I was up bright and early on the Saturday but none of the earliest sessions really took my fancy so I went exploring, wandering towards the upper floors of the Convention Centre and happening upon the Day Stage, which turned out to be a good move. 37signals’ Jason Fried came out came out and held forth on the subject of running a business.
He was reading chapters from REWORK, their latest book and one that I’ve since bought and (more surprisingly) read. It’s full of short, opinionated chapters, most containing some good common sense. The general aim of the book seems to be to try and dispel the myth that to be a successful business person you need to take on as much work as possible, please as many people as possible, work 23 hour days and grow as much as possible. Simple stuff and, as I said, pretty much common sense, but a useful counterpoint to much of the perceived wisdom out there.
It was a good morning actually, because next I went along to Design for Awareness: Mobile Technologies and Health which I went along to because I thought it would be interesting and a sidestep from my usual areas of interest. As it turned out it couldn’t have been more relevant to my current interests. I don’t think my notes quite reflect what was going through my head while I was sat there but I’ll try and get them written up separately later. In the meantime, here are Jason Hall’s notes.
Next up was Designing The First Fifteen Minutes. Another good session and another one I’ll write up notes for separately. My go-to person on this kind of stuff is Joshua Porter who was name-checked right at the end. It was good to get some different examples of effective sign-ups.
At this point I had a bit of a break before catching the second half of Ze Frank Conversation: The Creative Lifestyle. The main topic of conversation seemed to concern Ze’s attempts at cracking the traditional entertainment industry. I’m not entirely sure what the main story was there but he had the air of a man whose time had been wasted on an endeavour he was never utterly sold on. Actually, his story reminded me a bit of Stringer Bell’s (without the drugs, guns and so on)
The last session of the day was Gaming the System with 4chan. A generally amiable meander with Christopher Poole and a pretty decent end to the day. I didn’t take any notes because I wasn’t really there to learn anything, although a theory that Wikipedia is a game for fans of bureaucracy has stuck with me.