Very early on in the movie, Anthony Michael-Hall who plays Bill Gates gets on a phone call with Ed Roberts (computer engineer, creator of the Altair), and just as he’s about to take the phone call, he turns to Steve Ballmer (Developers! Developers! Developers!) and Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) and says about the call:

It’s our job to find out what this guy doesn’t know that he needs… but does need. And then make sure he knows that he does need it and that we’re the only ones to give him the answer.

If that doesn’t say enough about what marketing and sales is all about, I don’t know what does.

1. The pasteis de belem. Oh. My. These tasted like nothing I’d ever tasted before. Heavenly.
2. I saw almost all of the main conference talks. This doesn’t usually happen. I was comfortable with it at this conference because over at Simply Accessible, we hired a fantastic project manager to help us. You might know him – he’s Robert Jolly. Knowing he was keeping things moving back home really helped me not stress about work, so I could actually listen to the other speakers. I loved it and I can’t wait for more conferences where I can do this.
3. Bruno took the leap of faith and allowed me to speak about something other than Accessibility. I talk about accessibility all the time, and generally have the freedom to talk about whatever I want. But there are only a few conferences that have encouraged me to go beyond accessibility if I so desired. Thank you, Bruno, on so many levels.

The UX Lisbon 2012 conference was rich with speakers that I’ve never met, but have always held in such high esteem, other speakers that I know but haven’t seen in a few years, and a very clearly advanced audience. For me, it was like a perfect storm of speakers and attendees. Judge the speaker lineup for UX Lisbon for yourself. You’ll see why I was so excited to join that crew on stage, to meet them for the first time, or to be reunited with them.

We also managed to get in some site-seeing, with the grand finale being a full day tour with several other speakers and spouses/partners/whatevers, organized by Bruno. I’d be understating it if I said it was a long day on Saturday. By the end we were all exhausted. But I’d also be understating it if I said that Bruno did an amazing job with the conference itself, the social events, and taking care of the speakers. Amazing just doesn’t cut it.

To everyone that I talked to, the attendees, the other speakers and friends, those that tweeted out soundbytes from my talk and workshop, and to our wonderful host, Bruno: thanks for indulging me.

Short version:

Go to LinkedIn. Send them feedback (using the Send Feedback link at the bottom of any page). Ask them to enable some method for seeing who has shared your content and where within LinkedIn. Which connections? In which groups? Which discussions?

The strength of a social networking site lies within its connections. If we don’t can’t see those connections or don’t have a mechanism to explore new connections, the social networking site has failed in at least one of its goals.

Tweets, Likes, Shares, +1s are the 4 most prevalent means for getting your content out there today — at least for our target audience at Simply Accessible and Seize the Room.

Each badge includes a mechanism that allows you to share content on their respective social networking site. The Facebook and Google Plus badges allow you to toggle your status for that article, allowing you to like and unlike, or +1 and -1 that content directly via the badge. But sharing is only one of the core purposes of a social networking site.

My Favourite Piece

Click on the number that is beside the tweet button and you’re taken immediately to a search on twitter that shows you those 33 or whatever number of tweets. So you can see the effects or the spread of that content.

Why is that important? I want to know who is interested in my articles. Maybe I’ll follow them, or add them to a list. Maybe I’ll do nothing, but the important part is that I can track the spread of my ideas on twitter. The current badges for Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ don’t have that capability.

I wrote to LinkedIn support and asked if I was missing something. Is there a way to see those shares? I’d like to see who it was that shared it, and if they shared it in specific groups and/or discussions or just as an update. This feature would help connect more people to strengthen the network, so it seems to me that it would be central to any social networking site.

I got this response from LinkedIn:

Unfortunately, the site doesn’t have this functionality right now to track sharing, but I’ll definitely send your suggestion on to our product team. When lots of people ask for the same improvement, they try their best to get it done (but sorry to say, they usually can’t provide a timeline)

Doing my duty

Well, she left the door open. That support person suggested that we use the “Send Feedback” link on the bottom of any page. I’d encourage you to do so and request the same feature if you think its important. I know I’d appreciate it if the feature was there, and I think it would actually make LinkedIn better and more useful in terms of network building. As the support representative said, if enough of us ask, maybe it’ll get on the product road map.

