I gave a little talk on "AJAX and Flash mistakes: lessons learned building SlideShare" at SXSW08 last weekend. The audience was great, and the conference in general was a helluva lot of fun (as always).

I talked a lot about the interplay between AJAX and server-side performance ... how AJAX often seems like a performance solution, but often introduces new problems. I also talked about the need to design entire processes, rather than simple modal dialogs (which are so easy to design that your design skills for building multi-panel flows can get quite rusty if you aren't careful).

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Last week I spoke at the Startup Project at the Stanford Faculty Club. About 300 people (a mix of startupists, VCs, and curious techies) gathered together to talk about Amazon Web Services. Check out the talk here:

Other speakers talked about using EC2. My favorite speaker was Joyce Park (of 106miles fame) from boozemail, a silly little facebook app that is growing like a weed (it lets you send virtual drinks to your friends on facebook). Sean Knapp (from a hot video startup called Ooyala) also presented, and Don MacAskill from SmugMug gave his crowd-pleasing "Set Amazon's Servers on Fire, not Yours" presentation.

Randy Komisar from Kleiner Perkins also gave a great interview where he talked about "dashboard businesses", where you measure user behavior on a cheaply-built live site rather than focusing on up-front analysis and business planning.

Good stuff, all of it! There was a similar event in San Francisco the next day, but I had to get back to work, so I didn't go.

I'm talking at the startupwire group in McLean, VA (just outside of Washington DC). I'll be talking about some of stuff that has happened (and some of the stuff we've learned) from the first 6 months of slideshare: if you're in DC please drop by.

This talk will be interesting: we're doing it via video skype + slideshare, with the result being projected on a big screen. The audience will see me, and I will see them, but it might be hard to make actual eye contact.

Anyone have any cool stories about nonprofits using slideshare?

I'm going to be giving a talk for netsquared on Creating Web-Based Presentations for your NonProfit. It should be fun (I'll be sharing the mic with Cindy Li of Scraplog).

I've got a few stories and experiences to share, but I'd love to add to the list. Send me an email (jon AT slideshare DOT net) or just reply here.

p.s. The talk is on June 12, at the super-terrific citizenspace in San Francisco.

I gave a talk at SXSW a few days ago (AJAX & Flash: What we learned building SlideShare).

Here's the slides. I also put my talk notes into SlideShare as comments, so if you're interested in knowing what I actually SAID, go check it out here.

On a side note, SXSW is an AMAZING conference. The parties were out of this world: it really is "spring break for web hipsters". I'm definitely going back next year...

Game Inspired RIA Design: Talk at UIE WebApp Summit

I spoke a couple of weeks ago at the UIE WebApp summit in Monterey. It was a great event: lot's of smart people working on building cool stuff. Some of the highlights: Bill Scott's famous AJAX design talk, David Malouf's talk on rich application design, Sean Kane's talk about how Netflix was designed, and Thomas Vanderwal's talk on tagging your world.

My talk was about game-inspired web design. Games, especially online casual games like bejeweled and the like, have been an important inspiration to the design of both mindcanvas and slideshare.

Rashmi gave a talk as well on designing for recommender systems.

The slides for both our talks are included below. If you've got any questions about my talk, comment on the relevent slide (on slideshare) and I'll do my best to answer!

I'm at barcamp bangalore 2 right now. What a crowd! Everyone has a wireless startup they're working on with their friends: the tech entrepreneur scene is definitely heating up in India.

I gave a talk this morning about scalable web architectures. I focused on what we learned from building slideshare, including aspects specific to scaling Ruby on Rails. I also talked about Amazon S3, which I can't say enough good things about. People thought that my slide on google ad words / Amazon cash flow was pretty funny.

Anyway, here's the slides, plus a video snippet from the beginning of the presentation. Feel free to comment on individual slides on slideshare, and I'll try to answer questions!

(video brought to you by Arun Ramarathnam )

I'm at barcamp bangalore 2 right now. What a crowd! Everyone has a wireless startup they're working on with their friends: the tech entrepreneur scene is definitely heating up in India.

I gave a talk this morning about scalable web architectures. I focused on what we learned from building slideshare, including aspects specific to scaling Ruby on Rails. I also talked about Amazon S3, which I can't say enough good things about. People thought that my slide on google ad words / Amazon cash flow was pretty funny.

Anyway, here's the slides, plus a video snippet from the beginning of the presentation. Feel free to comment on individual slides on slideshare, and I'll try to answer questions!

(video brought to you by Arun Ramarathnam )

Saad documented barcampdelhi amazingly well. He not only shot some heautiful photographs, he also shot some video of my presentation on preloading data in AJAX. Here's me talking about metaphors you can use to explain preloading, from an engineering and design perspective.

This essay is adapated from a presentation I gave at the Oreilly / AJAX summit. The original powerpoint for the presentation is also available.

We need better metaphors to explain the value of rich clients to business decision makers. We need proof that richer user experiences make business sense.

An article I wrote for siliconvalleywatcher just got published. It's a general wrap-up of the AJAX summit.

An article that I co-authored was just published in the Oracle Technology Network (as part of their "Mastering J2EE" series).
The topic was usability and software architecture.

Here's a link to an article that I wrote for boxes and arrrows. It won't cure cancer or anything, but it might help you avoid the dreaded "political death spiral" pattern that design projects often get trapped in.