Not so live blogging of day two
Tuesday, May 30th, 2006So here I am back in Auckland, trying to get my shit together. The past week has been such a high but now I’m finding it quite a challenge to get all my thoughts in check…
I’ll briefly go over what I enjoyed on day two of the conference. I wont cover all the speakers, just the ones that I was enthused enough to take notes about. As you may remember day one ended at a restaurant with 13 hardcore geeks. Needless to say getting up the next day was a bit of a struggle (thanks to the kingfisher!) but there was a lot of coffee and redbull to keep up going.
- Russell Brown (one of the few NZ speakers) opened up day two with an excellent talk on content and community. Russell Brown has been in the ‘content’ industry for ages, working as a journalist, radio personality and founding Public Address. He started his speech with an audio clip of David Lange’s 1985 Oxford Union debate speech and ended with an excellent video of a Starwars/LoTR mashup. In between he spoke about how content creation is slowly moving away from the mass media and how there’s been a huge turn towards citizen journalism. All in all, a very good talk with a lot of excellent references!
- Russ Weakley who is the founder of the Web Standards Group was next up with a funny and passionate talk entitled: Let go and allow users to control their own experience. For me this was one of the best talks of the conference. Not only is Russ quick-witted and dry, but he really knows his shit. His whole speech was based around this hypothetical situation: “Image you were in control of a large website with inconsistent and unwieldy structure. What if you had total freedom to redevelop the website from the ground up? What would you do?” Russ covered a lot of really interesting and out-there ideas that challenge the way we structure website content. He gave us a whole new paradigm to web design and information architecture. Throw out hierarchy; tag everything (images, text, audio); have users search for the content they’re after and return all the tagged media that related to that search term; allow users to control what they see; allow user submitted content (wikis, comments, tags). A really great way of looking at IA…a little Utopian, but fucken rad, none-the-less.
- Dori Smith - author of several books, magazine contributor, speaker and leader of the Web Standards Organisation’s DOM Scripting task force - a geek extraordinaire gave a brief introduction to unobtrusive javascript. This was a good (albeit entry-level) talk on progressive enhancement and how it pertains to javascript. She showed us how easy it is to convert nasty looking attribute event handlers to beautiful, unobtrusive javascript. The only bad thing about this talk was the fact that there were idiot ego-centric geeks who felt it necessary to point out minor unimportant errors in markup and semantics. FFS!!! Those dicks should have their hands chopped off. Dori, if you happen to read this. I thought your talk was excellent and I look forward to any others you may give in the future!
- Donna Maurer - an amazing speaker from Australia who gave a captivating presentation on usability for rich Internet applications. There are a few basic guidelines that any application should adhere to (including RIA’s.) These are: it should be efficient, effective, satisfying, easy to learn, have good error management and good feedback. Donna went through several screencasts of popular ‘web2.0′ applications and discussed several positive and negative things about them. It was really informative to see these things pointed out. Some thing were as basic as making sure buttons look 3D - this is something computer users learnt years and years ago and keeping these common design/usability trends going really makes for a far superior user experience!
- The rest of the day went in quick a blur…Tony Chor from the IE7 team gave us a demo of IE7 and talked through some of the new features. The thing that struck me about this presentation was the passion and sense of humour Tony exuded. The final presentation was by Kathy Sierra entitled Now Go Change The World. This was an awesome show. She really had the audience in the palm of her hands. At the end of it I was more inspired and psyched about web design than I’ve been in bloody ages. It was great to end on such a high note as it made for an awesome start to an evening of drinking, dancing and schmoozing. Give the geeks some beer and they’ll dance the night away!
An amazing experience! The organisers did such an amazing job. Big big-ups to Mike Brown and the team for pulling off such an awesome event! I cant wait for next year!
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