If you are on Twitter, you can befriend @SouthByScruvy. Who is this? It’s a virus, both literally and figuratively.

Many of us came back from SXSW with a nasty flu-like virus. My friend, Jason, jokingly wrote on Twitter that he’s pretty sure that we all had scurvy. I followed up by confirming that diagnosis, with evidence that we did not drink much OJ while at the conference.

A day later, Twitterers were no longer writing about the flu, people were referencing SXScurvy. Two days after that, the virus joined Twitter as it’s own person @SouthByScurvy complete with an avatar of a virus and tweets about “collecting souls”.

What I find fascinating, as I sit here still trying to get over this illness, is watching healthy people referencing our illness by this new name. Why is that interesting?

Because it means the branding of the virus, SouthByScurvy spread quicker and more virally than the virus itself.

UPDATE: So what do web designers do with all the time on their hands being home sick, they make a website for the virus: http://www.sxswscruvy.com.  Stephanie and Jeremy, great job keeping the branding moving faster than the virus.

The South by Southwest conference in Austin once again proved to be a fantastic opportunity to feel the pulse of the industry and see where the bleeding edge is and how much catching up we have to do. I will happy to discover that this year I didn’t feel at all behind the curve. My own knowledge, my work and the work we are doing at the Fool are progressing if not near the front of the pack, not at all far behind (this website withstanding, it’s stuck in a state of mid-relaunch). That being said, here are ten points of knowledge that I took away from SXSW:

• “Need”, “can’t”, “only”, “easy” and “fast” are five words that can add three months to the scope of a project. Example: It’s only one more feature. We really need it. We can’t launch without it. It should be easy. Can’t you just do it real fast? Boom! Three more months.
• The best way to be successful at making money online is to help other people make money. It comes back to the old principle of greed being one of the two driving forces (with fear) to get someone to do something. While providing information online is helpful (a la Wikipedia), providing an opportunity for others to make money online is when things get lucrative (a la Basecamp).
• The biggest sin on the web is crappy copywriting, which is made even more heinous because of all the parts of the web, words are by far the cheapest thing to fix.
• It’s great that you can read the NY Times on the iPhone but you won’t unless the NY Times provides a light-weight mobile/iPhone-ready version with stripped down content already pre-zoomed (which they actually do, Apple just doesn’t use it in the advertising).
• We are going to look back at this era, when you had to go to a terminal to use the internet, as antiquated. The wheels are already in motion for a day when you can view a Google Map on display at the pump while filling up the tank, and order groceries from PeaPod from your refrigerator.
• Sites like Google Reader get it right with pagination for the mobile/iPhone browser. “First, Prev, Next, Last” is too cluttered on the small screen, just provide the single link to “Next 10 Stories”.
• The Imperial Shuttle wasn’t designed with Wookies in mind. If you look for it, you can find examples of bad (or good) accessibility and user experience everywhere, even in your favorite films.
• The two minute video is turning the corner: no longer being seen as an ad but as a desired part of the site experience. Utilizing short well-made video on your website is a clear next step.
• Clients will naturally gravitate towards the Frankenstein design (a piece from comp A, these elements from this comp B). It’s a designer’s obligation to set the expectation that each design is holistic, and can not be mixed and matched.
• There is a misnomer that websites are being sold on newsstands. The concept of “above the fold” is an antiquated as it is inappropriate in the digital media. People are comfortable with scrolling.

It’s so simple really, and not at all new. It’s the original Facebook model, before it became huge.

Twitter is about proximity. Over the past year I have sent about 100 Twitter “tweets”. Over the past week I doubled that. Why? All the people who I am following, and who were following me, were all in the same location (at SXSW conference in Austin).

Proximity changed everything.

Previously, I would have argued that if you saw my tweet “Going to Stubbs for some BBQ” it would provide you with a topic of conversation for the future. When you see me next, you can ask what I thought of the famous Stubbs ribs instead of just approaching me with a broad question like “How are things?”.

But proximity adds another layer. Now, you can join me at Stubbs if you like. I broadcast I would be there at lunchtime, and if you were to come, you would find me there and you can trust that I would welcome the company (because if I wanted to be left alone, I wouldn’t have broadcast where I’d be to the world).

I wasn’t in college when Facebook came onto the scene, but I imagine this was how it originally became huge. Students, on the same campus, updating their activity (late for class, in the dining hall, studying in the library) so other students on the campus could find them.

For the next four days I will be at the SXSW Web conference in Austin TX. This conference includes four days of 4-5 panels each day plus 1-3 networking events every evening. It is full emersion into the web design world, and I came away from last year’s completely inspired and motivated, loving my craft and my industry, and ready to do bigger and better.

At work I got an email saying that my Outlook inbox was over the allotted bandwidth. I was shocked, (not “how-can-this-be” shock, because I save everything so I did not doubt I did indeed reach the allocation level) because we had an allocation level that I was able to reach. I look to my Gmail and Yahoo accounts and for years their maximum allocation has grown well faster than I could catch, even with saving just about every email.

Yahoo recently announced that they are doing away with the allocation altogether, this is relatively trivial; considering they were already outside the scope of most people’s usage, but at the same time it was absolutely a huge move. Since the costs of storage continue to drop, Yahoo determined it was too cheap to meter and more strategic to just give it away for free, and find the revenue in another way (advertising or cross-selling perhaps).

This move to the FREE business model is the basis of this very illuminating WIRED magazine article from Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail). This article dives into the business strategies of the digital age, and the new economics that are essentially being invented on the fly that make sense of this bold new world. It’s a very intriguing look at the where we are economically and how the Internet and digital media is driving where we are heading, to a world where we get a whole lot more, for FREE.

The Super Bowl advertisers pay for the opportunity to speak to an exceptionally massive and captive audience. Let’s take a look at how excelled and who completely missed the mark.

Best in Show:
The Coke ad with the parade balloons
This was just a feel-good commercial from being at the parade to seeing the essence of toddlers wanting the Coke to good old Charlie Brown finally winning something. Just great.

Best Montage:
Hank the Clydesdale
It was a Rocky montage, that’s the hands-down winner every year, no matter what the commercial is.

Best Single Line: (tie)
“Knock it off” when everyone was doing the Night at the Roxbury head bob and “I under-estimated their creepiness” by the baby talking about the clown he hired. In both cases the commercial were edging close to being unremarkable, but the line at the end ascended them into deserving mention at the water cooler this morning.

Best Cross-Media promotion:
GoDaddy “exposing” Danica Patrick
It was actually cheap and gimmicky (and misleading) but it was the only company that really transfer the massive Super Bowl audience to their website, so they get the nod.

Best Actually Selling of their Product:
DELL Red
They played on some pretty base desires, acceptance and attractiveness, by essentially saying this DELL will make you popular and hot girls will want to make out with you.

Worst Single Concept:
The “I Quit” heart
When that heart leapt of out of that woman’s body and held up a sign that says “I Quit”, we thought it was announcing the woman had died.

Worst Direction:
The down-on-his-luck drug dealer.
The director missed the mark and gave the guy some pathos, I had to remind myself not to feel sorry for him, he’s deals drugs to kids.

Worst Interference:
LifeWater with Naomi Campbell doing the Thriller dance.
This reeks of meddling by upper brass not in marketing. The scenario that played through my head was that the executives decided they have too much money invested not to micro-manage the creative process. So, it starts with the insistence that they use the commercial to brand their “I’m-not-theGIECO-gecko” mascot. Then someone with “C” at the beginning of their three letter title decides a Super Bowl ad needs a celebrity, never mind what for, and gets Naomi Campbell hired on. Then a different “C-blank-O” watched a viral YouTube of a Thriller dance breaking out at a wedding and decided that was both cool and funny, and aren’t those the qualities they are looking for in a Super Bowl ad? End result – too many unrelated ideas, all just slapped together.

Worst of the Worst
SalesGenie with the animated Panda
This ad was horrifically offensive. It was a parade of up every negative stereotype of Chinese people. I have to imagine someone is going to get fired for these.

When you are freelance designing, the soundest approach is typically to charge an hourly rate. The better you are, the more you charge per hour for your work, it’s an increasing scale. But what happens when you are competent enough to no longer need many hours to complete the work?

I went to the National Symphony Orchestra here in DC. They played 90-minutes of intensely complicated music from three symphonies. In the talk-back session that followed, their conductor Maestro Slatkin, noted that they only had three days to prepare and five rehearsals. That means these professionals, the elite in their field, spent approximately 20 hours of preparation to learn and master three symphonies.

When you are that proficient, at the top of your game, charging by the hour starts costing you money. I can’t fathom the exorbitant hourly rate these musicians would have to charge to be properly compensated?

As we get closer to the holidays and the shopping gets crazy and tensions get higher, it is important to step back and remember that it’s really all about being together, like Chewbacca reuniting with his family for Life Day, and enjoying the times we share, like Bea Arthur and Snaggletooth at the Cantina bar. If this all sounds very confusing and bizarre, then you are probably not familiar with the 1978 Star Wars Christmas Special. Fortunately, someone was kind enough to edit that train wreck of a two hour program down to 5 minutes and post it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asnVcbWQ2cg

I think the lesson learned from this special is all too self-evident. Taking risks is a part of growth, but you must be very very careful with the choices you make, especially when they impact your brand.

Anyone who designs emails knows that the current landscape of compatibility and rendering from the many different email clients makes the Netscape/IE browser wars of the late 90s look like a sandbox skirmish. Many of us have come to terms with having to continue to use antiquated <font> and <table> based HTML to get a consistent rendering in email, and with the regression of Outlook (now using MS Word for rendering instead of Internet Explorer), that consistency is becoming less and less reliable.

Thankfully, someone has stood up and said enough. An advocacy group has just launched a site to follow in the footsteps of the Web Standards Project, to try to educate designers about best practices and to reign in the multitude of email clients (Outlook, Eudora, Hotmail, Gmail, YahooMail, AOLMail, etc.) to agree to support these common standards and practices.

Best of luck Email Standards Project, you have my support.

I had two cards with points from the ESPNZone, one with one single point, the other with 74 points. I asked the clerk to merge the two cards together. He stated that was impossible. I submit that that is technological impasse is rather convenient for ESPN.

Because, I can not move that one point onto the card with 74 points, there are only two options:

1. It is never used, which means a small profit for ESPN Zone, or
2. I add points to the card to bring it back up to the level where I can play off all the points, which is new profit for ESPN Zone.

I recognize that a great deal of the gift card value for businesses comes from the small change that gets left behind, and if I, the customer, neglect to zero out the card, that is my own doing. But at least the legitimate retailer provides the opportunity to zero out the card. Every major retailer from clothing to bookstores to supermarkets will let you run off the remainder of a gift card and subsidize the remainder with cash or charge. ESPN Zone, on the other hand, does not give the customer any options, it just takes our money. When I asked for a clarifying statement, the clerk at the Washington DC ESPN Zone simple said, “This ain’t the Metro, you can’t trade in your cards here. What you got is what you got.”

I got hosed.