Web Directions

Bob Harris’s closing Keynote at Web Directions North 09

• In: Blog
• By:John
• March 4, 2010
• Leave a response

Jeopardy cham­pion, fan­tas­tic come­dian, author, inven­tor, tele­vi­sion writer (cred­its include CSI and Bones) and much more, Bob Harris came into my life in a way unimag­in­able only a hand­ful of years ago. My wife was well over due with our first child, and far from con­tented. She read an arti­cle by Bob, I think in Salon, which made her laugh, and wrote him a quick email to thank him. He wrote back. It tran­spired he loves Sydney, and of all things cricket, of which like all patri­otic Australians we too are fans.

A few weeks later, Bob was vis­it­ing Sydney, and on one of the hottest days ever in Sydney, with our daugh­ter about 5 weeks old, we spent a won­der­ful evening of con­ver­sa­tion, some­thing any­one with young kids will tell you can be quite rare.

We catch up with Bob every year or so, and keep in touch, not least via his won­der­ful photo essays he sends of his pretty amaz­ing trips around the world, writ­ing for Magazines, research­ing books, and so on. At the end of 2008, his col­lec­tion of dozens of pho­tos with com­men­tary was so funny, intel­li­gent and mov­ing, I asked him whether he’d be inter­ested in turn­ing it into a pre­sen­ta­tion for the upcom­ing Web Directions. Generously, Bob said yes.

The pre­sen­ta­tion closed Web Directions North, in Denver in 2009. Right slap bang in the mid­dle of the GFC, num­bers were down on pre­vi­ous years, but the event itself as so many atten­dees com­mented was fan­tas­tic — tremen­dous pre­sen­ta­tions (Nicole Sullivan intro­duced the world to OOCSS there, and the pre­sen­ta­tion went onto have over 100,000 view­ers) and fan­tas­tic energy.

Bob’s pre­sen­ta­tion, which really had lit­tle to do with tech­nol­ogy, or the web directly, com­ing at the end of long days of pre­sen­ta­tions and par­ties was in some ways a bit of a risk all round. Within a minute though, he had the audi­ence laugh­ing, and think­ing, and I remem­ber as I got up at the end to thank him and wrap up the con­fer­ence, I turned to see most of the audi­ence on its feet, and many folks with a hint of a tear in their eye. It was a mar­vel­lous priv­i­lege to be there.

Bob’s recently uploaded video of the pre­sen­ta­tion to YouTube. If you’ve got a spare moment one evening, I really rec­om­mend you take a look.

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