Web Directions

Web Directions Closing Keynote: Mark Pesce — You-​​biquity

• In: Uncategorized
• By:Maxine
• July 25, 2006
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Web Directions Closing Keynote: Mark Pesce — You-​​biquity

When we launched Web Directions this year we inten­tion­ally left the clos­ing ses­sion on day 2 open in recog­ni­tion of our belief that epipha­nies are worth wait­ing for. In pre­vi­ous years we’d had the crazed irrev­er­ence of The Smackdown, some­thing for which those involved are yet to for­give us, and then last year the excel­lent Jeff Veen on Building the Next Generation of Web Apps. At the end of two very packed days we think peo­ple want some­thing which is con­tent rich, but inspi­ra­tional and thought pro­vok­ing. And for our­selves we wanted some­thing which really closed on the theme of this con­fer­ence: stand­ing on solid tech­no­log­i­cal ground, with our eyes trained on the far horizons.

Anyway, John and I were talk­ing through a few pos­si­bil­i­ties one day when we just looked at each other and said the same name: Mark Pesce. Or so the story goes.

Mark is a pio­neer­ing thinker, writer and speaker on media and tech­nol­ogy, renowned inter­na­tion­ally as the man who fused vir­tual real­ity with the World Wide Web to invent VRML. He was enticed to Australia to chair the Emerging Media and Interactive Design Program at the world-​​renowned Australian Film Television and Radio School and has now gone on to receive an appoint­ment as an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, as well as found FutureSt, a Sydney media and tech­nol­ogy con­sul­tancy. And of course, you may know him from such ABC pro­grams as The New Inventors. He’s such a per­fect fit for how we wanted to close WD06 this year that we couldn’t believe it when he said yes.

So, we’re really excited to announce that this year WD06 will be clos­ing with Mark Pesce on You-​​biquity.

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.

One response to “Web Directions Closing Keynote: Mark Pesce — You-​​biquity”:

1. • By:WDS 2007 Day 2 at Pat’s Point of View
   • February 13th, 2008

   […] fin­ish off the day, and the con­fer­ence, was Mark Pesce’s pre­sen­ta­tion on…well, on lots of things but most impor­tantly the destruc­tion of the […]

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