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So much to learn, so little time

Friday, July 13th, 2007

OK, I’ll be the first to admit to having played fast and loose with the law at various stages of my career. But, I’ve largely worked as an individual, or as part of a very small, under resourced organisation.

There is no excuse at all for playing fast and loose when you are the marketing department of a major international telecommunications company, or the people who run their marketing campaigns for them.

Things like this really should not happen. The fact that they do shows a disturbing lack of knowledge on the part of every person who signed off on it. I suspect no lawyer looked at it at all, as checking that model releases had been obtained would be the most basic due diligence. However, anyone in the creative industries, particularly the commercial creative industries, should know about them as well.

I doubt any legal action will come of this, and that’s really not the point. However I would like to think that someone who thought they were pretty clever and funny, is now feeling pretty damn stupid.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

New workshop for September 25 - Beginning Ruby on Rails

Sunday, July 8th, 2007

Maintaining what has become a tradition, we have a late addition to the Web Directions South Workshop program for this year: Dr Nic Williams will be hosting Beginning Ruby on Rails on Tuesday September 25.

Anyone involved with the web would be aware of the phenomenal growth in popularity over the last several years of this full-featured, industrial-strength framework for building web applications.

The really good news for developers who are keen to give it a go is that it is very fast to learn and get started. Useful web apps can be developed after one or two days of education. This workshop is an outstanding opportunity to get that education right here in Australia with one of the most well respected members of the Ruby on Rails community, Dr Nic Williams.

The full day workshop will be perfect for anyone who has a desire to find out more about Ruby on Rails, and put it into practice.

If you have

• basic programming skills in any language
• an understanding of object-orientation
• knowledge of database design and access using SQL

then don’t miss this chance to participate in an enlightening, practical day that will stand you in good stead as you move deeper into developing apps with this new framework.

Beginning Ruby on Rails is priced very reasonably at $395 for conference attendees, or attendees of another workshop, $495 standalone.

If you are already attending the conference or another workshop, just register for this new one with the same address and the discount will be applied automatically. And please do get in touch if you would like to swap into Beginning Ruby on Rails from another workshop, as this can be arranged, no problem.

Beginning Ruby on Rails - Sept 25, 9.00am-5.00pm

About Dr Nic Williams

Register Now

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Danah Boyd in Australia

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007

If you have any interest at all in the future of online social networking, and in particular its implications for the education sector, don’t miss this upcoming Education.AU seminar:

Danah Boyd: Generation MySpace - Social networking and its impact on students and education



Danah, an internationally recognised authority on the way people use networked social media, will discuss critical issues such as

• What today’s youth are really doing online and does it matter?
• What are the trends in technologies and social networking we need to be aware of?
• What does this mean for work in the 21st Century?
• What does this mean about Gen X, Y learners?
• What opportunities are educators missing out on if they don’t engage?

I’ve seen Danah speak a few times at SXSW. She comes from an academic background, but has an outstanding ability to see phenomena such as MySpace and other aspects of online life in their broader historical and cultural context. I really think it will be a great day.

• August 6 - Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre
• August 8 - Melbourne RACV Club, 17th Floor 501 Bourke Street Melbourne.

Check the Education.AU site for full details.

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Community

Tuesday, June 26th, 2007

While it didn’t make it to the list, I fear this word has probably become so widely and thoughtlessly used as to render it meaningless, so it probably should have a place on this other list. However, for want of a better term, I shall push on regardless.

I’m sitting here going through my database of previous attendees, thinking about how to do a final mailout about the June 30 deadline for early bird pricing. Looking through all these names always gets me thinking about the first time we ran a web development conference here in Australia, what seems like centuries ago. How humble it was, and its 220 attendees, its single track, its presentations on topics which seemed so vital then, so quaint now.

There’s a lot I could say about that content, and how it has changed so much over the intervening years. How sessions such as User Experience in Online Communities and Ajax or Flash: what’s right for you?, not to mention Mashups, Web Apps and APIs would not even have been bleeding edge. We simply did not have the vocabulary to express these ideas in 2004. What’s great to see is how quickly, and even painlessly, this revolution has happened.

But what I really want to take this opportunity to do is thank those 220 people who did find out about us and come along in 2004. Without you 2007 most likely would not be happening at all, or it would be some massive product oriented event run by some faceless corporation, possibly not even based in Australia.

Without being creepy about it, you were our true founders.

