First up was to finally meet Mike Riversdale. I’ve been dipping into his blog for years now, and I recognised him as soon as I saw him outside the Town Hall. I introduced myself and he shook my hand saying I am the reason he and Llew blog – which is quite a hefty thing to hear on a hungover Friday morning – but it became easier to bear once he explained when, years ago, they were trolling around the internets and they came across thejamjar.com and they said to each other “Hell, we could do that!” and they were right and so it’s my fault they saw how easy it was to blog!

With coffee in hand, another good front seat Day Two began.

Eric Ries was the first person of the day to give entrepreneurs tips, ideas and information about start-ups. He started his talk with “I do not want, nor do I require your undivided attention. That is what the internet is for.” He talked about his previous experience with start-ups – and how the one that was done ‘right’ (“Like the Cylons, this company had a ‘plan’.”) failed, and the one that where they did everything wrong, worked. He urged people to be flexible and to reduce time between iterations. To be able to change direction but stay grounded in what is learned along the way.

I attended Daniel Burka’s workshop earlier in the week. He preached the “listen and iterate” and “take chances and release often” message during his time on the Town Hall stage. He wanted us to make small improvements and to not be afraid to prune content and funtionality to create a lean, realigned design. He also said to build with the expectation of change.

Amy Hoy is a funny woman. Her talk was bound for success as she had incorporated the essential elements of Magnum PI and octopi into her presentation. She wanted us to remember that our work/products could be seen as improving someone’s day “We are affecting the quality of the day for people using our software.” She also said to get on with it “Lions don’t wait for an RFP from a gazelle.” and we need to be bold, we need to be majestic.

Everyone up to this point wanted to share information. Mike Davidson did too, but he didn’t want any of us to share it outside the Hall. He asked that we not Twitter or Blog about his presentation. It was about entrepreneurs etc too – and I don’t believe there was anything ground-breaking in his talk, but I will respect his wishes and a) not blog about it and b) assure you you didn’t miss much.

Bek Hodgson was late to Webstock – Lachlan took her spot the day before, and she arrived in time to take his today. Her presentation was quite short, which left loads of room for questions from the audience. She pulled from her experience in user participation on such sites as etsy and blurb.

Kevin Rose is an internet rock star. He brought a list of 10 Tips For New Web Entrepreneurs, and I managed to grab 9 of them:

1. Go build it! another call to arms to just get the hell on with it. Don’t quite your day job, but start passionately building your product in the after and between hours.
2. Build and release often.
3. Hire your boss. Hire people who compliment your skill set – who have strengths to your weaknesses and who are smarter than you.
4. Raise money.
5. Go cheap.
6. Connect with your community. He suggested when there is no money, not to pay to attend conferences, but show up at all the free after-parties to meet people.
7. Hack the press.
8. Find good advisors.
9. It’s okay if not everyone listens. (not sure if this was No.9 but it’s pretty good advice)
10. Analyse your traffic.

The second speaker from a workshop I’d done earlier in the week: Adam Greenfield got everyone thinking – so much so that hardly anyone left the Hall for afternoon tea but preferred to continue the discussion around networked urbanism and humanisation of technology. This man is insanely intelligent, and has a Mariana Trench of thought. He’s funny too – in that quiet, understated, smart-kinda way. He talked a little of movies such as Minority Report “You know that movie? the one where Tom Cruise plays a heterosexual police officer..” He also reminded us that “It’s not to make data public, it is that the public make the data..” which makes it ours? Technology is bleeding into RL – the city has become searchable.

Then the long <a href=”http://www.webstock.org.nz/10/speakers/veen.php” target=”_blank”>Jeffrey Veen</a> took us on a journey from ice-making to the internet. Telling stories from the past, who succeeded who failed and how this relates to us in the business of now.

I’m so pleased that good conferences end with people who reach into the future and get our thinking juices topped up. Bruce Sterling has done it before at Webstock, and this year we had the pleasure of Mike Pesce and the future as he sees it. While some futurists talk about grand things, Mike thinks about the small ways technology will revolutionise our lives. Our access to information will come from tiny points, but with great depth of data. He says that unless everything is connected, everything is useless. He gave examples that included buying a pound of ground beef in a supermarket and scanning the bar code with our smart-device-of-choice to learn not only what is in the ground beef, but where the animal was farmed, what it was fed on, what anti-biotics it was injected with, where and how it was butchered – information that we use to make our purchasing decisions. He talked about books – how they want to be digitised because they’ve always been a message in code. He was incredibly interesting, and left me (and I’m sure many others) thinking about the future and seeing things in wider perspectives.

Beautiful colours of Darling Harbour, Sydney as the rain swept across the city throughout the day.

