The question "Is Google Sending the Translators Home?" was raised in a blog that claims to be "a group weblog by the sharpest minds in online media/journalism/publishing." A week later, the blog was forced to admit that "Google Translation Tool Only Works Sometimes", with the final conclusion that "in most cases the translations are, I think, not really usable".

One could just as easily ask the question, "are blogs, wikis and community story selection sites like Digg sending the journalists home?" Obviously, the answer is no, if this weblog run by professional journalists is any indication. When USA Today and Netscape recently modified their content formats to be more hip and Web 2.0, this sparked a sizeable dropoff in the number of regular visitors to their sites.

As this WSJ article indicates: "Tech bloggers typically genuflect before Digg, regarding it as a founder of a new kind of democratic journalism.

As with any democracy, Diggers get what they deserve. Recent top stories have included a CNN report about a girl who found the severed head of her missing pet dog on her front porch, an interactive graphic featuring three women in halter tops at a car wash, and a posting about unusual urinals."

In much the same way, users of the Google machine translation tool get what they pay for.

Our Production Specialist Deanna Linehan is playing at SXSW this week with her band Velvet Brick:

Velvet Brick is playing 2 free shows at SXSW, and doing a live broadcast on Public Access -

3/15 THURSDAY – Texas Rock Fest – 11 pm

The WAVE Nightclub – 6th Street

3/16 FRIDAY – RedGorilla Music Fest – 1 am

DARWIN'S Pub – 6th Street & Trinity

3/17 SATURDAY – EXSE Live Broadcast – 9 pm

Airing on CABLE CHANNEL 16

Our long-time Japanese translator Allen Hunter, bassist with the Eeels, is playing with his new band this week at SXSW:

He says: Please tell whomever may be interested that my band is playing tonight at Room 710 on Red River at 8pm or so, then at Mother Egan's at 10.

Our Project Manager Rainy Day is attending most of the business and technology panels this week at SXSW. We will have an article on what she learned in an upcoming issue of our monthly e-newsletter, but we thought you might like to catch some of the takeaways she's jotted down so far at SXSW.

Designers' Workflow

It is good to overestimate how long a project will take, thereby including a bult-in contingency plan.

People tend to underestimate how long a project will take, because they want it to get done quickly.

You get better work from people who understand both design & development, especially CSS.

How to Create a Kickass in-House Design Team

Our measure of success is whether our users understand our product and what we’re trying to communicate. It is important to keep the internal clients happy—if they don’t like the product then we have nowhere to hide.

Key takeaways:

• How successful are the products.
• Element of follow through is important.
• Infrastructure is key. Have processes in place.
• Build the relationship with the vendor and be clear up front. Try to constrain it to work at hand. .
• Don’t ever stop being innovative or stop trying.
• Look for passion. Skills of relationship management.

Dan Rather Keynote

Asking the tough questions and the follow-ups is not as common nowadays. American journalism needs a spine transplant. You can get so close that you become part of the problem. Powerful people will use journalists to the full extent possible, right up to when the journalist says “that’s too far.” The second that a source begins to believe that a reporter is in bed with the establishment, that’s too far. And, the second that the reporter begins to feel like he or she is part of the establishment, and has to play nice, that’s too far.

Convergence Culture: Henry Jenkins

Web 2.0: Social community that works together to solve conceptual problems, remixes content.

Participatory culture is central to the world we live in today.

Step 1: expansion

Step 2: speed up

We’re now talking and watching in real time and that leads to a world of collective intelligence.

Power comes from collective energies of complex communities, demanding a richer world of content across multiple media platforms.

Intellectual property issues are at odds to an expanding participatory culture.

The line between participatory culture and participatory democracy is blurring.

Wikipedia—The most powerful thing about Wikipedia is the process by which knowledge is produced and evolves.

Bust 2.0? The Next 10 Years

Interesting potential parallel overlaps appear to be going on. Are we headed to another bust? Unlike the earlier bust period of 1999-2000, we have more people online, more advertising dollars. It is a fundamentally different time, it is much cheaper to start a business online, but we are headed for some kind of shakeout. Right now we are witnessing a sort of rebirth and flowering of innovation, with a much tighter feedback loop, an unprecendented feedback loop, at that. What’s amazing about the infrastructure shift is services are much easier to provide.

