Stefan Hayden

I’ve written this email to enough people now that I really should just post it for every one else: I say if you want an mp3 player to go head to head with the ipod the Creative Zen Micro is great.

One of the decisions that should go in to buying any mp3 player is how much music you’re actually going to want to put on it. With most mp3 coming in around 3mb and a cd coming in between 40 - 70 mbs you should be able to figure how much music you want to have with you at all times. the more music you are willing to swap on and off the device the smaller hard drive you can get.

The Creative Zen Micro has 5gb of space which is roughly 1666 songs or about 83 hours of music.

Cnet has a great list of best of the best mp3 players and also navigation to change what type of mp3 players you are looking at. The most important categories are: Flash memory MP3 players | Hard drive MP3 players | Micro hard drive MP3 players

Flash memory is the hardest to break since it has no moving parts but has the smallest space. typical about 1gb.

hard drive and micro hard drive are easier to break (both the ipod and Creative Zen Micro micro hard drives) but have much larger storage. micro hard drives are smaller and have less storage then regular hard drives but stay about the same price as regular hard drives. regular hard drives have more space but can become annoying to carry around since they are so big.

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This week at Inside the Net Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte talked about SXSW. Amber actually made it down though I didn’t bump in to her at SXSW. What surprised me is that Amber was really surprised at how many designers were there.

Maybe it’s just me but SXSW has always been design first and technology second. Even when the panels are about standards the focus is design. Why Amer thinks this is just a Tech Web 2.0 conference baffles me.

Does any one agree with me? Designers own SXSW and though it’s fun to talk about business and technology the focus will always come back to design even if I have to get on stage and drag it there myself.

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Notes

Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps (more)

How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Standards (more)

WaSP Annual General Meeting

Microformats: Evolving The Web (more and more)

Web Standards and Search Engines: Searching for Common Ground

Holistic Web Design: Finding the Creative Balance in Multi-Disciplined Teams (more)

Web 2.1: Making Web 2.0 Accessible (more)

Demystifying the Mobile Web (more and more)

How to Make the Most of Maps

Sink or Swim. The Five Most Important Start-up Decisions

Tantek Çelik Presentation: Creating Building Blocks for Independents

How to Bluff Your Way in DOM Scripting (more)

How to Be A Web Design Superhero (more)

Traditional Design and New Technology (more and more)

OSX and Longhorn Development

Video Blogg Business Models

Ambient Findability

Learning From Comics

Craig Newmark Interview (more and more)

Standard Deviation

Cluetrain Seven Years Later

Creating Passionate Users

The Wisdom of Crowds

Opening Remarks: Jim Coudal and Jason Fried

How to do Precisely the Right Thing at all possible times

Bruce Sterling (more)

Dogma Free Design

Design Eye for the List Guy

Wasp Task Force (WTF)

CSS problem solving

Smaller, Faster, Lighter

Design and Social Responsibility

Starting Small: Web Business for the Rest of Us

Does Your Blog Have a Business? (more)

“Zero-Advertising” Brands

Serious Games for Learning

Digital Convergence

Cyberplace: Online in Offline Spaces – and Vice Versa

Book Digitization and the Revenge of the Librarians (still looking but here are some pannelist notes: here, here and here)

Slides

How to be a Web Design Superhero

Float like a butterfly (Ethan Marcotte)

Microformat slides

Design Eye for the List Guy

How to bluff your way in DOM Scripting

Traditional Design and New Technology (full post)

Video

Joi Ito interviews people at SXSW (original post)

Audio

SXSW Podcasts

Avalonsta Podcast feed

Further Reading at Squidoo: SXSW 2006

sxsw, sxsw2006, notes, slides, reference

Just to stir up some trouble I thought I’d point out some of the more amusing points of SXSW.

Jason Santa Maria really has a love hate relationship with Stan. Holistic Web Design used some illustrations of stan as users point of view and you could almost see Jason cringe.

Sean Inman is a tiny tiny man. He’s extremely slight and most likely wears his facial hair proudly as to not be mistaken for a high schooler or perhaps a small child. Jason Kottke is always hard to spot at conferences but that’s only because no one’s looking in the right places. If you are in a panel look to the far back corner to find the man who hides so well.

This year Jason offers other advice like “Never Get Married”. Something he should say as much as he can if he really wants his wedding to go well in the next 2 weeks. All I can say is if I donated to Kottke.org do I get a wedding invitation? I think so.

Eris Stassi must be web designs little secrete. Her occasional posts on her blog were very reflective and deep though very far between. Clearly she has a lot of clout as she really directed the Holistic Web Design panel in there decisions and really seemed to be a diving force in how amazing the redesign of Plazes seemed to be. Not to mention that she is truly beautiful.

I’m surprised that with so few big named women in web design Eris does not get more attention. Perhaps it’s good that the web design bolgosphere only cares about content and could care less if your pretty or not. Though it seems most big named designers are not ugly at all. I mean look how pretty Jason Santa Maria is. Talk about one sexy beast.

(thanks to Laughing Squid for the pic of JSM)

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Sunday was very low key. Only a couple of sessions really stood out. Meet Judy Jetson was interesting but not overly so. We still seemed to be so frighted of teens using technology that we can’t get past it. Of the 3 one did mention sconex which was pretty cool even though it was just in passing.

The Keynote with Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong was good. I never got in to Dooce but I do like Kottke. I think it’s funny that so many designers can agree on something like web standards but still can’t accept pro blogging as something respectable. I meet Jason briefly at AIGA and he’s a really nice guy.

In fact he’s the opposite of what anyone might think. If you ever want to find Jason at a conference you just need to look for some one with a power book in the corner who is trying to disappear. I’ve never seen anyone who wanted to blend in to the background as much as Jason does. I could tell he was best on stage when he was talking to Heather and forgot about the audience.

Running Your New Media Business and Sink or Swim: The Five Most Important Start up Decisions was good but nothing revolutionary. If anything I like hearing over and over again the same thing at similar panels. I hope that when I start my own mew media company I might even do the right thing the first time around.

Holistic Web Design was by far the best presentation of the day. All of the members of the panel help completely redesign Plazes.com and the results were amazing. I loved to hear each one talk about the project, what they changed, why and how it effects the end user. Eris Stassi (who abandoned her blog several months ago) really did an amazing job of directing the redesign and I have even more respect for her then I had in past years.

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