@media Impressions

Published 18 years, 5 months past

I’m back home from @media 2006, and as much as I’m happy to be reunited with my family, I’m very glad I made the trip to London.  All the people I met (and I met far too many to have any hope of naming them all) were great, very enthusiastic and passionate about what they do.  Forget the “reserved Englishman” (or woman) stereotype: if I were to create a single composite image to represent my experience, it would be a warm, wide grin.

From all the commentary, it would seem that people very much enjoyed my keynote, “A Decade of Style”, and several people commented on its similarity to last year’s keynote by Jeffrey Zeldman.  I knew he’d talked about the Web Standards Project, but I didn’t fully appreciate the danger of topical overlap.  Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to have hurt its reception, and I’m glad people found my little trip down amnesia lane to be of interest.  Personal narratives can be highly compelling, but they can also be unimpressive or (even worse) boring.

Of course, there was plenty of love for other talks, but you can understand why I might have been most concerned about how my talk was received, it being the one for which I was responsible and all.  I don’t get nervous about speaking in front of audiences, but I do fear boring or annoying them.  If there’s one thing I strive not to be, it’s a waste of others’ time.

As usual, there’s a quickly expanding body of photos over at Flickr.  I just have two things I’d like to suggest that @media photo taggers please do (or don’t):

  1. While I appreciate the photogenicity of London, pictures of Big Ben or Heathrow airport don’t really deserve the tag “atmedia”.  The venues, sure; the attendees, absolutely.  But a picture that shows all of the seats on your flight to UK were full isn’t really about the conference.  And do we really need to see what you ate for dinner each night?  I say thee nay.  (But then I totally don’t understand the impulse to habitually take pictures of one’s dinner, so maybe I’m a tad off base there.)

  2. If a person is depicted in your photo and you know their name, you should put that in your photo’s tags.  Whether you use the proper format (“Joe Person”) or the compressed version (“joeperson”) is irrelevant, since Flickr treats them as being equivalent.  But it’s nice to be able to find all the photos of, say, Jon Hicks by a convenient name-tag.

    I’ve also seen people tagged with both their name and URL, so a photo of Jon Hicks might be tagged both “jonhicks” and “hicksdesign“.  That’s a decent bit of design redundancy and probably worth doing, but at the very least, tag the names.  I’m going to go clean up my omissions on that score this evening, so as to flesh out the semantic gooness of my own photo stream.

Just my two bits of tagging advice; take ’em for whatever you think they’re worth.  In the meantime, if you’ve ever wanted to see me wearing a suit, or with my fangs partially extended in anticipation of a fresh meal, well then—I guess it’s just your lucky day, innit?

Comments (27)

  1. “so as to flesh out the semantic gooness of my own photo stream”

    I can’t decide whether that’s a typo or not, and I’m hoping it isn’t. “Semantic gooness” is a great phrase which needs more use and more currency; it puts me in mind of a whole sticky waxen ball of associations and theories and ideas and words surrounding one concept. We should increase the semantic gooness of the web, in my opinion.

    Well, yes, of course it’s a typo. But it’d be good if it wasn’t.

    It was nice to meet you again, Eric!

  2. I must admit, ever since getting NIPSA’d on Flickr, my zeal for tagging photos is nearly nil!

  3. I would have said that yours and Jeffrey’s keynotes complimented each other very well. Seeing the story from two different perspectives as it were.

    Glad you enjoyed your time in London, and hope to see you again soon.

  4. Pingback ::

    EightyOne » @media &#8212 Thursday

    […] Eric’s comments […]

  5. I agree, the atmedia flickr clusters are becomming unviewable. Just because you visited London during your trip for the conference, doesn’t mean it has anything to do with atmedia, and therefore is unworthy of the tag.

  6. Pingback ::

    Think Drastic » Blog Archive » The obligatory “I’m back from @media 2006″ post

    […] The “hot topics” panel session which closed the conference. Jeremy Keith lorded it over Molly, Jon Hicks, Eric Meyer and Tantek Celic, which produced a very entertaining debate. […]

  7. Really enjoyed your keynote speech, was fascinating to see things from your personal perspective and glad to hear that you had a good time here in London.

    It was also good to finally have a chance to meet and chat to you at the party afterwards. Hope to see you again soon!

  8. Me, I just can’t get enough of London street sign photos!

    It was very good to meet you, albeit briefly.

