Registering bright and early bought me time for coffee, and some good luck getting a seat up near the front of the stage in the Wellington Town Hall.

Mike Brown opened this much anticipated conference saying “Webstock is made with love.”  and that we all fall in love with things made with love. Webstock is made with love, and is loved: and it shows.

Scott Thomas (@simplescott) was up first. He was Design Director for the Obama Presidential campaign and walked us through some of the strategies and outcomes. He said they established a consistency and balance to exemplify stability and experience through design. He learned that by letting control go, so much more was possible – a message that would be repeated again and again through out this conference – that it’s about the people, for the people, of the people.

Brian Fling rambled his way through his slot. There was quite a bit of disappointment on the Twitter back-channel about the apparent lack of focus of his talk. Personally, I enjoyed it – I thought he was interesting and spoke well.

Lisa Herrod was up next: she spoke passionately about accessibility and how we need to stop making excuses not to do it. She has worked within the deaf community in the past so has a personal touch-paper to her subject. She urged us to develop more insightful personas for testing our online projects – to include people with more challenges, to include characteristics of all peoples and to ensure access to information for everyone regardless of how they access it.

Lisa was followed by her husband, Lachlan Hardy. His passion is the Open Web. He introduced us to OpenID, MicroFormats, OAuth and Webfinger, giving examples of how they are used, and how they are integrated. He said we need to “Solve small pieces of the problem at a time.” I don’t know much about the open web, sources or movement and found this talk really interesting and enlightening.

You probably don’t know this about me, but I’m a bit of a process nut. Not that you can tell by looking at me or observing my work, but I love listening and learning from the way other people work. I’m not in management in anyway, but of all the processes I enjoy knowing about, managing people is the most interesting. Esther Derby come to Webstock with the 13 essential questions managers need to ask to create a design environment for people to do great work:

1. How does the work really get done?
2. What information and tools do people need to do their work?
3. How can we build feedback into the system so people can easily determine and identify errors and solve their own problems?
4. How do you know when the work is done?
5. What is the capacity of the team? “All plans are wishes..”
6. How long does it take to tell if you’re off track?
7. What reward systems are employed? “KPI and bonus systems don’t work..”
8. What message are we sending with our reward system?
9. What message are our policies and procedures sending? “Do we really trust you to make decisions?”
10. What happens to people when they bring unwelcome news? “If you say ‘yes’ to everything, your ‘no’ means nothing.”
11. What is your iterative learning cycle?
12. What do I know that ain’t so? “Most people work for money? performance reviews increase performance? Rewards can reduce cognitive function.”
13. What do I know that I forget at work? “Don’t overstuff the pipe – give people room/time to think.”

Shelley Bernstein held a workshop in the days before Webstock. I came *this* close to going and after experiencing her Fostering Personal Connection to Place suffered a good dose of regret. She was  _outstanding_. Authentic, passionate, dedicated, charming she let us know her mission at Brooklyn Museum was more about community and user experience than anything else. Shelley and her team at the museum have worked hard to create a space that is accessible and welcoming. She said “It’s easier for me to fly to New Zealand than it is for people [in New York] to visit Brooklyn.” She also mentioned the idea of giving up control – the museum allows photography and digital interaction within the museum. They ask their community and listen to the responses from visitors, from comments, from feedback in person, at the museum and from the web site. They are dedicated to infusing content with life and she said “A personal voice makes a difference.” So they encourage people to use their real names, real Twitter accounts, and to amplify the community’s voice, to develop that community on their terms, not those of the museum and to contribute to the community, not just “be there”. Ms Bernstein was inspiring. Later, when speaking to someone who had been at her workshop, they mentioned that she had been extremely nervous about her talk, and believed she wasn’t a very good or confident public speaker. Shelley, if you ever read this, know this, you held us all in the palm of your hand – you carried us on the journey of your beautiful museum with your authentic and passionate believe in community. You were my outstanding talk of the entire conference – and I doubt I am alone in that feeling.

Jeff Atwood said he was so fascinated with “being in the future..” I guess we in New Zealand and Australia are just used to it but it was fun to hear.  He talked about Stack Overflow, collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers.

Please, don’t let it be interactive by Regine DeBatty who was annoyed and fatigued with interactive art that wasn’t meaningful.

We didn’t get to have Ze Frank this year at Webstock, but swear to god, Rives is just as good. This New York beat poet brilliantly finished our first day of speakers at Webstock. He mixed multimedia, word-play and stories to spin smiles and touch hearts all around the Town Hall. Some of his quotes I captured included: “I was 15 for 6 years straight.” “My weird mind wanders and my brave heart breaks.” “Your once and future lover has made himself at home.” and “Touching myself was like TIVO in a way.” Take any opportunity to see this man – you’ll find slices of him on ted.com.

• New York Times Reader is a gorgeous reading experience – if our local online papers could produce a reader like this, I would pay for content. As it is, I read the free content provided in the New York Times reader and enjoy it a great deal.
• Plastic Logic’s eReader
• Just to keep the fire fueled: Apple iPad rumours still simmer away – between patents being filed and leaky reps, I am looking forward to seeing the first quarter of 2010 and the possible announcement of a new Apple product-line.

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]