It was from Matthew Milan, back in the day. I loved the concept then, and I love it just as much now.

Start at the end and work your way back to the beginning. I think what I love the most about it is that the process that you go through helps you recognize signs of success and signs of trouble, before you even start. And, it helps you to think ahead and ask “If we’re three weeks in and we haven’t seen X or done Y, then here’s what we’ll do to get back on track to our most desirable outcome…”

Planning for your own failures ahead of time so that you can ultimately succeed. Love it.

I’m really very proud to have the article accepted and published there and I couldn’t have done it without the help of our full-time team and friends.

So, thanks go out to Jeff Smith, and Joanna Briggs who helped with coding and testing the many iterations of the examples that we used in the article.

And big thanks to Jason Kiss — he used to live and work here in Ottawa. We talked quite a bit about ARIA and I passed some early drafts his way for feedback. He works with us occasionally now that he’s in New Zealand (yes, that’s right… now that he lives in New Zealand, he does do some work with us. In Ottawa. I guess I just have a thing for remote teamwork!). Jason and I talk regularly about accessibility, user experience, technical and cultural challenges with accessibility — sometimes on the clock, and sometimes off. (Seriously, if you’re reading this from Australia or New Zealand, hire Jason. He’s sharp as a tack and brings with him tremendous experience and knowledge.)

His research and testing into ARIA tabbed panels was referenced and used heavily in the tabbed panels section of this article. We based our code on his, because… well, because it was so very thorough and well-thought out.

AccessU West is an awesome accessibility conference put on by the fine folks at Knowbility. Hosted at San Jose State University, in San Jose, California from January 10th to 12th, 2011.

I’ll be making my usual bold statements, including:

• Everything you know about JavaScript and Accessibility is wrong and,
• Yes, you can create Accessible Flash

I’m teaching my full-day Real World Accessibility for HTML5, CSS3 and ARIA course as an optional (but highly recommended, if I do say so myself!) post-conference session.

There’s also a Usability track for practitioners that focus on the user side of accessibility, not just on design and development techniques.

If you haven’t already, get out there and register for AccessU West. I look forward to seeing you there, talking with you about user experience, design, and accessibility!

And then the site just sat there.

For 5 years.

That just seemed kind of silly to me. Simply Accessible needed to be more — a place where we can continue to write about a very specific topic: web accessibility.

Back to life

So, earlier this year, I decided that it was time to bring Simply Accessible back to life and turn it into a big part of our business. We’ll continue to share articles, posts and opinions about accessibility there. And we’ll also be working to bring many of our accessibility courses online.

I’ve been teaching web accessibility to web designers, developers and a variety of user experience folk for years, and now we’re getting ready to launch many of those courses online. Travel budgets are down, training budgets are down, and that means that people need to get the training that they need quickly and efficiently, and without travel if possible. That’s what we’re bringing online very shortly — we’re working out all the logistics of course delivery, archive format and subscription access, but onces that’s done the courses will launch.

I’d be ecstatic if you’d check out the new design for Simply Accessible, sign up for the newsletter, grab the RSS feed, or even subscribe via email if you like.

We’re very excited about the site and what is happening with it. Hope you are too!

Well, Project 52 didn’t go quite as planned. Fail early? Yep. I managed to get two entries for Project 52 before I couldn’t do it any more.

Fail often? Yep. I managed to continue to fail to write for the next umpteen weeks. Until now.

That’s okay, though. It isn’t like I don’t have things to say (I say a lot of them on Twitter). I’ve been writing and producing other “stuff” – part of a book (InterACT with Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design), a number of new presentations, and a few new articles ready to go up at Simply Accessible once we get that new design finalized.