What does the boom/bust mean to established businesses? Example: Discovery Channel tries to meet the demand of its customers. In Web 2.0, customer support is very important. Do viral marketing. Start with email and move up to widgets.

Molly Steensen on Outsourcing-India/China/Russia: you’ll find an extraordinarily intelligent, creative group of people. They offer different approaches to things we’re doing and have educational models like labs and incubators.

Remember, this is a global community. It is important to get a team that works well together and that can be really hard especially on a global scale. Communication is hard even regardless of language or time barriers.

Our Project Manager Rainy Day is attending most of the business and technology panels this week at SXSW. We will have an article on what she learned in an upcoming issue of our monthly e-newsletter, but we thought you might like to catch some of the takeaways she's jotted down so far at SXSW.

Kathy Sierra Keynote

Key takeaways:

• Enable users to get together with one another (offline)
• Shape computer interactions in our software to feel more human face to face matters.
• Encourage offline community
• How to make our apps feel more human? Canyon of Pain: between what they want to do and how to do it
• 80/20 solution: We can capture and have a short dialogue with our users and go far to get the computer to appear to understand them.
• Get the user to the right context
• Give them an understandable set of questions

Stop Designing Products

Adaptive path gave this presentation on the user experience pyramid. The next step up on the pyramid from technology is features. Pile features on technology, then the experience is at the top of the pyramid. However, you want to start with the experience first, and then figure out what it'll take to get there. Products can be considered as people, too. They have personalities. People get emotionally attached to their products.

What is the experience we want to deliver? Determine this, then figure out the tech and featuers to support that. The experience is the product we deliver. It is the only thing the costumers care about.

Ruining the User Experience

What is good user experience?

1. Understand your user in a deep way
2. Take that information and designing/implementing and demonstrating your understanding. Think more about the context.

Levels of service are:

1. No frills: Make content accessible. no distractions, clean markup, light/fast downloads. straightforward, basic, no css. functional & that's about it.
2. Dress it up: styled with css, refined visual design, simple interactivity, some Flash, cross-browser compatible, styles for alternate media. color, images, readability. Laid out better, readable, scannable, easy on the eyes. Nicer looking.
3. Add interactive experience. Responsive interface elements, predictive data delivery (Ajax), more customizable interactions. Google maps, kayak.

High and Low Class Web Design

Key factors are:

• Education
• Economic power
• Cultural literacy
• Social standing- political clout, pull in social circles, etc.

Economically, speaking, you have consider three general categories: upper/middle/lower

When marketing also consider demographics and SocioEconomic Status. SES is a numerical measure of your class, cross referencing your career, where you live, income, etc. This is often used in advertising.

Sociologically speaking you should consider these categories are from the book "Class"

• Top out-of-sight: super wealthy behind gates, hiding since the Depression
• Upper Class
• Upper-Middle Class
• Middle Class
• High Prole
• Mid Prole
• Low Prole
• Bottom out-of-sight: homeless, destitute, society tries to hide.

Few people want to be perceived as being above upper-middle class, because they don't want to be perceived as being uppity and out of touch.

How does this affect design?

Look at how different companies talk to their audiences. Many use a design aesthetic of the upper end: simplicity & elegance.

Example: Apple is a high class brand. The store is designed to look like Cartier or Tiffany, not Best Buy. This also translates into their web sites.

The best way to learn about audiences is through user research. Spend lots of time with potential users, watching them use the product and their reactions.

One way of approaching design is to try five or six different things, and the one with the most click throughs wins.

Holy Trinity of Web Design

A site fails because one of the three portions is out of balance or two large.

• Business
• Users and needs
• Developers

The key here is to balance the three things out.

As more people specialize, generalists become more important.

With small teams it is good to have one person from each discipline.

Example: At Yahoo, every day the group gets together for a 15 minute standing meeting- quick update, discusses issues.