shepherdweb.com

2007.sxsw.com has been unveiled in preparation for March 9-18, 2007 in Austin, Texas. Now through September 29th is your chance to get the best available registration rate. Programming will probably not be announced until the weeks before the conference, although hints will be thrown out.

Panels at the 2007 event will cover topics such as accessibility, advertising, blogging, business issues, content, creativity, design, entrepreneurial concerns, mobile technology, legal issues, online video, open source, podcasting, programming and usability. A preliminary list of panels will be released in early October.

My main grip regarding the 2006 Conference was the lack of programming topics. There was no shortage of web 2.0, AJAXy entrepreneurs showing off their applications, and plenty of designers, accessibility evangelists and semantic code promoters. Jeremy Keith and Aaron Gustafson presented what was probably the closest thing I saw to a full presentation on programming with their presentation on DOM scripting. Jeremy also sat in on one of Tantek’s presentation and presented a really cool mashup he had developed. I also seem to recall Shaun Inman also participated in a joint venture where he got to show off some php skills with a redesign of Plazes.com (Plazes does not appear to be using that design).

So, why the focus of SXSW weighted so heavily towards client side layout and code? Business logic is a very important part of “Interactive Design”. Without parsing engines, how useful are Microformats? How about RSS? Without server-side code, how do you do web 2.0?

I would like to see more sessions that focus on server-side development. Here are some suggestions:

• The Framework Olympics - Four popular frameworks go head to head. Django, RoR, CakePHP and (prepare for backlash from open-source community) ASP.NET.
• Subversion for noobies.
• Communication Skills for Coders - How to get a word in edgewise when in a room full of power-hungry entrepreneurs, touchy-feely designers, and loud mouthed marketers.
• Rapid Development Skills - You don’t need a framework.

Just a few ideas.

But, an equally important factor behind the growth of SXSW is the growth and support of the devoted community that follows the event. As always, we welcome your suggestions about the website and about all other aspects of SXSW Interactive. Beginning next week, you will be able to give feedback on 2007 panel proposals via a special online interface.

Perhaps I will submit some of mine.