Come see a great panel at the Web 2.0 Expo

Well, tomorrow, the wife and kid and I are off to Italy, and while I'm not looking forward to the day spanning, multi leg, long flight with a 1.5 year old, I know I'll dig it when I get there.

Right after I get back I'm off to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I'm going to be hosting an all star panel that I know you're going to want to see, titled "Failing Fast: Get Your App out of the Lab and Into the Arena". Sitting on the panel is Randy Reiland from the Discovery Channel, Scott Green from Google's SketchUp, Ryan Stewart from Adobe, ZDNet, and The Internet, and last but not least, Alan Lewis from eBay, of eBay Desktop fame.

We've got some great topics to discuss in the general area of how to actually pull off an open process where users are involved in the direction of software you build. What does that mean for brand? How can you sell that process externally and internally? and more. Come see them in action and bring your questions. It's going to be a great panel.

EffectiveUI Releases Discovery Earth Live

Last week Discovery Earth Live, built by co-workers and friends at EffectiveUI. There's a better write up at http://rjria.blogspot.com/.

Anyhow aside from being fun to play with - this is the funnest globe experience I've seen online - this application has the potential to be a nice little educational application. Here's a 'story' I created showing the all the man-made lights on the globe overlayed with yesterday's Nitrogen Dioxide emissions. Of course coincidence doesn't indicate correlation, I just thought they looked cool together. However that fun little exploration experience could trigger some interesting questions and, I'm sure, fuel some heated discussions. Paging Mr. Gore....

Here's the story I created:


Of course, the widget embedded there is fun to play with, but all the 3D gee gaws don't mean a thing if you don't have something useful backing it up. The data is the king here. This is an object lesson to anyone who builds interfaces and experiences. Make things as flashy as you like, but if you don't offer my anything besides a quick deversion, I have no reason to keep using your application.

Hopefully Discovery will keep feeding this application with the data that allows us to explore and discover relationships between events, not just an excuse to play a quick game of "As the world turns".

RailsConf Baby!

I have the official word, Daniel Wanja and I are presenting a tutorial at RailsConf 2008. This is as exciting for me as speaking at MAX - two great technologies that I love to work with, and I get to help cross pollinate them. I'm really grateful for the privilege.

Here's the information: http://en.oreilly.com/rails2008/public/schedule/detail/1213

Watch here for more information.

ScaleNine's Juan Sanchez joins the EffectiveUI team

I'm really excited to say that Juan Sanchez, whom you may know from ScaleNine.com, has joined the EffectiveUI team.

Not only does he bring a great design sensibility to the team, but he's also one of the Prime Movers behind Degrafa, which is a really exciting project.

I don't know what the heck posessed him to move to Denver, but it's going to be great to have him around the office and he'll a valuable addition to the EffectiveUI User Experience team.

Speaking at WebManiacs in DC

I was invited to speak at the WebManiacs conference in May. I'll be speaking on Flex with Rails, similar to my talk at MAX, but with more meat and more RubyAMF.

Here are some details from the site:

The WebManiacs 2008 conference schedule has been finalized and registration is open. Early bird pricing ends Jan 31. Consisting of a two-day ColdFusion conference ("CFManiacs") coupled with a three-day Flex conference (FlexManiacs), hosting over 70 speakers and 130 distinct topics (some of which are hands-on), WebManiacs promises to have the most comprehensive coverage of Flex, AIR, and ColdFusion at the lowest price. Seating is limited, so folks should register early in order to get into the more popular sessions.

SEO with Flash

One of the classic protests to Flash on the web is SEO. Some of that new content I was talking about on InsideRIA is already here, an example of which is a great rundown of SEO with Flash using Adobe's SDK by Andre Charland.

Have a look at it here, and have your answer ready next time the Slashdotters start hatein'

O'Reilly's new RIA Destination

O'Reilly has released a new site devoted to all aspects of RIA design and development at InsideRIA. The site is centered around blog posts and articles from a panel of experts, headed by Rich Tretola and Andre Charland.

The first content up today is mostly hello world and introductory messages, but make sure you RSS it, because there should be some great stuff up there consistently.

Of course I have an interest in mentioning it since for the next while a forthcoming O'Reilly Shortcut I've authored is going to be serialized there. Here's the first installment. I believe there are 20 installments, so watch that space, and this one, for more updates.