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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.

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A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.

If there’s one thing about Web 2.0, it’s that we’re realising that there are actually people using the internet. It’s no longer about Human to Computer interaction, but rather Human to Human. Discover some of the user experience ideas and strategies behind the design of flickr.com, one of the richest Human to Human places on the web today.

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A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

It seems that everyone is talking about user generated content and online communities these days. But how will citizen journalism, user-generated content, the Blogosphere, tagging, ranking, and Wiki knowledge reshape branding and your business? How do you manage and scale this community and then hand control to your users (and how do you explain to the boss what you’ve just done?). Gain an understanding that dialogue is the new content and learn how to maximise the benefits (and minimise the pitfalls) of creating online communities in this presentation.

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A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

The collection of social and information technologies informally known as Web2.0 have created a rich universe of applications - but a scattershot one. We plug lots of our information into websites everywhere - MySpace and Digg, Friendster and Yahoo!, and everywhere, Google, Google, Google. Yet it’s as if we’re spending all of our time building information silos; piles of data which are essentially unconnected. It’s getting dull. How many times do I need to list my friends, or my contact information, or my favorite bands?

We know why it’s happening: commercial interests are overruling the natural pooling and sharing of information that would actually bring some utility to this mountain of data we’re generating about ourselves. Yet the pressure to share is building up: the recent explosive emergence of mash-ups, which juxtapose two or three or more services in unique and valuable ways shows us that the hybrid always trumps the thoroughbred. And that’s just on internet services. Very few of us control the mountain of data we generate as we pass through this world - everyone wants it (for their own purposes), yet we - who are creating it - never have access to it.

It’s time to revisit the entire philosophy of interaction design on the Web, time to move the focus away from the site-as-resource, toward an idea of the site-as-personal-enabler. What we each bring to a website - or rather, what we should bring to a website - is a wealth of information about ourselves. This is the real resource of Web2.0, and the next place the Web is going. The exuberance around social networks shows us that people want to connect - it’s time for designers to build the tools which will truly enable that connection.

See the slides and hear the podcast »