Wandered around the SXSW Tradeshow, getting my geek on:
Here some folks who regularly use assistive technology were helping web designers and developers with questions about accessibility and how the blind use the web. I also voted for one of their AIR competitors. I recognized one of the people at the booth, and was blown away by the fact that she recognized me. (She’s only met me once, at Access U, and surely had to recognize me by my voice, since she’s at least legally blind.)
Sunday! he and I bumped into each other at the tradeshow and took pictures of each other. 🙂
Opera, one of the best browsers out there, aside from Firefox. I did use the Opera browser for a few years before Mozilla Firefox came along when I was using a Linux-based machine.
This was hilarious. Monstor Mimbots are jump drives (flash drives, stick drives – they’re known by many names) in “limited edition” designs. Remember all our discussions in class about personalization being a key part of the definition of new media? While I was looking at one of these I overheard someone saying, “I like the personalization of these.”
I couldn’t NOT take a picture of the Google booth.
Being a geek, I found this next booth fascinating. Make is one of two magazines aimed at the hacker, computer programmer and developer culture. Most of the folks I know who develop the kinds of technologies we’re here at SXSW to talk about, tend to like to build things, but it’s beyond just the simple model rocket or simple science kit.
Some folks trying out the kinds of gadgets and things that readers of the magazine make.
Craft is the other magazine. While this magazine has a more female-dominated audience, and Make has a more male-dominated audience, they aren’t exclusive of each other. The idea of building things from scratch appeals to both male and female developers who regularly build technology from scratch.
One of the more popular crafts is knitting. It quite possibly appeals because of the binary nature (there’s only two stitches, knit and purl) and pattern orientation, so similar to programming.
Other geeks find creative expression in building technology that feels more like it came from the Victorian era.
Finishing up with a shot of the Creative Commons booth.
Fazia Rizvi