Today started a bit weird, seeing as it's both daylight savings time and Austin is one hour behind London. Luckily for me, my iPhone automatically updated with the proper time and rang my alarm for me.
The day was colder than the others, but was still good enough to wear shorts down to the conference centre. I wore a sweater until I got there. I'm hoping tomorrow the sweater isn't needed as it'll be one less thing I'll have to carry in my backpack.
The first session of the day was about internationalization and translation of language. The panelists were from Firefox and TED. They talked about the great virtue of having the crowd translate content for you. They illustrated the pros and cons of each and talked about if they were ever duped by volunteer contributors. The speaker from Firefox said they hadn't been because their contributors form such a close connection with the product (their names go in the credits), but the speaker from TED said they did get duped once. She said they hired a professional translation company at the very outset of offering their video online and after the video was posted, Polish and Turkish users sent emails saying that all of the translation was incorrect, that it had all been just run through a machine coding tool. The emailers offered to help and then translated the entire thing that took the other company a week to do, in about 12 hours (it was both correct and free).
HTML 5 specs were demonstrated for the audience again in three panels that were actually part of a larger HTML 5 "mini-program". Covered today was video, visual effects, and accessibility.
By the way, if you want to see some of my photos from SXSW 2010, you can check out my personal Flickr set!
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