Bit off-topic here, but very cool indeed. I am a huge fan of Jamie Hewlett (ever since Tank Girl) and the Gorillaz together with IE9 are asking for people to design a character for the next videos:

The countdown begins; Gorillaz fans have two days to develop “The Evangelist” – a new character in Gorillaz world

Gorillaz fans only have two days remaining to design a new Gorillaz character, known simply as “The Evangelist”, for Gorillaz world. This is the last chance for budding artists who have until Sunday 28th November to submit their ideas to www.gorillaz.com/evangelist .

The winning submission will be redrawn by Gorillaz’ Jamie Hewlett, and the final creation will be revealed on 6th January 2011, on Gorillaz.com. The winner will be credited on the competition page and will receive a Gorillaz “gift pack” including a signed, framed print of Jamie Hewlett’s final design of “The Evangelist”.

Now, I can’t paint for Toffee, but if I may give a piece of advice – most evangelists should have long, flowing, red, curly hair :)

On Tuesday Laura North’s Speaking Out partnered with the London Girl Geek Dinners to deliver the third Speaking Out Event in London, England. Speaking out is meant to give people tips, confidence and ideas on how to become a public speaker. This time, Laura had invited Claire Lee from Microsoft and Margaret Gold as speakers and me as someone to get people drinking and talking afterwards.

The topic this time was “Speaking in Technology” and my presentation “Talk Nerdy to me” gave some tips on how to speak to a tech audience.

The slides are available on SlideShare:

The audio is available on archive.org:

Details/Notes

The event was special for me as it was the last public talk for me as a full-time Yahoo employee – great to do that on a topic that is close to my heart.

Talking to technical audiences is different than talking to others.

The good news are that clothing doesn’t matter and that technical glitches are expected. If something goes wrong, you can blame either Microsoft or Apple.

The bad news are that there is a shorter attention span – technical audiences don’t forgive long-winded explanations – and that the audience is keen on spotting a mistake to show off that they know more than you. The final part of bad news is that feedback is very polarised, so you should take bad and good feedback with a grain of salt as the truth is probably in the middle.

If you take the right approach, none of this is an issue though.

Girl geeks are not uncommon and there are crossovers. For example in Star Trek – The undiscovered country – Lieutenant Valeris – a Vulcan – was played by Samantha from Sex and the City!

Lea Verou (@leaverou) completely blew me away at the Fronttrends2010 conference in Poland. Her CSS3 talk was very long, very complex and she delivered it amazingly well although she was incredibly nervous at first.

Anna Debenham @anna_debenham gave an amazing talk at the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival about the state of education in web development in the UK. Although she is very young she already runs her own web magazine at ScrunchUp – check it out!

What is their secret? Simple, passion and information – if you love what you talk about you will give a great talk. Prepare properly and you have a great talk nailed already.

However, there are some more tricks:

• Don’t over-plan – rehearsed talks with planned jokes are stale and boring
• Avoid redundancy – Write your deck and then remove all the things that are not really necessary.
• Say what it is – tell the audience upfront what you will talk about and use the right terms
• Cite other people – instead of telling the audience that you know it all back up your information with deep-dive links
• Break out of the box – every topic has a very obvious use case, but the interesting talks are based around the unknown part of a certain technology
• Don’t preach – tell people what works for you and why and not that they should use what you use because that is the way
• Ask questions – a simple show of hands makes the audience feel much more part of your talk and forces them to move
• Avoid religious wars – don’t get into nitty-gritty little arguments about technology. It is good to cause controversy but doesn’t teach you or the audience anything
• Prepare takeaways – have your slides available, your code on GitHub and a list of links somewhere. Don’t make the audience scribble down while you talk

And that’s that – you can find a lot more tips in my Developer Evangelism Handbook

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Michael Mahemoff on HTML5 for Game Developers
• Fascinating research into the CAPTCHA solving business – getting 1000 cracked will cost you half a dollar!
• Interesting discussion about the merit of awards for designers
• Codinghorror has a good analysis how Firesheep works showing just how broken cookies are
• HTML5 Doctor has a simple introduction to extending HTML5 with Microdata
• A Practical Guide to Designing with data by Brian Suda
• box-shadow:inset can render some very cool designs.
• A paving machine of awesome
• What should a developer know before building a public web site answered comprehensively on Stack Overflow
• Good list of new HTML5 features of Mobile Safari
• Good discussion about the merits of validation
• Videos of the build conference on vimeo – Cederholm, Fisher, Meyer, Budd
• förbind – a collaboration tool using websockets by Remy Sharp
• Wow, I did not know that people managed to smuggle art to the moon
• Why using simple language should be lucrative is an interesting article questioning copy as important
• Zurb has some impressive CSS Box Shadow & Text Shadow Experiments
• Solid design advice in how to design a website that won’t piss everyone off
• Chris Spooner has some pretty rad text effects using CSS3 text-shadow
• Tuning canabalt has some great tips on how to write a mobile game
• Some pretty funny book covers – albeit not planned to be that way
• Great tips on how to move from TextMate to VIM
• Awesome article about using yql to execute JavaScript in the cloud
• Five Usability Challenges of Web-Based Applications by Jared Spool

