It needs to be said - Jared Spool rocks. Hard. Mr. Spool just got offstage from delivering the closing keynote at Web Directions North and literally slayed the audience with his rapier-sharp sense of humor and unbelievably-deep sense for experience design. If you ever get the chance to see Jared speak, drop everything and just do it. You will get schooled, make no mistake about it- and enjoy every minute of it.
But the closing keynote was just one part of a fantastic day in Vancouver- I missed part of a great opening keynote on iterative application design by Kelly Goto due to catching up with Molly in the foyer (always a pleasure) discussing life, travels and her new role with Microsoft as contract standardista.
I also recorded two 'wild' (i.e. no mic setup) interviews today- which if the quality holds, I may podcast next week after a cleanup pass. Otherwise they may get transcribed and posted for your reading pleasure.
The first was with Derek Featherstone, and we talked for about 20 minutes on accessibility from a grassroots perspective. If you're not in a government or educational institution that requires compliance, it's easy to overlook designing for disabled viewers, and Derek had some great insight into both how you can approach accessible development as well as the recent state of the industry. I can't think of a better guy to help illustrate why - and how - you can start making your site projects as viewable and accessible as possible. Keep posted for details.
Jeremy Keith sat down with me for darn near an hour later in the afternoon (after we both caught Steffen Meschkat and Kaitlin Sherwood's mashup session, yet another stellar presentation). And this interview, I've gotta tell you, was a great one. We covered everything from Ajax frameworks, to visual tools, to scripting best practices, to web standards, you name it- Jeremy's a brilliant guy with a lot to say and had I not checked my watch we probably would have chatted straight through Jared's closing keynote. It's clear that I'm going to have to pare that recording down to a smaller size, but I'm not sure what to trim (except for a few sections in which we discussed some software under development and the expected NDA 'cone of silence').
I also ran into Tantek Çelik in the hallway and quickly talked microformats - I'm going to have to get back with him in San Francisco and spend more time on the topic as that's another area that we (as well as Jeremy) could have spent easily another hour or two upon.
Right now I'm cooling my heels before the Media Temple party (those guys are notorious for their closing-night blowouts), so I'd better get this posted and head on over. More soon, but after tomorrow's ski/snowboard excursion to Whistler. Lots of work, now it's time to play. ;-)
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