Southern Fried

T.G.I. Interwebr’s Grill Slide 4Whew. I’m back from the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival and feeling a bit burnt out, in part because the show was bigger than ever this year. While I can’t say that its ferocious growth has caused South by Southwest to lose its singular usefulness as the friendliest and most thoroughly stimulating of digital conferences, scaling up nevertheless has its pluses and minuses.

That’s getting ahead of myself, though. I’m a little too fatigued to fully expand on that, but you can expect a post about this year’s experience in Austin in a day or two.

In the meantime, I’m going to offer up a little something from one of my appearances at the festival: my presentation at Monday night’s 20×2 event, the annual adjunct to the festival proper in which twenty participants are asked to answer a single, purposefully vague question in two minutes flat, using whatever creative powers they can summon.

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Offending Experts and Pleasing Everybody

An audio recording of my talk at Carson Systems’s Future of Web Apps conference has been posted online, so those interested in what I had to say but who couldn’t make it to the conference can now have a listen.

For myself, I’m pretty sure I’ll never plop it onto my iPod, as I hate hearing recordings of my voice. This probably runs counter to my interest in continually improving as a public speaker; it would do me some good to sit down and hear all my gaffes, my stuttering and my aimless diction. But I already subject myself to plenty of discomforts in the name of self-improvement, so this is one I’m just going to forgo for the time being.

I don’t mean to discourage you from listening to it, though. Several people told me my performance was ‘not all that bad’ and ‘definitely less painful than watching the slaughter of kittens.’ Go hear for yourself!

On a less disingenuously self-deprecating note, I wanted to share here a visual illustration of one of the things I mentioned in my talk. The idea is that, as interaction designers, we of course don’t want to offend any segment of the user base. But if you’re going to offend anyone, it should be experts and not beginners or intermediates.

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Shorter, Faster, Better

Okay, it’s true, I don’t blog enough. I used to think I was a fairly active blogger, but looking over the frequency of my posts for the past few months, it’s pretty obvious that I only manage to publish two or three times a week. And if that weren’t evident enough before now, this complaint about infrequency is the one thing that I heard loud and clear yesterday, sprinkled in amongst all the gratifyingly supportive commentary on my decision to start running ads from The Deck and Authentic Jobs on this Web site.

The problem is that, as an amateur writer, I have a particular weakness: an inability to be brief. Almost without fail, when I sit down at my computer to ‘dash off’ a post that I think will run only two or three paragraphs, I end up writing six or eight of them. What should take me ten minutes too often turns into an hour and ten minutes, and so I often can’t find the time to even start.

What I want to avoid, naturally, is the idea of quantity trumping quality — I don’t want to delude myself that readers will continue to tune into Subtraction.com just to read, for instance, that tomorrow evening I’m heading out to Austin, Texas for the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where, on Sunday, I’ll be doing a power session and a panel on “High Class and Low Class and Web Design,” and that if you’re there as well, please come up and introduce yourself before Tuesday afternoon, when I fly back to New York. I mean, that’s what Twitter’s for, right?

Still, I will take the feedback to heart and try and post more often, and in doing so, I’ll do my best at striking some kind of balance between brevity, quality and quantity. Here’s an example: a post like this one would normally ramble on for another several paragraphs, but for tonight, it’s going to stop right here.

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A Commercial Message

Some readers will have noticed that, starting several weeks ago, I began running job posts from Cameron Moll’s Authentic Jobs. This evening, for the first time, I’ve also started running ads from The Deck, Jim Coudal’s design-focused advertising network.

Truth be told, with the first move, I tried to sneak it through, without acknowledging it in any blog posts. Aside from the fact that they’re advertising, I figured that those job postings, being in black and white and being styled in such a way as to be very similar to the rest of the site, were visually innocuous. The ads from The Deck, however, are in color, and not so easily ignored.

I’m bracing for some scathing feedback from readers, so please, let me know how you feel if you find these changes to be offensive. We’ve been living with advertising on the Internet for over a decade now, but it’s still a topic that can inflame passions among reasonable people, and I respect that.

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