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Reflections on the first 24 hours of the Web Direction South 2010 “Tell us what you want” survey

Yesterday I launched our "Tell Us What You Want" survey for Web Directions South 2010. In essence this is a call for papers really, it's just that we don't like using that term as we think it makes us sound like some sort of antediluvian academic symposium, which, I'll ... Read more »

Want to speak at Web Directions South 2010? Got Feedback and Suggestions?

If you want to speak at Web Directions South this year, here's your chance to propose a topic.Even if you don't want to speak, you can also give us feedback and your thoughts on what you'd like to hear about this year, and who you'd like to see ... Read more »

State of the Web Survey for 2010

In late 2008, we did our first comprehensive State of the Web survey, with well over a thousand respondents from all over the world answering. The aim was to capture a snapshot of the technologies and importantly practices and philosophies of professional web designers and developers. We published the ... Read more »

Announcing Web Directions @media — London, June 8–11

In 2005, not long after WE04, the first conference we helped organise, well known UK web industry expert Patrick Griffiths, of HTML Dog fame, launched @media. An instant success, @media and Web Directions have always shared very similar DNA - a passion for the web, standards, accessibility and best ... Read more »

Thanks for completing the Survey!

Thanks for taking the time to complete our survey. We'll be publishing the details soon.In the meantime, please grab a PDF copy of Scroll Magazine, edition one [3MB PDF], and edition two [2.7MB PDF]. There's plenty of great web related reading, from experts around the world.Keep up ... Read more »

MOB Case Study now​.webdirections​.org

The amazingly talented folks at MOB produced a couple of fantastic things for Web Directions South 09. Working with YiYing Lu, they produced the wonderful "you are what you tweet" Augmented Reality project. They also built now.webdirections.org, an iPhone optimized web application (yes, yes, the design decision ... Read more »

Google’s new approach to China

Google had just taken what we believe is a huge step forward for the web, and the worldWe have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis ... Read more »

Web Directions South 09 Resources — many more now online

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Guy in preparing all the pages and producing all the podcasts, we now have a whole raft of the presentations from WDS09 now available online, so, if you're looking to catch something you missed because you you went to another track, or you couldn't ... Read more »

First batch of WDS09 resources now available

You wouldn't believe how many things there are to do in the week after an event - I actually feel like I have been busier this week than I was in the week leading up to the conference. But one of the big things we have been treating as an ... Read more »

Trip to Japan for Web Directions East — winner announced!

A couple of months back we announced that we were going to be giving away a ticket to Web Directions East to one lucky attendee of Web Directions South.Well, that lucky attendee turned out to be Dylan Fogarty-MacDonald, who has already let us know that he is very excited to ... Read more »

Web Directions — The Soundtrack

I've got a few enquiries here about the music we played during the conference, so I thought I should really give credit where it is due and write up something comprehensive.Between sessions in the rooms we played XX by The XX - which came recommended by Luke ... Read more »

GovHack, Canberra Oct 30 and 31 — produced by Web Directions

On Friday afternoon at Web Directions South we were excited and honoured to be able to announce GovHack, an event we'll be producing in canberra at the end of the month. GovHack is an initiative of the Government 2.0 TaskForce, in support of MashupAustralia, a competition encouraging ... Read more »

Tech23 startup event in Sydney

Hot on the heels of our amazingly well received Atlassian Startup Space at Web Directions South, Tech23 is a full day startup focussed event in Sydney on October 27.If you are a startup, an investor, or someone thinking about starting up - get along, learn and network. ... Read more »

Web Directions South 09 — Our best ever

Web Directions South is over for another year, and judging by the comments in person, in blogs, via email and of course via twitter, it would seem many think it is the best to date, something we'd have to agree with. Sometimes the stars seem to align - extraordinary presentations ... Read more »

Dan Hill — Closing keynote: 15 years in

It is time for the practice of web development and design to broaden its horizons. How can the skills and experience we’ve acquired over the last 15 years of working on the internet be applied more broadly to, say, the design ... Read more »

Kelly Goto — Keynote: WorkFLOW

Shift your thinking, alter your process, and create a dynamic of doing rather than spinning. Workflow veteran Kelly Goto leads you through a fast-paced session designed to help transcend obstacles and develop a culture of adaptation, progress and flow. Learn the ... Read more »

Cameron Adams — Keynote: Making Waves

If you work on the web, it was hard to miss the announcement of Google Wave in May. It was especially exciting because this project, designed to leapfrog current modes of online communication, was developed right here in Australia by ... Read more »

