future of content

Nick Finck, Molly Holzschlag (get Zen of CSS design signed?!), Keith Robinson, “Kevin Smokler”:http://www.kevinsmokler.com/ (haven’t heard of him before, book sounds interesting)

loooong introductions!

what do we mean by content? Molly sez it’s an unanswerable question. communicating a message. Keith: blog is technology, not content. clients who refer to individual posts as “a blog”, same with Flash. Kevin’s content pet peeve: content is not an element of the design!!!!! non-graphical elements. Keith: podcast is format: the words/music are the content. audio as well as text. Molly wonders what the audience thinks.

audience (is that peterme?) — content is what people are coming to your site for. he says blogs are a genre, not a technology. (mmmm. nice distinction.) most people don’t discern design/format from meaning. (yep, that’s him. he’s a freaky-smart guy, because I think he just got right to the center of the thing.)

Molly says as a designer that she’s also thinking when talking about blogging both about it as a genre but also as a technique.

audience: service as a space where *users* create the content. Molly adds that the the service facilitates the production of content. we tend to think sometimes outside the way that users think. she’s getting mad about syndication, and how to understand the presentation of RSS/feeds/etc. Keith talks about the difficulty of explaining RSS; Kevin “if you go to 10 websites a day and the 7th hasn’t updated, then you’ve wasted your time. imagine having a program that will check to see if the sites have updated so you don’t waste your time.”

audience: social interaction? Molly: one beauty of the environment is that it’s not one-way. non-linear, global.

q: concern with blurring between experience and meaning…and the breaking of content as just another site design element. user experiences what the design is. example: delicious user experience; when behind the curtain, it’s meaningful, but otherwise baffling. Kevin: terrible interface! Molly: drive-by. (which is how I use it, too.) as a sideblog. notebook/scratchpad. for what it is, it’s amazing. show of hands: who uses it?

crap. I got all distracted by the mention of the wiki for the conference.

Molly asks if there’s a difference between information and content.

fuck. I just lost all the notes I’ve been taking for the last half-hour…and some of them were really good.