Donahue in A List Apart

April 19, 2011 | Permalink  

We presented the Donahue app last month at SXSW, and since then we’ve been busy on a lot of stuff. Mostly, though, we’ve been preparing for the great honor of having our talk published in A List Apart. The resulting article, a distillation and refinement of the actual talk we gave at SXSW, is out today.

ALA’s editorial summary of our article is pretty funny:

Baby’s got backchannel! If everybody at the conference is staring at their Twitter stream instead of at the person who’s doing the speaking, maybe the speaker should meet them halfway. Migrating speaker presentations to the backchannel can empower the audience while enabling the speaker to listen carefully to their responses. The broadcast model of presentations is dead! Long live the conversation model.

Our friend Jeffrey Zeldman attended the talk and thought that our message was something worth discussing with a broader audience (and as a veteran of thousands of conference sessions, both as audience member, speaker, and organizer, Jeffrey knows presenting!). We couldn’t agree more! Our whole objective, the whole point of the talk and of Donahue itself, is to expose interesting ideas to wider audiences, and, more importantly, to begin conversations which can make those ideas better.

And we’re in love with Kevin Cornell’s pitch-perfect illustration, too: a conference room full of liberated twittering birds. Go read it!