Hallgrímur Thorsteinsson from NFS, an all-news station, introduced the session at 2006.04.27 09:36.
This will be an English-speaking conference. My name is Halli Thorsteinsson; I’ll be chairing this conference today. Minister, “good guests,” as we say in Icelandic, welcome to this first Iceweb conference. I want to congratulate the Icelandic industry, first of all, for finally getting together and forming an organization like this. I was under the impression they already had. But no. Formally it’s on now, and that’s nice.
We are very fortunate today and tomorrow for this conference to have the cream of the crop of Web development in the world today with us. A great bunch of speakers, great bunch of people here today. So we’ll be honoured to get their expertise in a setting which, I think, is favourable to this sort of thing. It’s a setup that even the guests are sort of wondering about sitting at a table like this, but I was saying maybe they could start some working groups in the area here to work on some of the aspects of what they’ll be talking about. But anyway, I’m rambling on.
I just wanted to note how remarkable the Web is. I’m in the media now, but a few years ago, I had some years in this business, looking at it now, it seems like it’s grown up a lot, but really it seems like the Internet in its infancy. But it’s nice to be on a platform like this here today. This is the way the Web is organized – loosely, on the ground. These are the grassroots, and this is the way the Web is working.
Looking at the group of speakers, you can trace the origins of the Web, because they have been instrumental in some of the standards that are at work today, and they have worked with some of the people who have been instrumental to this revolution. Every time we talk about the Web, it’s still a fundamentally democratic institution and technology, and it makes it very, very special.
Let me introduce our Ministry of Finance and Industry – Industry and Commerce.
(Ms) Valgerður Sverrisdóttir: It’s my honour and pleasure to open this conference which headline is Iceweb 2006. The Icelandic government has placed emphasis on further development of Internet society in Iceland. The country is in a favourable position to use information technology. Icelanders have been at the forefront of using public computers and the Internet. The same can be said about other aspects of information technology, which can be compared to other European countries. According to a new report, Iceland is number four in the ranking of the World Economic Forum’s World Technology Report 2005–2006. In some areas, however, development has been slower than expected.
The company SJÁ (interface testing and consulting) conducted a survey for the PMO in 2005 on all the Web pages of ministries, institutions, and local municipalities. SJÁ looked at whether the sites were interactive and how usable they were. The results were clear: We had to make a lot of improvements. Only four institutions offered full interactivity, meaning the public could conduct their business through the Web. As a result, the government intends to place more emphasis on making it possible for the public to send applications to the government and get responses via the Internet. [A project will be launched.] We do hope that the use of electronic signatures will be more in next years than before. [Carries on.]
Ideally the user will not need to know in advance which ministry handles which service [at the portal Iceland.IS]. It is absolutely essential that it is usable; it’s made for the public and the public should be able to use it without restraints.
On a personal basis, I find the Internet to be a wonderful tool to express my views. I have a private Web site on which I post short articles. The media reports it if it is of general interest to the public. In a way, I am not dependent on television or newspapers to share my views with the public. I have tried to make my homepage usable, as it is essential in my view.
With these words I declare the conference open. Thank you very much.
Halli: There’s a lot of ambition in the public service and elsewhere in Iceland. If they’re not number one in something, they’ll try to make it so. Formally we were recognized as the country with the most broadband use – finally officially recognized. So that’s an indicator.
Let me introduce the chairman of SVEF, the Icelandic Web developers’ union. Hugi [“Huggy Bear”] Þórðarson has been very instrumental in the organizational things for the Icelandic Web awards through the years and now is the chairman of this new operational body.
Hugi: You might find it odd that we’re speaking English, because we wanted to make this something more international. If you don’t speak English, you’re going to have an interesting two days. [Thanks everyone under the sun.] We started this organization last December, a very modest organization of 36 people. Now only four months later, look where we are [140 members]. I know that some of you here are not members of SVEF. Imagine what we can do on Iceweb 2007 if we have a full year to prepare. So if you’re not part of the organization, [lightly] I beg of you to join the organization. I and the board of SVEF hope this conference is only the first Iceweb of many more to come, because in 50 years I want to recount how Internet Explorer didn’t have CSS2 support when it all started [and still doesn’t].
Halli: Imagine that – a few months and it’s grown to cult-like status. In America this would be a membership of 140,000 strong, a political force to reckon with. Anyway, let’s go to the speakers, which are phenomenal. Molly Holzschlag is here in the deserts of Arizona and is finding it “cool” to be in Iceland, I think. She’s a well-known Web-standards advocate and instructor. She’s a group lead for the Web Standards Project and an invited expert to the Internationalization working group at W3C. Among 30 books she has written, one of the recent ones is getting a lot of attention, The Zen of CSS Design, which she coauthored with David Shea, which is also here, speaking tomorrow. You can see her at Molly.com. You actually got that early on, didn’t you? [Molly: “Shows how long I’ve been around.”]
