Sorry I did not post late last night. Exhaustion took over and I decided sleep was a much better idea.

After the somewhat negative experience I reported on yesterday morning, things took an upward swing. As I reported, Robert Reinhardt's discussion of Flash Video was excellent. For many, his talk clarified a lot of the terminology and mechanics involved.

After that, I attended Peter Hall's fine talk: Google, where's my Flash site?

Peter discussed the problems associated with Flash and engine indexing. His solution was an open-source tool called Ripple which can be found at:

http://www.peterjoel.com/ripple

This tool uses JS to link Flash content to XHTML data that the engines can recognize.

What I found most curious is that I heard many participants grumble, when leaving, that all he was doing was pushing a third-party tool. My feeling was....so what? Tools from a whole variety of sources are a part of our professional life. The whole idea of software, today, is expanability with additional tools to save us time and trouble. It is called RAD.

In the afternoon, Amit Pitaru presented a fascinating talk called Introduction to Processing. This one is hard to describe in a couple of paragraphs. To quote from his description:

"Processing is a programming language and enviroment built for the media arts communities. It is created to teach fundimentals of computer programming within the media arts context and to serve as a software sketchbook."

I will be asking Amit to work this up as an article for MXDJ. I feel this fascinating subject will be better served that way.

Finally, kudos to Rich Shupe for his Introduction to ActionScript. After the experiences of yesterday morning, it was good to see ActionScript presented properly. I only wish more people were at the talk. I hope it opened a lot of ideas.

If any of you are at the conference, please say hello. I had several talk to me yesterday.