Day 3 was more or less a waste. I attended "Surviving Your Own Collaborative Project," Joshua Davis's keynote speech, and "Database Driven Websites." The first was the most interesting, though that's not saying much. The Mirror Project is a site where people upload pictures of themselves reflected in various shiny surfaces. Fray.com is a site for people to share their writing. And k10k is a design zine. All of these are non-commercial sites driven primarily by user submissions. Their sites are interesting, but the panel suffered from the same disease that affected all the sessions I attended today: they didn't really have a point. They did, however, cast off some kernels of wisdom:
- Derek Powazek of Fray said: "There is nothing like a collaborative project to make you figure out what your boundaries are." Submission pages start out short and vague and get much longer and more specific as people come up with things you never would have thought of, nor wanted to, which sends you back to the drawing board for your submission guidelines. What is obvious to the site owner is apparently not obvious to the eager but oblivious fans and hopeful participants: "Everything you didn't think you have to say, you have to say." Heather Champ of the Mirror Project showed some of the pictures she had to reject, including a "toilet's eye view" and pictures of non-reflective inanimate objects.
- According to Heather, there are just people out there who won't get it, no matter how clear and simple it might be.
- As may be obvious, they were all very clear that users will try to pass off others' works as their own, and they had to be vigilant for that sort of abuse.
- Derek added later: "If you ask them for 500 words, you will get 1000 words. If you ask for 1000 words, you'll never get it because it seems like too much."
- Derek on motivation: "These sites that we make are giant billboards for what we believe in."
- They all agreed, as might be obvious, that you need a thick skin. Rejected hopefuls don't take it well, but when a site gets big, there are far too many submissions for them to take, even if they were all top quality.
There's not much to say about Joshua Davis. It seems like he just engages in pointless Flash gimmickry. He demonstrated his noodling (in a rambling and noodling fashion), but I never saw the purpose of any of it besides that it amused him. That's perfectly fine, but when he's supposed to be this design guru, I'd like to think he has a handle on utility. Jothan had hardened my heart against him already, not to mention the Wired-meets-Wallpaper audience member who was sitting next to me muttering things like "Sick" (in a good way!) anytime Davis dropped a bombshell. I didn't get it. The whole "cult of personality" was kind of off-putting as well, even more so than with the weblog elite.
The final panel I attended was also a waste of time. The panelists didn't have an agenda and didn't know what their audience was going to be, so they just ended up having a Q&A with questions all over the map. Fucked Company's Phil Kaplan (a.k.a. "pud") had some questions about how to make his website scale. I only mention it because apparently his website is a mishmash of ASP, Cold Fusion, Perl, and PHP all running on MS SQL Server and some kind of flat-file database. Dude needed help, which I might have offered, but he took a call mid-session and left. His search engine uses LIKE '...%...' against BLOBs for crying out loud. The audience ranged from people who didn't really know what it was to people who had been doing it for years, like the guy who runs Distributed.net's statistics servers. There was one lady who asked "How do I get started? Should I use Flash, or UltraDev, or...?" I don't mean to ridicule ignorance, it's just that the panelists had no agenda, and so didn't supply attendees with useful information on whether they should be there. So nobody left happy. On a side note, I was pretty impressed with panelists Dirk Elmendorf of Rackspace and Ean Schuessler of Brainfood. The panelists were all clearly intelligent and understood the technology, but they were completely rudderless.
Hopefully tomorrow will be more productive. I still haven't finished my writeup from yesterday. Actually, I haven't been motivated to even start. Maybe it'll take a few days to digest.