Things that made me happy this morning:

• 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web is a great eBook style HTML5 presentation
• Nick Halstead on what motivates programmers
• There is background audio on iPhone you can use for text-to-speech
• A step by step tutorial how to mark up a progress bar
• Detailed video of a working CPU in Minecraft – the first CPU with livestock in it
• Interesting write-up on link padding for hashtags for smoother browser scrolling
• Amazing – you can built a touchpad using paper and graphite
• Twitter partnered with Gnip to offer more tailored Firehose feeds for developers
• easyXDM is a library to work around the same origin policy of JavaScript in many different ways
• IE6 fixer is a polyfill to work around the issues of the browser – you can select which things to fix.
• Interesting tip how to track Ajax loads and JS event clicks in Google Analytics
• A call to abandon designs when you like them to much is tough but might yield better results in the long run
• Glenn Jones is always good for interesting concepts. Draggables is an alternative way for users to pass data between web sites.
• Andrew Woolridge has a great writeup on how to create web services with JS and YQL
• YQL Erklaerungen in deutsch
• Chaos invaders – bit confusing but then pretty cool
• 3D Pong in jQuery is quite a lot of fun
• F1 by Mozilla makes social sharing of web sites easy
• Good introduction to the support of HTML5 forms in Firefox4
• A very cool TextMate colour scheme for developers
• Josh Aas talks about the Improvements for Firefox4 on Mac
• Frogdesign built a cool visualisation of where people tweet with live heatmaps.
• A nice live audio analysis of tweets – the more people tweet, chirps you hear

As announced earlier I am leaving Yahoo to work in Mozilla as principal evangelist with the focus of HTML5 and the open web. So my job will be to advocate the awesome of HTML5 to the world.

Yay HTML5 and the open web technologies

I love the open web and HTML5 and I strongly believe that they are the future of our work environment. HTML5 brings sanity to the crazy hacking we had to do in the past to run web applications in browsers. I don’t want to change hashes and use iframes to seed browser history, I don’t want to use Flash to allow for uploading several files at a time and I really don’t want to have video that I cannot manipulate from JavaScript.

We’re forging the future happiness of end users here and our main job is to sell HTML5 as the better alternative to what we are doing now. We need showcases to tell the world just how awesome HTML5 is and luckily a lot of people do so.

Be good, be open

The messaging of the leading lights of HTML5 is simple: it is about open technologies and the web. So instead of PDFs and Flash movies a lot of presenters use hand-rolled HTML5 slide systems which are simply documents on the web and anyone can see them with a browser. When Tantek gave his “HTML5 right here, right now” talk at Fronttrends in Poland and YUIConf in Sunnyvale he very much pointed out the graceful degradation of systems like that and their benefits for the web. As HTML slides are on the web people can easily find them and read them.

When it gets weird

The problem that a lot of HTML5 demos have right now though is that they only work in a certain environment. Showcase presentations like Paul Irish’s The State of HTML5: Inaugural Address even need more than one browser to work and Paul switches them during his talk. This is a feat of HTML5 right now – not everything works the same across browsers and you want to show off some of the cool things by sticking to one browser and others in another browser.

A few days ago for example people got very excited about a 3D Tetris implementation by Tobias Schneider which apparently looks like this:

I went through all my HTML5 browsers and saw this:

I learnt about this demo from Twitter. Whilst the original Tweet by Tobias stated that a Chrome Dev Channel build is needed as the browser to see the demo, retweets and others omitted that piece of information. This is bad. As you can see in the screencast above all I saw was broken implementations – even in Chrome. Only Safari showed it the way it was intended.

The issue is that the slide systems expect environments working without providing a fallback to other environments. I am a geek, I can live with that – if I showed this demo to people who are not geeks they’d get the main impression that HTML5 is just weird and doesn’t work yet.

Tobias more or less agreed to this:

This all in all doesn’t help the cause. If you want to advertise a new book you don’t show a bleached out and unreadable cover. If you want to showcase the reliability of a car you don’t make a video of it not starting.

Using HTML5 demos responsibly

There are a few solutions to these issues:

• Do not upload demos that only work on your computer and your environment – let people wait for the video of your talk and upload the code to GitHub telling people exactly what is needed to see them.
• Create a screencast of your demos and offer that one as a fallback for browsers that don’t support your functionality. Test in your live demo for the browser you need to make it work and show the screencast to the others explaining which browser you used to be able to see it live. This also protects you against the very common case of having no connection and conferences. The simplest way to create a screencast is by using Screenr. More tips are available in my Developer Evangelism Handbook.
• Spend some more time and also support other browsers – this would also allow you to show the differences live.

I know all of this is more work, but nothing that couldn’t be tackled if you distribute the job a bit. Contact others to maybe help you fix your demos for other browsers they are more familiar with and we’ll have great demos to show the world the power and revolution that is HTML5.

Update: and it works! I just wanted to point out that taking Tobias’ example was not about shaming him or anything like that. I loved his presentation and the demo and quoted his tweet to show that tweets will be taken out of context. People not re-tweeting his explanation that the demo only works on Chrome was another good example of how things go wrong right now. To add, following our conversation Tobias did fix a lot of the demo and I am very thankful about this: