The most juicy, for lack of a better term, panel during the remainder of SxSW had to be the Clay Shirky chat on Sunday morning. It has been a long time since I felt so inspired by someone on a Sunday morning. It was something I had much been looking forward to and the experience did not disappoint. Here’s a short clip of Mr. Shirky speaking about education,

A couple of other panels really stand out. Josh Knowles gave an excellent presentation titled, Add Some XBox to your UX. He covered the basic design elements of gaming, namely earning points, achievements and unlockables. He provided one of the more succinct explanation of a concept all conference,

Just kicking a ball around can be fun. Kicking it hard. Kicking it at things. Running after it. But by wrapping this playful activity in the rules of soccer — put players on teams, give the field boundaries, set specific goal zones, and such — you get a complex and challenging game which billions of people find meaningful.

I also felt a kinship on account of both of us being 6′5″ former English majors with a distaste for Jakob Nielsen, never underestimate the value of a distaste for Jakob Nielsen.

Oh – here’s a really cool site with some new CSS working it’s way into our browsers (as long as it’s not IE), http://sxswcss3.com/. Go ahead and check out the source code on that cool puppy.

Tuesday, the last day, featured a couple of really good presentations. There was “Effective Dashboard Design, Why Your Baby is Ugly“ by Aaron Hursman. Then, there was the highly attended session “Interactive Infographics” which featured several good speakers, including Shan Carter from the NYTimes. From the latter, I found it interesting that the NYTimes pairs a designer with a reporter and nothing is represented which is not verified to be true. If something can not be verified, it is simply omitted from the final infographic.

SxSW was inspiring, exhausting and exhilarating all at once. New friendships were formed. Old friendships were revived and plenty of libations were enjoyed. I can’t wait until next year.

After that, I attended a panel with a couple of Google UX’s called Long Distance UX. Like many, I walked out early because there was little of value provided beyond the obvious. I’ve been doing remote UX work for a couple of years now and discovered no new insights. At times, the panel didn’t explain itself well or made statements that appeared to border on the ridiculous. With both the first panels, I thought the topics where covered with too broad a brush and some more practical examples might have been more useful.

My day ended at the Battle for Your TV panel where sparks flew. This was a blood bath that pitted Mark Cuban (HDNet / Dallas Mavs) versus Avner Ronen (Boxee). Here’s a hint, Cuban barely blinked, much less bleed.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/swnktstic/

I think Cuban stunned Ronen right out by attacking Boxee on the lack of a revenue model. In turn, Ronen attempted to attack Cuban on Broadcast.com. These efforts failed miserably. Questions about Broadcast.com were met with responses like,

(Broadcast.com) made more money in a quarter than any revenue ever made by Boxee.

(Broadcast.com) was going to go cash flow positive the quarter Yahoo decided to buy the company.

Ronen had no answers. This first rampage by Cuban was slowed only by the fire alarm that forced the evacuation of the convention center. When conversation reconvened, Cuban picked up where he left off. During a Q & A section, there was a long line of angry, rambling attendees ready to take on Cuban. He quickly dismissed all challenges, sometimes with funny responses. Mark Cuban is just plain whip smart.

Like others, I came into the room leaning towards Boxee. I wanted to believe. I came out totally convinced by Mark Cuban. He spoke intelligently about revenue models and why distribution systems other than the Internet made more financial sense. He also made it abundantly clear that he was platform agnostic in that he simply looked for good return on his investment. If distribution via web video providers would provide adequate guarantees, he would be happy to work deals. Cuban demonstrated great knowledge of the domain while Ronen, sadly, looked lost. It saddens me to say this, but I think Ronen may have hurt Boxee more than he helped here. I have a hard time seeing the long term viability of the company after listening to their chief executive. I also came out with a whole new level of respect for Mark Cuban.

Overall, my first day was positive. The Mark Cuban panel was as exciting as any i’ve seen at any conference. I also had a great time chatting with very interesting, intelligent people about topics on which I am passionate. I can’t wait until tomorrow.

aside: when pondering such important matters, it’s always important to do it in the 3rd person – for objectivity of course.

One might imagine using an iPad in the morning and evening to read emails, browse blogs and online news sources at home, activities presently performed on one’s iPhone but better suited to a larger screen. Scrolling using a mouse or even the trackpad don’t exactly feel natural.

However, one is likely hesitant to commit to purchasing an iPad. Truth be told, this author longs to hold one at the local Apple store, only then can a final decision be reached. It might have been an easier decision if the iPad had come equipped with built in iSight. A model for CDMA networks would have also helped encourage the purchase of something other than the WiFi only model. As for other features, one can with confidence (or lots of hope) believe Apple will deliver multitasking on the device at some point.

At the end of the day, this a significant leap forward not in what it delivers with this first version, but in the promise this device holds for the future. Imagine one’s technologically challenged mother, not computer savvy using this device to satisfy her basic communications needs through interactions that feel natural. Those astounding interactions that many have observed in awe as young children quickly understand on the iPhone; this device will succeed on the back of interactions like that for browsing pictures.

Alas, this decision will likely be borne out of the total collapse of any inner fortitude that may attempt to provide resistance to the siren song that many Apple products emit. If the iPad sings it’s lustful song, this sailor is likely to jump in the water and swim in the magic.

The post explored leveraging the searches of other users to gain insight into what boyfriends and girlfriends might care about most. I figured i’d take it a step further and perform the same experiment for married people, contrasting it to those of the original experiment. I threw the results into a grid for a little more insight. Here it is …

Make sure you are in your root directory./Users/yourUsername

Create a file called .profile. I prefer to use vi for this purpose.

$ vi .profile

If you’re new to vi, here are the basic commands you will need to remember for this task.

* : x [return] to close and save the file
* i to insert text before the cursor until you press [esc]

More basic vi commands

Now it’s time to create the alias, type in the following into your new file,

alias yourLabel=”/path/to/commonly/”Used Directory”

Close and save the file. Now, make sure to restart Terminal, or the changes will not be reflected. Once you have restarted Terminal, simply type in the alias …

$ yourLabel

… and voila!