    I don’t know if it’s strictly @media, but the flickr cluster has some photos of the accessify crowd’s side trip to the Royal Observatory.

  9. Thanks for your talk Eric. Yes, there was a bit of overlap with Zeldman, but what I took from it was the message – ‘share what you do and don’t hold everything close to your chest’ and – ‘Communities have driven the development of CSS and web standards’. I also liked your tip about forming an ‘Advisory panel’. I am very interested in the future of Print from the web, so I watch this area with great interest and if I come up with anything useful, I intend to share it!

    I was keen to use s5 in my presentations after last year’s @media. I noticed that most people have given this up in favour of Apple’s Keynote. Why is that?

  10. Pingback ::

    Max Design - standards based web design, development and training » Blog Archive » Essence of tagging

    […] Source […]

  11. Pingback ::

    @media2006 // Mark Hadley

    […] I’ll add my 2 pence to flickr later, making sure i tag them correctly of course ;) Talking of tagging i’ll also be sorting out a WordPress Technorati plugin soon, so that i can tag this post with atmedia! […]

  12. Respect, Boom-shaka lakk.
    I’ll go change my tag right away!
    Loved the keynote btw.

  13. Oh and another thing, a tip for @media geeks, if you want your atmedia photos in a bunch, put them in a set… including your Big Ben and dinner photos.

  14. Trackback ::

    Legends of the Sun Pig

    “atmedia” tags on Flickr

    In their write-ups of @Media 2006, Eric Meyer and Peter-Paul Koch have both spoken out to discourage the use of the “atmedia” tag to photos on Flickr which have no (apparent) relevance to the event itself. Personally, I’m with Russ Weakley in the op…

  15. Pingback ::

    Learning the World » Blog Archive » @media 2006 day one

    […] The conference started with a keynote by Eric Meyer with his personal impressions of the last ten years of the web. Quite interesting since I’ve been reading his articles in WebTechniques, a great magazine and victim of the web 1.0 bubble, later on Webreview, where he published the CSS browser compatibility chart (depicted in the picture), a great companion in my struggle with the browsers back in the internet stone age. […]

  16. Trackback ::

    nuances

    @media2006

    Attended @media2006 in London last week and had a great time. Met some really nice people and made a bunch of new friends as well as talked to some very approachable giants in the field….

  17. I’ve also seen people tagged with both their name and URL, so a photo of me might be tagged both “jonhicks” and “hickdesign”.

    Was this copied and pasted from Jon Hicks? Only here it seems like it should refer to tags like “ericmeyer” and “meyerweb” surely?

  18. Chris: that was a revision mangle. I originally wrote “a photo of me with Jon Hicks” and then cut out the wrong part when I edited it down. I’ve just now updated it to fix that mistake and a nearby silly typo. Thanks for drawing my attention to the error(s).

  19. And do we really need to see what you ate for dinner each night? I say thee nay. (But then I totally don”t understand the impulse to habitually take pictures of one”s dinner, so maybe I”m a tad off base there.)

    Eric, you evidently aren’t eating well enough. Come and visit us and we’ll give you plenty of reasons to take photos of your food.

  20. Meri: sorry, nope. I looked at all the pictures on the main page of your site (and read a few descriptions) and I still don’t understand the compulsion. That’s okay; I have my own compulsions that few if any would understand.

    Though I admit there was one time recently that I took a picture of someone else’s dinner, but that was because the chef had arranged the components to form a smiley face. That was worth capturing.

  21. Hi Eric!

    Nice pics @ http://flickr.com/photos/tags/atmedia/. […] A very accosting layout and a interesting discussion topic, do you provide any Web-based services to universities or students. […]

  22. What about the picture of a dessert on a spiral plate that you use for the header?

  23. What about it, Chris?

  24. Doesn’t it illustrate an example of you photographing a meal? Forgive me if it was someone else who took the picture. Ah wait! It was Tantek wasn’t it? Sorry.

  25. Where can I see your presentation using S5 online again? Or, don’t you have any idea for uploading the files on this site?

  26. Trackback ::

    lowest-common-denominator

    Freedom to tag

    As I’ve finally got this site up and running, I’ve been thinking about how I tag. I’m a promiscuous tagger. I try to be exhaustive in my efforts to describe that which is being tagged. I am both thorough and…

  27. Eric are you going to put online the slides from your keynote from atmedia?

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