What’s great to see is that at the same time as the idea of an online community has taken off and spawned more web applications than anyone cares to think about, a genuine offline community has found fertile ground, and flourished here in Australia. I’m intrigued by the relationship between these two communities, the online and the offline: the nodes at which they connect to each other, and how we as individuals pass seamlessly through the porous barrier that separates them, what we leave behind, what we take with us.

Stay tuned.

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Looking for a place to party till dawn after Web Directions?

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Don’t just stand around like a pork chop after the closing night party! Impress your newly found friends by whipping out your Opera Mini and pulling up this bookmarked Gridskipper post: Drink Till Dawn in Sydney. Time was when rubbing shoulders with the doyennes of The Taxi Club was your only option, but I’m here to tell you that those days are over.

Enjoy! But remember all things in moderation, don’t forget Web Hack on Saturday morning - more info about that coming real soon.

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Westciv free self paced courses back online

Sunday, June 17th, 2007

This week Westciv is restarting the free course program, kicking off with the brand new edition of their CSS Level 1 course.

CSS Level 1 starts with the absolute foundations of CSS and standards based web development so it’s probably a little too basic for regular readers of this blog. However, I thought it was worth posting about here for you to pass around the office to anyone who might be interested in learning a bit about the code from the ground up.

All it takes is to come back to the site every Monday for 10 minutes or so over the next 12 weeks, to get a really solid grounding in hand coding of CSS, and a deep understanding of all the principles of standards based web development.

So if you know anyone who might benefit, do pass this on to them.

http://www.westciv.com/courses/free/index.html.

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“Getting” Web 2.0

Thursday, June 7th, 2007

Published today in Smart Company, a newly started online Australian magazine focussing on business and technology is an articale by Brad Howarth, Australia’s leading business/technology Journalist (at least in my opinion), “Web 2.0: the new divide”. Brad and I spoke recently, and quite a bit of what I had to say has made its way into the article. If you are interested in some of the philosophies we have about why and how we run Web Directions, you might be interested.

I suspect over the coming weeks and months, if you are sick of the term Web 2.0, then you are going to become mighty sick of it. It seems all kinds of pundits and experts are crawling out of the woodwork, capitalising on a buzzword few people will give you a decent definition for.

A recent article in the same magazine

Web 2.0 is the new divide in business. A new SME Leaders Opinion poll shows that while half of small and medium businesses are Web 2.0 savvy and engaged in online marketing, the other half just don’t get it.

I’ll be a bit more blunt about it. In my pretty extensive experience, 95% of companies don’t get the web in the slightest. They can’t even build web sites that get remotely close to accepted best practices in basic design, accessibility and coding.

So, when it comes to using the web as a communication medium, how many are genuinely facilitating and participating in conversations? And how many are simply thinking of the web as yet another channel, like television, radio, print and so on. How many understand the enormous intelligence of that connected community of millions of intelligent, passionate individuals?

A good place to keep an eye on many of the missteps, as well as to learn more about the right kinds of steps you should be taking is Laurel Papworth’s online communities focussed site. Laurel spoke at last years conference (slides and podcast available (CC licensed too - just attribute them if you use them eh?)), and is back again this year, running a fullday workshop Building and maintaining vibrant social networks for your business, and speaking on the intersection of social networks and mobile devices.

I’d like to think, while we try as possible to make what we do a “web 2.0 hype free zone”, you’ll a have to try very hard to find a better way to get up to speed with the technical, philosophical, and cultural currents and developments which are carrying the web forward than Web Directions. I’d liek to think the people who attend the conference don’t so much “get” the web, as “grok” it.

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Web Directions on the internets

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

Anyone who has been to one of our conferences will probably know we really try to integrate the online and offline, though blogging, flickr photos, t-shirts and so on. In the last year or so, there has been an explosion in the use of services like Upcoming, and social networking apps like Facebook, all of which provide interesting ways of connecting people.

Right now you can find Web Directions South online at Upcoming, so if you have a (totally free) account, you can head on over, and say whether you are watching or attending WDS07, and if you’ve not used upcoming before, take a look - it’s a great way of finding out about events that might interest you, or getting the word out about an event you are organising.

Cheryl Lead, speaker at last years conference and all round Aussie web dynamo (she’s just started her own web consultancy design agency, so check them out) has set up a Facebook group for those attending or interested in the conference. So, if you have a Facebook account, head over to the Web Direction South group and join up.