“Moo [.com] put me front and centre.” “Customer service is the new marketing.”

Deb talked about being a good host at a party is the mindset to making a great web experience. That greeting, talking, facilitating new relationships with users and participants was what would keep people connected with a site/brand/experience. She urged everyone to:

• think like a social animal
• observe
• join in community conversations and activities
• help users – new and experienced, both
• to stand for something
• put love in because we’ll get love out
• be consistently attentive – avoid grand gestures
• experiment
• listen

Suggested a site that makes everyone smarter – by their knowledge and connections was a great thing. Let users learn about you, them them learn about themselves, let them meet others.

Above all, she wants us all to respect our users’ time.

“[I move] in and out of clouds of connectivity.”

Rob feels that space is collapsing. He walked us through his thoughts around the idea of how we experience technology now, compared to 50 years ago. He quoted “it takes 20 years to become an overnight success”.

He talked about the fathers of information architecture, and about virtual reality. From the 60s and early examples of augmented reality to today’s dabblings with targets and Flash (for instance). How, by using programs on our mobile devices, we can view the world with a layer of information augmented over the top to enrich our informational experience.

He talked about the future – how it’s already moving towards having that enriched experience leave a hand held device and become part of us – first an example of eyewear, followed by the (cringing) image of circuitry on a human’s eyeball.

Use Google Analytics and Google’s Web Optimisation toolkits for measuring and testing questions of user preference, rather than taking guesses at what people prefer.

Presentation at Web Directions South 2009, Sydney Convention Centre, October 9 2.40pm.

“The internet is the colour of the future.”

Matt wove science fiction and tales of hiking the great steps of America into an inspiring, entertaining and thought-provoking Keynote. A wonderful mind-setting for the conference.

An amazing keynote to end Day One. Cameron paces his way with gentle humour and an attention-grabbing presence.

He talked about Google Wave, and how the team came to some of the decisions around the design of elements such as threaded (for want of a better word) discussions.

Wonderful presentation.

Video or Podcast from Web Directions South 09

“How pissed off would you be if you were the Terminator and you came back in time and forgot to Google Sarah Conner or check her Twitter feed?”

Scott Gledhill, Beyond SEO presentation

Tag-team presentation covering the usual suspects of search engine optimisation. Touching on feeding and education the rest of the business to realise it’s everyone’s focus to produce content, decisions and directions based on good content, to feed the search engine animals.

Presentation at Web Directions South 2009, Sydney Convention Centre, October 8 10.45am

Accessibility Chickens! Damien’s session was the stand-out for me. I enjoyed his style, and his content. Drilling deeper into the whys and hows of encouraging accessibility through the entire process of producing and publishing content for the web.

He reminded us that accessibility is not just for people who are blind or have low vision, there are other very sound reasons for creating sites that follow accessible guidelines. People who access our sites for whom English is a second language, for example; or those whose literacy is low; or people who use assistive technology to access and input with the site; and he reminded us not to forget the aging population who might find fine control of a mouse to hit, say, small button targets quite difficult. He also mentioned ’situational disability’ such as glare on a screen when using technology outside, etc. He urged us to value this market as they tend to be tenacious, determined, and very loyal to sites that meet their needs with less effort than other sites.

He put forth reasonings why accessibility didn’t have to be boring, nor did it have to be expensive. In fact, it could and should be part of good practice across all disciplines of web development.

Damien asked us to ‘embrace accessibility’ – to learn about our (whole) audience, to get the right people with the right skills to work with, to integrate accessibility into the entire project cycle, and to test and measure and seek feedback – throughout the project and ongoing during maintenance and beyond. To stage implementation – starting with the most important aspects and building out from there. Overall he asked as all to be innovative.

“Thanks to the internet and the right assisted technology – never has it been a better time to access information.” “Have cane – will travel.”

“This is the first presentation I’ve given where I’ve heard a happy captioning story.”

Scott retraced on some of Damien McComack’s session, and drilled down a little more in certain areas of new media.

He told us about barriers to access, beyond those already mentioned, such as broadband speeds and uptake, aspects of ‘cloud computing’ and general accessibility (as we refer to it) including the cost of assistive technologies and software.

The four tenants of accessibility:

1. Perceivable (adjustable content, can I read it?) – alt tags, captions, accessible content, contrast, can I see it? can I hear it?
2. Operable (being able to find what you want) – keyboard accessibility, time available to consume content/media, content doesn’t cause seizures, navigation is usable
3. Understandable (content) – is the text readable? understandable? predictable? help users to avoid and correct mistakes, stable over time
4. Robust (other technologies) – authoring tool accessibility (turn it on in your software, then listen to it’s advice)

Taking HTML5 a step further | Sylvia Pfeiffer

[content to come]