I'm back! Two days of Web Geekery at Web Directions South, a conference held once a year in Sydney. I learned heaps and had fun-guro time. Virgin Blue sent two people down, myself and Christos to soak up the vibe and expand our minds. We shacked it up at his folks place the night before. Thanks Pappas's Folks!

As we sat waiting for the first speaker, we were excited beyond comprehension.

This was the schedule, and below is my lil recollection of Day 1.

Rashmi Sinha

The Perils of Popularity - Rashmi Sinha is co-founder and CEO of SlideShare, a surprisingly popular application for sharing your boring powerpoint presentations, who'd a thunk it huh? Her talk stemmed from the experience she had with SlideShare. She coined a term, Playing the Game, which meant how you can use your website to create mob like behavior. Examples of the current Game Players were Digg, YouTube and Flickr.

Andy Clarke

Think Like A Mountain - Andy was my favorite speaker last year and he did it again with a talk that showed shiny button web2.0 interface designers that you can get inspiration from real life things like comic books. He showed lots of different examples from comic books and how the illustrators used space and proportions to convey the message. He linked the tight limitations of comic books to web design. When illustrating a comic, the artist has to fit so much dialog into such a limited space.

Plugs

• CSS Eleven, a project dedicated to improving CSS 3


• Watchmen - Comic Inspiration, which I went out and bought the next day!


• Sin City - Comic Inspiration


• Understanding Comics by Scott McCleod.

Scott Buchanan & Ben Maguire

Harnessing The Law to Commercialize and Protect IP - We actually didn't want to see this talk, but because Christos needed to pee, we missed out on Cameron Adams - The Future of Web Based Interfaces. His room was literally spilling out the door. Our next best option was listening to Lawyers talk about Protecting your IP, which although generally boring, gave some good insight into the challenges web applications can bring to lawyers. I have to admit, I didn't take any notes in this session and can't really remember any highlights. ha.

Lunch Break

When the lunch bell went, Christos and I checked out some of the stalls. Microsoft had one promoting their new product, SilverLight. The presentations were a bit to detailed to really get an idea of what the suite can do. This guy was very into it.

John Allsopp

Trends and Predictions in Web Technology - Johns talk gave some good insight into the current state the web, and how it might change in the near future. He coined the term "Web Everywhere". The idea is that the web should be seamless in our everyday lives. It's obvious we're in the very early stages of this phase. He pointed out flaws in todays web application market with ownership. For example; we upload thousands of photos Flickr, yet if Flickr were to pack up and head for the hills tomorrow, there goes your photos along with all the meta data (comments, contacts, tags), and there wouldn't be much you could do about it. It's the same scenario with Amazon and your reviews, YouTube and your Videos etc.

Plug

• John wrote Xray. Nice one!

Brian Fling

Web 2.0 + Mobile 2.0 = ? - Brian's talk was centered around Mobile 2.0 and how location based services will be the next big thing. The idea is that your phone should always know where you are in relation to who and what's around you. For example if you need a drink your phone should be able to tell you where the nearest pub is. You could easily find your mates because your phone knows about them.

Plug

• Blue Flavor made Leaflets, which take advantage of RSS feeds to make handy iphone versions current sites like New York Times, Flickr and Newsvine. Cool huh?

Chris Wilson

Moving the Web Forward - Time for a speaker from the browser we love to hate. Chris Wilson works for Internet Explorer as a Platform Architect, he's also on the Web Standards Project team. He gave an excellent talk on the challenges the Internet Explorer team has with developing their browser to meet todays standards but also not break the millions of sites that rely on non-compliant rendering. By the end of the talk I had a lot of sympathy for Chris and Internet Explorer. They have it tough... poor fellas.

When Chris paraphrased Barbie with, "Security is hard", in a nerdy squeaky voice. I laughed.

Christos was listening intensely.

End of Day

I met up with the family afterwards for some good tucker in Chinatown :). Christos headed back to Brisland.

Day 2 wrap-up coming soon....