and more study would be warranted. I'll post more info when I get it.
I got to hang out with WOW chair Bill Cullifer and co-chair Molly Holzschlag. I managed to introduce myself to Eric Meyer. I tried out my joke on him - "Are all your CSS gurus called Eric?" - and he said, "There's just two." (The other is Eric Costello.)
I talked to Adam Pratt from Adobe whose session on graphic optimization I'd enjoyed earlier in the day, and his friend whose name escapes me (we were drinking pitchers of margaritas, after all).
I saw from across the room but did not manage to catch up with Rebecca Blood and jjg. I hope they're still around later in the week.
But that was just yesterday and I said I'd talk about today. I felt a tad hung over this morning and was still putting the finishing touches on my Blogging and RSS presentation up to the last minute before barreling downtown in my battered Tercel and BARTing from Oakland to downtown SF, where I arrived in my room almost exactly on time (a half hour before my 2 PM session).
Anyway, I think it went well. I was a little manic and silly, and I poured out a dense stream of information about weblogs and RSS that still managed to fit in the hour allotted. There was a little time for some (excellent) questions and some applause at the end, so I hope it was good for the audience. It definitely functioned as a nice dry run for my intensive tutorial Friday afternoon. I've included the powerpoint in the link above because who knows when Seybold will manage to put it online, and I did this presentation gratis for the WOW sequence, so I assume I can give away the content if I want.
There are some good sessions this afternoon, but I feel a little crash coming on. I'm sitting amidst an OSCOM hackathon/sprint with goals of (1) AtomAPI implentations and (2) WebDAV vs AtomAPI. To my left is Sam Ruby, across from me is Kevin Burton and at 2 o'clock is Steve Jenson. They are all silently deep in thought. It's a little bit like a live version of the #joiito irc channel on freenode, with less chatter.
Oh, and at 5 PM there's something called Meet Craig.