Pastel fruit flavored marshmallows

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Perhaps I’m overly tired tonight, but Noded’s post today really resonated. JR wrote:

I think back to the people at SXSW who are supposedly the movers and shakers in our high tech online world. They seem to be working in mediocrity, working with browsers that break, operating systems that leave you vulnerable to constant attack, unwieldy programs that fail to do what they are supposed to, web sites that are impossible to navigate. I’m hoping at some point someone down in Austin starts to realize things ain’t going to fix themselves.

As serendipity would have it, the WaSP weblog updated, based on today’s SxSW meeting, in order to promote a new initiative: WaSP Street Team:

The WaSP Street Team is about you. No, not all the other YOUs reading this but YOU you, in your actual skin. The idea is that together we create a number of tasks – challenges if you will – to help the promotion of web standards in your local community. Things that will help get the word out to the businesses, educational institutions, web shops and individuals who live and operate directly near you. As a central group it’s hard for us to reach those people, but as a distributed team, it’s easy.

In between edits this last week, I moved all my images to Amazon’s S3 using a variety of RESTful applications, wrote about it (and will write again about it), ported my weblog over to being served as XHTML, wrote about it, ran my first test of embedded SVG within a web post, wrote about it, and decided that the WordPress category scheme won’t work for my needs and am creating a replacement. All of the functionality I’m creating for my web site I’ll write about, as clearly as possible, so that everyone, techs and not, can understand. I hope. All the code I create will eventually be released, as plugins or applications or what have you.

All will be using industry standard specifications: XHTML, CSS, RDF, Atom, REST, as well as JavaScript, PHP, Python, Java, and Ruby (for my S3 work).

I don’t know how many people read my site. Hi People! Regardless of the number, you all are my outreach. I may not go to conferences, you may never meet me face to face, chat with me over IM or twitter, vidcast each other, or swap spit, but I never fail to share what I discover. Yet we value those who go to conference after conference, who jump on to the next tech gewgaw, join in the next group hug, cellphone planted in one ear, iTunes in the other, eyes aglow talking about this brave new world where people don’t have to live and work face to face, all the while telling people they have to meet face to face to be real–busily twittering away about every…mundane…act, because if they stop, they actually stop, the silence will catch up with them like a humongous tidal wave and do something horrid!

For the last year, reading much of this, I feel like I’ve lived on a solid diet of marshmallows–you know, the small pastel, fruit flavored kind? It’s good at first, and even tasty, but eventually you’d kill for an apple or a cheese sandwich.

Frankly, anyone who goes to more than one conference every month is just not someone who stands still long enough to have anything interesting to say. And if we ever do meet face to face someday, I can tell you it won’t be in the midst of 4000 other conference goers, all twittering away while ignoring everything around them(!?)–or while we share toasted marshmallows over a campfire snuggled up in sleeping bags among 150 strangers.

Twitter is the big thing coming out of SxSW. My god people. Might as well run a magnet across your synapses.

Update: