News from 2007
Memories and articles from back in the day
Ten things that will change your future
No, not actually keeping your resolutions (though that might help), but the Sydney Morning Herald begins the year with a look forward to Ten things that will change your future. Well worth a glance, and featuring some quotes from and coverage of Web Directions speakers Adrian Holovaty, Mark Pesce, … Read more »
What don't you want for Christmas?
Yes, it’s true, those crazy lads Tim Lucas and Cameron Adams have way too much time on their hands, but let’s indulge them in a bit of silliness shall we?
Don’t let that acidic Chirstmas vitriol fester in your stomach until it explodes in a shower of turkey giblets on December … Read more »
Web Directions North - extended early bird ends Friday
To give folks a little more time to organize at this holiday time of the year, we’ve extended the early bird pricing (only $CDN795) for Web Direction North until this Friday only, December 7th at midnight (just before the 8th starts to be absolutely clear).
Email Standards Project launches
The Email Standards Project is a great advocacy and support initiative from the Campaign Monitor crew. Launched today, it aims to work with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email.
It really is hard to believe that it’s been 10 … Read more »
New blog at the Powerhouse Museum
Just launched is a new blog at Australia’s own Powerhouse Museum - Photo of the Day, showcasing some of the incredible photography created on a day by day basis by the museum’s photographers. Here you will see photography that goes far beyond that which simply documents museum’s collection, or … Read more »
Web Directions in Desktop Magazine
During Web Directions South, Managing Editor of SitePoint, and long time Web Directions supporter Matt Magain interviews me about the conference, its goals, and so on, for Desktop Magazine. If you don’t have access to the magazine (issue 234!) then you can read it online now, thanks to … Read more »
The Future of Email Design
Yeah look, I can be irked by an HTML email as much as the next person, but step outside the rarefied atmosphere we all live and breathe for a moment and talk to some friends who work in just about any other sector and you’ll understand why they just aren’t … Read more »
Why wikipedia does not run ads
I’m kind of guessing that all of you who have looked up anything on Wikipedia in the last 24hrs will have seen the link to Why Wikipedia Does Not Run Ads. Check it out if not.
It has some really strong arguments about how destructive the injection of cash could … Read more »
Ghost Town - another reason to check out Perth’s ByteMe! festival
Web Directions attendee Kate Raynes-Goldie has started a pervasive gaming company over in Perth - Giant Dice. Their first Perth venture, a mobile locative game called Ghost Town, will be held from December 2-9, as part of the ByteMe! Festival of digital content.
Mobile locative games are an … Read more »
Cricket action via twitter
OK, let me preface this by saying that my care factor for cricket per se is barely measurable on on the non quantum level. What does interest me though is people’s obsessive fascination with the game.
An obsessive fascination that leads to this fine bit of work by Myles Eftos, an … Read more »
Off to Perth again
Isn’t it funny how you will have never been to a particular city in your life, and then you find yourself going there twice in just a few months?
I had a great time checking out Perth and Margaret River back in August when the good people from Western Australian … Read more »
Relive Mark Pesce’s Mob Rules at Youtube
Mark Pesce’s closing keynote, Mob Rules, was definitely one of the high points of Web Directions South this year. Most of you have probably had a look at the transcript, and maybe even listened to the MP3. But what’s really great is that Mark has gone to the … Read more »
First Slidecast available
I’d say you’ve been following the podcasts of the presentations from Web Directions South as they come onstream, and we’ve also gathered together a lot of the slides into the resources site.
But something new and supercool has just come online: Scott Gledhill has gone the extra mile and … Read more »
Make the world a better place, one micropayment at the time
Got wind of a really cool Aussie project today: The Footprints Network.
This is a great little system to easily funnel micropayments from any online store’s customers to genuinely needy organisations the world over.
There’s an approval process to join the network, but then you get an API that you can … Read more »
Web Directions Speakers in the New: Mike Cannon-Brookes
Co-founder of Atlassian, Mike Cannon-Brookes, who spoke at WDS07, [slides online now, presentation podcast to come] this week announced that Atlassian is partnering with Microsoft to enable Atlassian’s enterprise wiki confluence to be integrated with Microsoft’s SharePoint. More details including an interview with fellow antipodean Richard McManus at … Read more »
A bit of co-working in Sydney?
Hard on the heals of Perths planned “Freelance Friday”, Sydney boys Tim Lucas, Cam Adams and Michael Koukoullis announce Sydney’s first ‘Jelly’ cow-working day, both on Friday 26th October. So head over to one of these places for some shared inspiration.
Web Directions at Builder AU
The fine folks at Builder AU, CNET’s great local developer site, have a great wrap up of Web Directions, including several video interviews with speakers Rashmi Sinha, Adrian Holovaty, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Chris Wilson, as well as in depth interviews with Andy Clarke, Scott Gledhill, Rob Manson and … Read more »
Web Directions Wrap up - the podcasts commence
With 28 presentations by over 30 presenters, getting the podcasts organized this year has been quite a task. There’s permissions to get from every author, CDs to rip and downsample (unless you want to download 60MB per presentation), the podcast RSS to create, site changes to make, and more.
This year, … Read more »
Come to Web Directions Free, from anywhere in the world!
This year some lucky person will get to go to Web Directions North for free, from anywhere in the world. Join our affiliates program and it could be you.
Here’s how it works. Get in touch with us and we’ll set you up as an affiliate. Use your affiliate link, … Read more »
Ladies and Gentlemen, start your mashups
Via Builder AU, we learn that the Australian Bureau of Statistics is planning to open up it’s data for mashups.
As part of an ongoing plan to make more of its data available in a variety of formats, the ABS is working to enable users to generate their own tables … Read more »
Web Directions North is launched
Last year was a blast, so this year we are doing it all again, in Vancouver from January 28 to February 2nd. Along with web legends Dave Shea and Derek Featherstone, we’ve put together a programme of workshops and speakers featuring as always some of the leading web experts … Read more »
Web Directions Wrap up - the blogosphere
Over at Technorati you’ll find about 1000 in bound links to Web Directions - so we aren’t quite Engadget, but I think that’s pretty cool. Here’s some of the posts I found with wrapups, comments, suggestions and thoughts that you might be interested in. There are plenty more … Read more »
Powerhouse Museum - Jobs
Folksonomies, mashups, data visualisation, UCD, usability, experimentation?
One of the speakers from Web Directions South this year, Sebastian Chan from the Powerhouse Museum, just got in touch this morning to say his team is looking to fill a couple of developer roles.
Sebastian’s presentation - Social Media and Government 2.0 - … Read more »
Freelance Friday/Work@Jelly
Work from home, and sometimes like to mix it with folks like you? Want to bounce ideas and techniques off similar minded people? In Sydney or Perth? Then mark down October 26th as the first “freelance friday” (or in Sydney Work@Jelly) day.
Check out Myles Eftos’s blog if you are … Read more »
Scott Buchanan and Ben Maguire
Wig meets Web (2.0): harnessing the law to commercialise and protect your IP
- MP3 of presentation - to come
- Presentation slides - to come
- Session description
- About Scott Buchanan and Ben Maguire
Session description
Innovation and development in web 2.0 moves ever faster, the law as slow as always. So how can you … Read more »
Web Design Job in Perth, WA
Our good friends in Perth, BAM Creative, are looking for a standards based designer. So, if you are looking for a job over that way, check out their offering.
Adrian Holovaty interview at SitePoint
SitePoint continues their coverage of Web Directions South with a just posted interview with Adrian Holovaty. I happen to think Adrian is one of the most influential people on the web, with major involvement in Django, Mashups, GreaseMonkey, online journalism, and more.
We’ll have the podcast of his presentation … Read more »
Making Links - Special Offer for Web Directions delegates
Making Links 2007 is one of Australiaís leading forums for workers and activists in the not-for-profit sector to share skills and information relating to website development, online campaigning, online social networking and community building, and other ICT issues. The conference is in Sydney, October 30th - 31st
This year the … Read more »
Accessibility is about people, not compliance
As developers, designers, architects, anyone really who designs and builds things that people rely on to get on with their lives, often think about accessibility is very theoretical terms. In the case of the built environment, it’s about complying with building codes. On the web it’s about meeting WCAG level … Read more »
BuilderAU Web Directions features
Builder AU, the local edition of CNET Networks Australia site for developers was our online partner for the conference, and were there in force covering Web Directions. The fruit of their efforts is now coming online, including video interviews with speakers (currently there are interviews with Adrian Holovaty and … Read more »
Speaker Interviews at SitePoint
At Web Directions Kevin Yank from SitePoint spoke with some of our speakers, and there are now a couple of these audio interviews online.
First up, there’s an interview with Andy Clarke, and Cameron Adams, two of our most popular speakers (people were standing in the hallway outside the room … Read more »
iPod Touch winner from SitePoint
Matt Magain from SitePoint got in touch to let me know the winner of the iPod Touch in their recent “Why do you love the Web” competition .
Congratulations to Teresa Ko, and I know you’ll love you iPod too - I sure do!
Slides and podcasts
Just a quick note for all those who have been emailing us asking after these.
As many of them as we can gather together will be posted at the site real soon now. It does take a little time to contact all the speakers and get their slides and notes from … Read more »
More Jobs - Developer/Designer at Glass Onion
Great supporters of Web Directions, and strong proponents of standards based design, Glass Onion, are looking for a Web Designer/Developer.
Web Designer
Excellent written and communications skills
Able to work Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash
Knowledge of standards-based HTML and CSS coding
Glass Onion is a Sydney based web design, development, intranet, extranet, search and … Read more »
win an iPod Touch, or get a Job, at SitePoint
SitePoint, excellent Australian based web design and development publishing company and community have an iPod touch to give away. Just head over to their site and tell them why you love the web by Friday, and you could win one of these fantastic devices (I got one last week. … Read more »
Gilmore’s Law
Fans sabotaging scalpers’ auctions
Pace Mark Pesce WDS07 Closing Keynote.
2007 McFarlane Prize
Apologies for the slightly belated announcement of the winners of this years prize.
As announced last week, the shortlist for this year’s prize were
- EQASRM by Angela Bonfato Creative and Spoon Media
- Occupational Psychiatry by August
- Andrews Must Resign by Michael Koukoullis
- SitePoint Design Contests by SitePoint
- … Read more »
Ben Winter-Giles - Managing agile projects within large organisations
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.
So you work at enterprise level. Lots of stake holders, lots of competition for time, need to deliver to multiple demands that…POP up. All projects incur change over time, that’s the way of the world. Using a benefits driven approach to delivery rather than a process driven or methodology governed approach frees the team to think laterally, and be responsive to client demands.See the slides and hear the podcast »
Angela Beesley - Wikis and community collaboration
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.
In this session, Angela Beesley will explain how Wikia is not only hosting but actively developing wikis and creating hundreds of thriving communities. The methods and processes that have led Wikipedia to be the world’s largest encyclopedia can be adopted for any type of wiki use, including educational and business communities. Using examples from successful online wiki communities, Angela will explain how to enable a wiki community to manage itself, and how to minimise the common problems that wikis have, including ways to deal with unhelpful or unreliable information, lack of adoption of a wiki, and the problems of malicious edits on open wikis.See the slides and hear the podcast »
Andrew Downie and Grant Focas - Javascript and other coding for good or evil
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.
When Version 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is finally released, the status of Javascript will be quite different to that assigned to it in Version 1.0 back in 1999. Back then, Javascript was to “degrade gracefully”. Currently AJAX offers increased usability for visual users, but may detract from accessibility. In future, use of JavaScript will be encouraged but, of course, must enhance rather than detract from accessibility. During this presentation, Andrew and Grant will demonstrate how Javascript, when implemented well, offers enhanced accessibility. By way of balance, they will also present examples of scripting that causes problems. Importantly, they will provide corrections to the errant coding.See the slides and hear the podcast »
Rob Manson and Alex Young - E is for everywhere
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.
In 1998 the American Dialect Society voted “e-” (as in electronic) as the “word of the year”. This signified how important the internet had become in our world. Almost 10 years later we’re undergoing an even larger change. Only this time the “e-” prefix stands for “everywhere”. Mobile content, services and commerce are changing the way we communicate, work and do business. And these changes are building upon the already massive revolutions brought about by the internet - only faster and made more pervasive. This presentation will look at the strategic issues facing managers and developers as they strive to adapt to this literally “moving” target.See the slides and hear the podcast »
Adrian Holovaty - Being smart about your data
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.
The Web is full of information that is presented inefficiently - both for machines and for humans. Adrian Holovaty shares philosophies and strategies for efficient data collection and information design, drawing from his experiences at data-heavy news sites lawrence.com, washingtonpost.com) and side projects such as chicagocrime.org.See the slides and hear the podcast »
Aaron Gustafson - Learning to love forms
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.
Forms. We all have to make ‘em, but few of us love ‘em. Aaron Gustafson believes that this is because we don’t understand them. In this session, we will explore forms from top to bottom, examining how they work and how their components can be incorporated with other elements to maximize accessibility, improve semantics, and allow for more flexible styling. You’ll get to see the complete picture with forms, including error, warning and formatting messages, styling and its implications, as well as best practices for manipulation with Javascript and Ajax.See the slides and hear the podcast »
Stephen Cox - Building ethnography into the design process
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.
Working in usability and user experience can give you some great insights into the product design process. Yet few organisations know how to take advantage of this information silo. As a user experience expert do you sometimes wish you could have more input into product ideas handed down from above? Ever wanted to have the ear of business strategists? Even be best friends with marketers and sales people? Stephen Cox explores some of the exciting things that can happen when the disciplines of usability and user experience are allowed to seep out into the realms of strategic and tactical design innovation. He approaches the field of ethnographic design research in practical terms illustrating how News Digital Media has come to embrace the idea of extensive customer research, and the benefits that this has brought to different levels of the organisation.See the slides and hear the podcast »
Sebastian Chan - Social media and Government 2.0
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.
More than ever before there is an enormous amount of publicly held data about our community, our culture, and citizens. How can government respond to the opportunities of Web 2.0? How can government websites and databases become more citizen-centric, and more responsive by leveraging social media? In 2006 the Powerhouse Musuem, a NSW State Government institiution, opened its core information asset - its collection and research database - to public tagging, and dynamic user-driven recommendations. In the same year the Museum launched a range of public-facing blogs, inviting comment from visitors and audiences. Sebastian Chan will discuss why the museum has made these very successful forays into social media, and how a small in-house web development unit was able to push through and launch a project which is counted among Australia’s top web 2.0 applications. If you work in a large organisation and have dreams of social media, do not miss this session.See the slides and hear the podcast »
Raul Vera - Mashups, web apps and APIs
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.
Hear all about the exciting possibilities created by these technologies from Google Australia.See the slides and hear the podcast »
Rashmi Sinha - The perils of popularity
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.
Can web-based social systems with their wide reach, user-generated and user-filtered content harness the wisdom of crowds? Duncan Watts’ recent experiments reveal how popularity based web social systems can throw up fickle, random trends that are essentially unreplicable, and only tangentially related to quality. However, popularity as a way to filter information continues to rise in popularity - replacing hierarchical menus, overtaking tags, and even used in lieu of relevance. Rashmi will link decades of psychology research on group decision making and social influence to what is happening on the web today. She will discuss different models of popularity based filtering such as Digg and YouTube. What are ways to avoid the Watts dilemma - including Google’s model of sociality, tag-based social systems, and object-based social networks. She will present some principles for the design of web social systems and how there were used in the design of SlideShare and discuss how SlideShare as an evolving social system handles popularity.See the slides and hear the podcast »
Paul McCarthy - Which open source tools are fuelling today’s leading sites?
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.
Many of the today’s leading and most innovative websites are now running or developed using open source software and tools. This talk aims to provide an insiders look at the growing array of open source software driving today’s leading websites.See the slides and hear the podcast »
Scott Gledhill - Is SEO evil?
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.
There can be a feeling in the web development community that “SEO is evil” - Scott Gledhill cuts through the hype to focus on how developing accessible, standards compliant websites is the first step in creating search engine friendly websites – and also talks about what is being done in the industry to make websites more findable, sometimes at the cost of making them less usable.See the slides and hear the podcast »
Cameron Adams - The future of web interfaces
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.
Ajax brought about a host of new possibilities in online interfaces, but where are we going next? Cameron Adams will look at the evolution of dynamic interfaces; interfaces that truly meet the needs of all their users. Through the careful use of Web Standards, client-side scripting, and server-side intelligence, it’s possible to create interfaces that shape, adapt to, and predict a user’s needs.