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.04.27 06:20. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/04/27/iceweb-intro/
I was sitting in the green room with Hugi Þórðarson waiting to go on Icelandic TV live (apparently the video will be up in a Flash player eventually) when we decided to check out the press coverage, in Fréttablaðið (emphasis added):
Sjö fyrirlesarar flytja tíu erindi á ráðstefnunni. Fyrirlesararnir eru Molly Holzschlag, Kelly Goto, Dave Shea, Andy Clarke, Joke Clarke og Shaun Inman…. kanadíski greinahöfundurinn og rithöfundurinn Joe Clarke fjalla um AJAX, AHAH og aðra tækni sem gert hefur forriturum kleift að þróa gagnvirka vefi.
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.04.26 10:06. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/04/26/joke/
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.04.21 16:25. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/04/21/thenewbag/
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.04.19 12:55. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/04/19/working/
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.04.19 12:54. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/04/19/pawley/
The nominees are published on page that uses tables for layout and has three HTML validation errors. At that rate, it should be a nominee in its own awards show. Let’s fact-check some arses.
cbc.ca/kidscbc: Flash (I did some work for them this year)
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.04.17 15:12. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/04/17/cnma/
I know I shouldn’t be picking on widdle Andy Wysocki and Bill Sanderson, the husband-and-husband team behind BigMuscle(Bears) and another “dating” site with an Orwellian name, NormalGay. They’re just average guys with man-sized appetites trying to give back to the community – via a genteel porn site that wages a campaign of atrocities against Web standards. I know it’s mean of me to nag at these small-time operators, whose hearts are pure and their edition of Microsoft FrontPage fully licensed.
Or is it? An online interview (NSFW) gives us a superexclusive peek inside the Magic Kingdom, where, as no dessert is complete without whipped cream, no Web site is complete without tables and frames. (Some copy errors corrected, others mocked.)
I can only say how it effected our life [sic], how its effected the gay community [sic] is only second hand from the e-mails we receive…. I Andy was in technical Sales [sic] and Bill was a manager in an IT department…. We figured the donations from the members were paying the [I]nternet bill and that anything he could get from selling ad space he could live off of, and my full-time job would cover the rest….
In July of 2005 we re-ran the numbers and figured I (Andy) could leave my full-time job with a pay cut, but the quality of life would offer us so much more. So what started as a fun project turned into a full-time job for both of us…. Bill and I are just the janitors keeping the site clean and sparkling.
So I guess I needn’t feel sorry for this couple, as they are debt-free proprietors of profitable Web sites that will shortly expand to further “boutique” markets. I note the gushing exclamation “Thanks, Andy and Bill!” on many an obsequious BigMuscle(Bears) profile; shouldn’t they be thanking us? How, exactly, is a site full of photos of shirtless and/or naked homosexualists (“I think voyeurism is what makes BigMuscle work in some ways”) in any sense “clean and sparkling”? (Never mind what’s under the hood.)
I think the [W]ayback [M]achine has some very funny old graphics of [QOD.com] when I really didn’t know about HTML coding. Not that I do still, but have learned a few things by now.
Straight guys know more about gay sex than these two know about HTML.
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.04.17 14:03. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/04/17/effected/
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.04.16 17:56. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/04/16/not-quite-futura/
I find it entertaining to watch heterosexualists and their primitive mating rituals, like telephone chatlines and <airquotes>hookup</airquotes> Web sites. I’m sorry, but we were doing that in the mid-’90s. It seems you people needed to develop your own parallel vocabulary before you could permit yourselves to do what we already found passé.
I was going to write a whole post on this, but what the hell, let’s sum up: Gay guys have a basket but straight guys have a package. We have fuck buddies (indelicate, but that is the term) and you have friends with benefits. You have two concepts unknown to us, dating and going out with, which never seem to be defined or to have prerequisites. (A Mormon and a stripper could both claim to be “dating” – possibly each other.)
There’s also that incomprehensible scarlet letter A of the heterosexualist argot, to hit on. It seems that any display of interest, real or imagined, constitutes hitting on someone. The term flirt having apparently been forgotten, so much as a glance or standing too close to a stranger on the subway can be and is interpreted as “hitting on.” I was once accused of hitting on someone when, at a party, I sat down on a sofa a foot and a half away from him. He was the hostess’s teenage son, and I was just chatting.
These days, of course, you’re all terribly au courant and so very Aughties. You consider yourselves bundles of risqué, envelope-pushing naughtiness whenever you cruise Nerve or Craigslist. (Or, G-d help us, Jdate – admittedly less of a joke than GayJews.) You puny heterosexualists, you. What’s it like to have only a couple of sites? We’ve got so many that the kottkeist job posting for an assistant to keep one’s social-networking-site profiles synced and up to date is a position we actually need to fill.
And here is the best part: I read these sites for amusement. This is literally true. I met one fellow once as a result of these things. Of course “ordering in” is ostensibly convenient, but even that is a hurdle I do not wish to surmount. Merely ordering in is itself too much trouble. I do, however, like to track, and frequently mock, people’s personal ads in the comfort and privacy of my home. I will send a note with an occasional compliment, always meant sincerely and generally interpreted as the opposite. I do occasionally correct their spelling, as there are really only so many ads for guys declaring themselves “discrete” that one can stand before going ballistic. (Then there’s the logical inconsistency of posting an ad on the Web calling for discretion.)
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The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2006.04.15 15:39. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2006/04/15/men4/
