The first session I attended this morning was Barenaked App: The Figures Behind the Top Web Apps, moderated by Ryan Carson of Carson Systems (discovered his excellent blog) and featured, among others, Michael McDerment of Freshbooks. As I hope our in-house-side-venture-appendage 76labs gains a bit of momentum over the next few months, finding out how much investment (man hours and dollars) that goes into developing and maintaining some of these great web applications really intrigued me. In the interest of brevity and conserving laptop battery power, I’ll list out a few of the nuggets I grabbed from this panel:

• Don’t discount the deceivingly high costs of ongoing maintenance once the application has been developed and launches - costs for running a simple application can easily run into the thousands of dollars per month
• Michael and Ryan both mentioned a principle outlined in E-Myth, that web app development teams require three personality types committed to the project: the entrepreneur, the manager and the technician (that’s the second time the E-Myth book has been referenced here so I hopped onto Amazon and snagged a copy for about $10)
• After launching your app, have a plan to deal with three possible outcomes: failure, marginal success and lots of success. It’s important to be prepared for each scenario.
• When it comes to knowing when to grow (for example: when to upgrade your server, when to add a full time employee, etc.) it’s in your best interest to be more reactive than proactive as it will save you money in the early going. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule and sometimes it’s just a matter of listening to a gut reaction.

Next up: The Future of the Online Magazine. We’ve had the pleasure of developing sites for a few magazines over the years (most notably the 2006 Webby honoree Maisonneuve) and since this discussion featured panelists from heavyweights like: Salon, Nerve, the Onion and CollegeHumor, I knew it’d be good. I wasn’t disappointed as Sean Mills, president of the Onion, had us all pissing our pants for the full hour… well, until our bladders were empty at least. Between my bouts of rolling on the floor laughing, I managed to pick up on a few useful points:

• When it comes to new technology, although all of the panelists’ sites featured news feeds, they appreciate when it comes to their audience RSS is pretty much unknown and the most effective technique for pushing out information is still an old fashioned email newsletter.
• While the direction of the web seems to put more value on user-generated content, nothing beats a talented editorial staff. I can’t remember who it was, but one panelist likened an online magazine without editorial staff to “American Idol without the judges. It just wouldn’t be as interesting…”
• The paid subscription model has gone the way of the dodo bird. Today’s online mags have discovered that with increasing traffic from blogs and search engines, there’s much more money to be made through online advertising… and you get to give away your content for free.
• Merchandising offers an alternative revenue stream that accounts for up to 20% of some of the panelists’ sites revenue (the other 80% coming from advertising).

Brevity didn’t help. My laptop battery died before the keynote from Dan Rather. Admittedly, I’ve never been the kind of guy to sit down and watch the evening news (CBS or otherwise) but I gotta say… I was a bit starstruck when he sat down for his hour long chat. Even as a very casual viewer, I’m no stranger to Mr. Rather and his important place in American journalism. I suppose I just have a lot of respect for the guy just because he’s been around so long (reporting since 1950!), coming from an age where it seemed like journalists had a lot more integrity, were truly independent, and would have never played the “go along to get along” game (as Mr. Rather put it) that so many of today’s journalists play just to avoid rocking the boat.

After the keynote we headed back to a couple of 30 minute quickies. The first session, Bullet Tooth Web Design: Plan Your Web Site like Pulling Off a Robbery, seemed promising. An interesting analogy for developing a site and two good speakers: Jason Santa Maria and Andy Clarke. I knew I couldn’t get much out of a short session like this, but I thought it’d be somewhat informative. I was wrong… the analogy dragged on and on and on… to the point where it got really tiresome (to me at least). I was waiting for some kind of nugget of goodness but it never came. Sorry guys, didn’t seem like it was really thought through beyond the title.

Immediately following that session was another short one on Design Patterns. Thanks to an old article on Signal vs. Noise, I’ve recently become a fan of designing with patterns but I can’t say I’ve done a tonne of research on what’s available online as far as resources go. I was under the impression that it was more of an approach and not the kind of thing that was standardized and shared… I was wrong. Turns out big names like Yahoo! and eBay (not online) have developed big libraries of design patterns. It makes sense when you think about how common pieces on a website could be “widget-ized” to be re-used again and again and again. The benefits of patterns are that as well as standardizing format and appearance, they help standardize vocabulary so that site pieces can be referred to in a common language.

“That’s not a horizontal linear historical navigation trail… it’s called a ‘breadcrumb’.”

The last session told us how to assemble a kick-ass in-house design team. Emphasis on the in-house. I kind of missed that when I read about it in the programme so I found out a bit late that it wasn’t really targeted at me but there was some good general advice about working in a design team within a bigger organization (reps from Yahoo! and Google sat on the panel… I’m not going to link those two company names.  If you can’t find their sites I don’t know how you even got here).  Unfortunately not much of this panel applied to me.