Pardon the brief, self-promotional nature of this post, but I just realized if I don’t get one up soon I’m going to miss the deadline – voting for SXSW Interactive 2010 ends this Friday!
Photo by ehnmark, cc-by license
I’ve submitted two panel proposals this year – each is described below with a voting link.
One of the panels I proposed for SXSW Interactive 2009 was on the intersection of open source and design:
Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.
The talk, unfortunately, wasn’t accepted for presentation at the conference, but they suggested that instead I do a shorter, podcast or video podcast version for the Extended Content program.
I did, and that content now has gone live on the SXSW site:
In our first installment of the Extended Content series, John Eckman tells you everything you need to know about open source and design. The differences and similarities, how they benefit each other and why they have trouble getting along.
Extended Content at SXSW Interactive
(Unfortunately they don’t allow embedding, so you’ll have to go there to watch it – and at least on two browsers I tried it on, you’ll have to wait for the whole thing to preload before it starts playing – so go get a cup of coffee or whatever while it loads).
It’s just shy of 20 minutes, and having been created back in February 2009 feels (to me) a bit outdated in spots – mostly the continued evolution of the work Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been doing with the Drupal community (not just on Drupal.org but also on Drupal 7 itself), which I encourage you to check out if you’re interested in the subject.
(via Dion Almaer and ReadWriteWeb)
Mozilla Labs posted a screencast yesterday of a new feature as part of the Weave project, which enables OpenID at the browser level, which will have potentially significant impact on adoption and use of portable identity technology.
Weave is a Mozilla Labs project, started back in December of 2007, which (before this latest announcement) was mostly known for their Sync service, which can synchonize (and keep in sync over time) bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history, and tabs, keeping your firefox browser experience consistent across multiple computers. It’s quite useful for those of us who have a work desktop, home desktop, and laptop, or some other combination of multiple computers regularly used.
This new effort, however, integrates OpenID into the Firefox user experience:
Read more…
Making Ice Cream
(Photo by Rachel J)
This weekend, freshly jet-lagged by back-to-back trips to the UK and Switzerland, with a brief stop in between for BarCampBoston 4, I attended the Northeast User Group Leader Summit, sponsored (thanks!) by O’Reilly Media and Microsoft. (Although I don’t technically lead a user group, I play host to BostonPHP at Optaros, volunteer for BarCampBoston, and participate in Boston’s Drupal and WordPress groups, as well as North Shore Web Geeks up in Newburyport.
The event, hosted in the new Microsoft NERD facility, brought together user group leaders from across the technology spectrum, and from New York to Maine. (See a shortlist of user groups represented in the wiki).
Read more…
Quick excerpt from an interview with Jeffrey Zeldman which includes some discussion of the impact of Open Source, and particularly open source CMS’s, on the process of designing and building web applications:
Although I think it’s important to draw a distinction between simple, relatively cheap licensing (the Expression Engine model) and Free and Open Source software, I generally agree that
Now, we have really powerful comparatively easy to understand, open source content management systems
And that this shift- from needing a large scale custom development project or an expensive proprietary CMS to now being able to leverage open source platforms – represents a key point in the maturity of web development.
