I have a tit-for-tat arrangement with the folks behind the upcoming Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto conference (which runs from June 16th through 18th): they’ll give me a media pass for the conference in exchange for my blogging (both on this blog and on the Accordion Guy blog) from the conference as well as interviewing some of the conference presenters. I’ve been meaning to learn more about search engine optimization and getting one-on-one time with a presenter is pretty difficult, so I think I’m getting the better part of the bargain.
My first interview is with Jane Motz Hayes, who is an Information Designer at WebFeat, a multimedia company that provides services for online marketing, employee learning and hosting/data management/content management services. She’ll be on a panel called Accessibility, Usability & SEO. I had the chance to have an email conversation with Jane recently. Since her panel discussion is going to be about accessibility, usability and SEO, I thought that would be a good jumping-off point for the interview. I asked her some questions, and she sent back some answers — read the full article to see the interview. Enjoy!
An intentionally bad promo that parodies 1980s ads for game systems like the Atari 2600, Intellivision and Colecovision?
An unintentionally bad ad created by a game company that bought the rights to the Guitar Hero name (the original Guitar Hero team now works on Rock Band) and whose best days are behind it?
I like the attachable fret buttons-and-pick idea; I’m less sure about yelling “Rock out!” into the microphone to activate Star Power, and not at all thrilled about the silly “put out the fire on your guitar by blowing into the microphone” concept.
Warren Ellis on Twitter overload: “You know, when Twitter hits capacity, they could just cut off the Bay Area’s usage and let the rest of the planet use the service…”
Here’s a story that starts with its inspiration, Clay Shirky’s presentation on gin, television and the social surplus, and ends with a story from my first job, in which a record executive came to the office to commission some interactive multimedia applications. It’s an interesting story about programming work and technology in the mid-90’s, the music industry and how predictions about technology can be way, way off.
I’ve been using Firefox 3 beta, which is the default version provided with Ubuntu 8.04, a.k.a. “Hardy Heron”. It’s quite good, but it’s hard to tell which plugins are compatible with it. Luckily there’s this guide — 20 Top Add-Ons that are Ready for Firefox 3 — covers some of the most useful Firefox 3-compatible [...]
Over at Ruby Inside, there’s an article titled 21 Ruby Tricks You Should be Using in Your Code will all sorts of useful code snippets. Even if you code in Ruby every day, there just might be a trick or two you haven’t seen before!