Meanwhile, if you’ve got a blog (you don’t have a blog - well, head over to Wordpress.com or Blogger for your free blog) and start one. And then, if you blog about Web Directions South, use the tag WDS07. To do that, just add the following link to your blog posts

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/wds07" rel="tag">WDS07</a>

Then you can keep track of blog posts about the conference at Technorati no matter where they appear.

Meanwhile you can keep track of photos at Flickr related to Web Directions by searching for the tag “WDS07″ or visiting here, and see the thousand or so photos taken at our conferences so far

To have your photos show up, just tag your photos on Flickr with WDS07.

We’ve also got a fun little app which will be live in the next day or so along these lines. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: WDS07, webdirections

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How we plan our program

Monday, May 21st, 2007

Web Directions South 2007 is the fifth conference that Maxine and I have been involved with. In the 4 years or so since we started down this path, a lot has changed in the web world. Things which were very much at the pointy end of the profession, like standards, accessibility, the focus on user experience, even validating HTML are now part of the mainstream of the industry.

Rather than simply focus on these over and over, each year we’ve tried to look over the horizon a little while keeping our feet on the ground with ideas and techniques you can make use of right now.

In 2003, as we started to plan our first conference, RSS, virtual worlds, user generated content, even blogging were cutting, even bleeding edge. Designing for the mobile web, building online communities, Ajax, were all off in the distance, or non existent. There were no Google Maps Mashups, or even Google Maps. The terms Web 2.0, Microformats and Ajax had not even been coined.

Fast forward to the web industry in 2007. Sites like Digg, and Chicago Crime are literally reinventing news, even your great auntie Mavis knows about virtual worlds like Second Life, while Myspace features in the news, the business and the technology section of the newspaper on the same day.

Each year, we aim to keep abreast of the key developments, covering issues like Microformats, Ajax, RSS, with leading experts innovating in exciting new fields. Each year we work to bring to Australia the expertise which will make our attendees better web professionals, to help them keep abreast of the design, technological, business and other developments central to our industry.

We could of course keep focussing solely on designing great user experiences with HTML, CSS, Javascript over and over again, but there is so much else going on as well we want to cover. So, while we still cover these foundations, with speakers like Andy Clarke, Aaron Gustafson, George Oates and Bert Bos, we also keep trying to find the freshest speakers, and ideas.

• We’ve seen Web 2.0 - now what will Mobile 2.0 look like?
• How can Flash and AJax be used be best used to allow us to do really clever things in web app design?
• How can we make every piece of data we put out on the web as smart as it can possibly be?
• How can I make a wiki really work for my business or organisation?

And we keep innovating with events like the Startup Bootcamp, WebExpo and WebHack, and of course ever better parties.

And while you might not have heard of every last one of our speakers, you will have heard of what they are doing. You’ll be using the tools they helped design and build. This year our speakers have been instrumental in developing amazing technology like Flickr, Chicago Crime - one of the first ever Mashups - Google Calendar, Slideshare, Wikipedia, Greasemonkey, Django, VRML, microformats, even CSS.

And on top of all that, we have a couple of amazing speakers still to announce.

We scour the planet for smart, innovative, entertaining experts. Those who walk the walk, as well as talk the talk. We bring them to Australia, and throw a week long party for them, and for you. We want you to leave excited, with a swag of new ideas and techniques, ready to do what you do better, or do something brand new. The only shame is that Web Directions isn’t on tomorrow!

As you can probably tell, we can’t wait.

Technorati Tags: wds07

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Australian Rails Camp ‘07

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

Pat Allen dropped us a note to let us know about the upcoming Rails Camp (and they mean billy tea and damper camp people) over the June long weekend (15th to 18th) about an hour north of Sydney in a bona fide bush setting.

So all you Rails developers, get planning. Looks like a great event, and well done to the organisers

Technorati Tags: tails, ROR, railscamp, australia

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News

• So much to learn, so little time

  OK, I’ll be the first to admit to having played fast and loose with the law at various stages of my career. But, I’ve largely worked as an individual, or as part of a very small, under resourced organisation.
  
  There is no excuse at all for playing fast and loose when you are the marketing department […]

• New workshop for September 25 - Beginning Ruby on Rails

  Maintaining what has become a tradition, we have a late addition to the Web Directions South Workshop program for this year: Dr Nic Williams will be hosting Beginning Ruby on Rails on Tuesday September 25.
  
  Anyone involved with the web would be aware of the phenomenal growth in popularity over the last several years of this […]