I checked in about 5, and went upstairs to the convention center and first thing I ran into a former colleague Laurie Excell from my days at Pro Photo Supply in Portland. She is an amazing photographer and a great gal, so it’s fitting that she be part of this photo extravaganza, which is all kinda funny because I just reconnected with another old friend from the PPS days just yesterday. Funny that. Any way, I was hoping to check in and get my good y bag, but they closed pre-con registration at 2pm. Oh well. There’s always the intarwebs and my trusty lappy.

More fun and reporting tomorrow after the brain swell begins. Now, I’m trying to decide if I want to go back out with the camera and get some night shots of the city…..

Maybe next time, rather than delete it i will click the link in the email, fill up my shopping cart and abandon it – 15 times. Why? Just to mess with their metrics.

I've covered this sort of thing before, but it never fails to amaze me – especially from companies that have an otherwise excellent online presence and program. I liken this to restoring a beautiful 53' Ford, then taking to Earl Sheib for the paint, you don't spend 25k on a hot rod just to put a lame $400 paint job on it. That's like deckin' yourself out in Bobos.

Somehow this all reminds of Dilbert…..

What a lot of companies seem to forget though, is how to communicate effectively with people who have signed up to an email list. Every week I get hundreds of emails, a lot of which are from some company wanting me to buy from them. While most of these are direct sales, a few of the good ones are indirect sales, and the really good ones are inserting their product/s into my lifestyle to make the experience and products relative to my day-to-day existence. Almost all of them, however, have one thing in common; they fail to communicate with me effectively. What do I mean? Quite often I receive an email with no text. None. Just a big fat empty page with an opt out and a link to a privacy policy. Why? Because I have images turned off by default, so I have to specifically request to see the images. One could argue that this is my fault, but it isn't, and I'll tell you why.

The sender has no idea how I will be viewing the email so they assume that I will happily download and digest the images, being bathed in their commercial propaganda. So what if I am on a mobile device with limited connectivity? What if (God forbid) I am only on dial-up? Why should I be forced to have to wait and view the images? Most the time they aren't even all that compelling, so by not considering this detail, they get the door slammed in their face.

This can happen for a lot of reasons. People tend to get too caught up in the new catch phrases. I mean, I think if I hear another word about making content relevant I am gonna hurl. Of course it has to be relevant to the recipient, otherwise it wouldn't be much different than SPAM (not Spam). It could be through lack of experience, the use of a poorly developed email tool, or simply because they are too concerned with getting something out the door that what si going out the door becomes secondary to actually hitting the send button.

The real kicker here is that it's pretty simple to create an email that has been designed and coded to accommodate both viewing options, by adding some inline styles to the text, and cutting out the headlines and essential message copy to be placed as actual text, not images. Rather than take the extra time on the front-end, they are losing customers before they even get to their site. The same rules and standards apply to email development as to website development, and it's pretty easy to code an email.

• don't use ID tags
• don't include CSS files, use inline styles instead.
• don't embed images in the email, link to a public web server where the images will be hosted.
• add ALT text to all of your images
• format the page so that it will still be easily readable if you have to use a large number of images
• don't use 1 big image for the email.
• as a general rule don't use images for text, especially body copy. Using images for header text is okay, just be sure that the ALT text is the same as what is in the image.

You won't be able to cover all your bases all the time, but having a well drafted email presented to the recipient regardless of whether or not they want to see the images is a must.

In a world where everything seems to have some version number slapped on it, web 2.0, (and God help us; web 3.0), why the big-brains at Google couldn't noodle up something even remotely creative is beyond me. Moon 2.0? Really? That's all you got? I can see what someone was going after; trying to make all trendy and cool – but it's not. It's lame. The Moon isn't new, in fact it's actually something like 4 billion years old, so throwing down a Moon 2.0 tagline/logo/thing is a sophomoric attempt to make it seem cool.

The poster is actually pretty nice though (image to the right), and it gets completely ruined by the Moon 2.0 crap splattered over a great image. Then for the t-shirts, there is no Moon image, just the lame logo on a shirt.

Maybe it's just me, and the fact that I am so tired of the web 2.0, and now web 3.0, crap being slung around that it all just makes me want to hurl. Most of the people who toss it around have no idea behind the actually meat of it, so it makes it a worthless acronym for a movement on the web, and how RIA development is changing the face of the web as we know it.

With a winners' booty of $20 million smackers, it just seems to me that someone should have made the decision to hire a top-notch designer to come up with something a bit more creative than Moon 2.0.

Toronto is a great city too, the 3 or 4 times I have been there have all been awesome.

I have no idea what my schedule is going to be yet, I can't decide so I am just going to figure it out as I go. The best part about these conferences is all of the massively creative people that you get to interact with. I have always feel reenergized every time I come back from one of these. I went to the 2006 FITC, and FlashForward in 2004 – and I am hoping to go to Adobe MAX next year…. Although it is in November, so maybe I will get lucky and be able to do both? Probably not…..

Maybe I will see you there. 

Yeah, yeah – I know. It’s not done yet. Deal with it. It’s cool and you know it!