But for some reason, I’ve felt incredibly guilty about writing for me. How can I produce content for ME when I can’t produce the content for others? How can I, in good conscience, write on my blog when I’ve got other deadlines that I’m missing?!?

Switch it up

Maybe, I’m actually looking at it the wrong way. Maybe I shouldn’t feel guilty. Maybe I shouldn’t hold back writing for me. I remember hearing/reading this somewhere:

“If you don’t love yourself, how can you love someone else?”

Maybe the same applies to writing.

If you can’t write for yourself, how can you write for someone else?

The living contradiction is a concept I first encountered in my days as a teacher. Through my professor and friend Tom Russell I learned of Jack Whitehead, who was very interested in action research, reflective practice and living educational theory.

Jack talks about experiencing oneself as a living contradiction — when we experience our actions being at odds with our beliefs and values — as the impetus to improve. When we experience that feeling, we are motivated to act. To change. To iterate.

This is different than hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the when we pretend to have certain beliefs and values, when we don’t really have them. With hypocrisy, we are lying.

A living contradiction, however, is about the truth. Finding a way to live true to what we believe — both personally and professionally.

Feeling the Pain

In the final two months of 2009, I did precisely the opposite of what I should have been doing. In October, I wrote two posts “What Gives?” and “Needs More Whitespace” — both of which explored the need to give things up, to slow down, to create space in our personal and professional lives in order to achieve a better balance between the personal and professional parts of our lives as part of long term “success” and happiness.

I wrote the words, but I couldn’t live the ideals. I slept less per night than I had for the last 2.5 years. I didn’t log my hours of sleep, but I know that more often than not, my alarm woke me only 3 or 4 hours after my head hit the pillow. Not healthy.

I believe, like Jack, that I can make a positive change after feeling and experiencing this dissonance. Feeling it so acutely is certainly more than enough to provoke me. I need to reflect, plan, act and evaluate. I am a living contradiction, and I’m okay with that, as long as I do something about it.

What are you doing — right now — that shows you are a living contradiction? What are you going to do to make a change to bring your actions in line with your ideals and beliefs?

We both need to change this now, while we’re still in the tone-setting, habit-building infancy of 2010.

That is part of the reason that I signed up for Project 52. It isn’t just a kick start to get me writing more. I’m using Project 52 as a means for me to understand myself and others more deeply and thoroughly.

In processing the past year of triathlon training and racing, I came to the realization that last year’s activities were focused entirely on the long haul. My wife and I competed in two races: IronMan Lake Placid, and IronMan Muskoka 70.3. Both are long distance races, and are spaced such that they ended up being the only races we trained for. And ultimately, that hurt us. We resented training. We weren’t having fun. We just didn’t want to do it any more.

Mentally reliving the experiences of the past 12 months while kicking off 2010, connected our world of triathlon racing to my world of work. Last year’s long-haul-only tri pain was that of 2008 in business — where we worked almost exclusively on one project for one client for the entire year. That singular focus for an entire year nearly burnt us out completely (ask Jeff Smith — he’ll tell you!), and I’m determined to never let that happen again.

Just as we need variety in our training and competitions in triathlon, so too, do we need variety in the projects we take on in business. It can’t just be the long haul.

It seems to me that in many ways, my ideal year in triathlon would be very similar to an ideal year of business. For the company to be healthy, and for us to maintain our passion, to feel good about what we’re doing, we need a well-balanced mixture of activity. Mix some short term projects — the sprint distance triathlons where we push our limits to go fast and furious — with some longer term projects — the long haul, IronMan and IronMan 70.3 races that take long, slow preparation and lots of endurance building — and a good dose of fun — projects where we experiment and scratch our own itches, doing things just for us.

Now, more than ever, I’m looking forward to the year 2010 — with a clear path forward for the right variety — in business, and in health.

What’s the right mix for you for 2010? How are you going to maintain variety so that you don’t burn out and keep the passion for what you do alive and well?