Matt Webb — Opening keynote: Escalante

Web Directions South 2009, Sydney Convention Centre, October 8 9.10am. The long run to the turn of the millennium got us preoccupied with conclusions. The Internet is finally taken for granted. The iPhone is finally ubiquitous computing come true. Let’s think not of ... Read more »

Rob Mitchell & Mike Williams — Test your JavaScript

Mike Williams and Rob Mitchell will explain why you should test your JavaScript code, what to test, and how to go about it. They’ll talk about full-stack browser-based tests, as well as ... Read more »

Donna Spencer — Information seeking behaviours

Each information seeking behaviour needs very different approaches to information architecture, information design and page layout. During this presentation, Donna will talk about each information behaviour, its key attributes, key design needs, and show good and bad examples of each.

Christian Crumlish — Designing social interfaces

Designing for social interaction is hard. People are unpredictable, consistency is a mixed blessing, and co-creation with your users requires a dizzying flirtation with loss of control. Christian will present the dos and don’ts of social web design using a sampling ... Read more »

Andrew Fisher — Cloud computing

Cloud services change the way a business or campaign can operate, increasing flexibility, taking less time to deploy and introducing superb cost efficiencies so that we can redirect finances to where they’ll really pay for us - in innovation, experimentation and ... Read more »

Suze Ingram — Would you like service design with that?

Service design is well established in Europe and North America and there’s already a handful of Australian businesses offering service design. What is it? Does experience in designing for screen interaction translate to designing services too? Will service design be the ... Read more »

Mark Stanton — Best practices for speeding up your site

As we pack our pages with AJAX and RIA goodness we often lose sight of the fact that the key to exceptional user experience is the responsiveness of your site. Inspired by the excellent work by Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance team, this ... Read more »

Luke Stevens — Data driven design

Far from being the enemy, data can be a designer’s best friend. So much so that it just might be the backbone of the next evolution of web design. Data doesn’t mean less creativity and experimentation, it means more. We’ve learned ... Read more »

Dmitry Baranovskiy — Canvas

In this session, JavaScript ninja Dmitry Baranovskiy takes us into the heart and soul of Canvas, looking at what it does well, and not so well, how well it is supported, and how to use it in cross browser compatible ways. ... Read more »

Cheryl Gledhill & Scott Gledhill — Beyond SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a unique mix of marketing, usability and technology which can often cause confusion on how it is implemented across different organisations. An important part of your SEO ... Read more »

Grant Robinson — Visualising the user experience

Rapid prototyping. Widely acclaimed as one of the best ways to create great user experiences, it isn’t without its own pitfalls. This session will discuss the pros and cons of different prototyping techniques, and introduce a new technique called “screenflows” that ... Read more »

Jeremy Yuille — The social life of visualization

When visualization is coupled with collective intelligence it becomes a very powerful tool for making sense of the data that is now an increasing part of our personal and organizational experience. But how do you design social web applications so they ... Read more »

Damien McCormack — Accessibility means business

Over 4 million people in Australia have a disability. As a result they may use the web in a different way to you: a keyboard instead of a mouse; a screen reader instead of a screen. Accessibility is the way that ... Read more »

Deborah Schultz — It’s the people, stupid

The most interesting problems on the web are social, not technical. Once the open, social stack moves into wide use, the real work is going to be on us to create ongoing experiences that inspire, inform, evolve. Avoid this talk if ... Read more »

Fergus Pitt & David Peterson — The mashed up playlist

The ABC launched three new socially networked digital radio websites: ABC Dig Music, ABC Jazz and ABC Country in July 2009. They are the first of several ABC projects ... Read more »

Elliot Jay Stocks — Progressive enhancement

In the summer of ‘07 in a flood-soaked Oxford, England, Elliot appeared on stage for the very first time. His presentation, ‘Progressive Enhancement & Intentional Degradation’, looked at how to reward modern browsers with the latest CSS tricks and punish ... Read more »

Tania Lang — Using AJAX to enhance UX

AJAX is changing the way that users interact with websites - it has the potential to provide richer and more interactive online user experiences but also introduces its own set of usability and accessibility problems. This session will present views from ... Read more »

Lachlan Hardy — The open web

The Open Web is an evolving term that encompasses technologies from web standards stalwarts like HTML, to almost-mainstream buzzwords such as OpenID, and on to emerging specifications like PortableContacts, but it’s more than that. It is a philosophy.

Silvia Pfeiffer — Taking HTML5 <video> a step further

This talk focuses on the efforts engaged by W3C to improve the new HTML 5 media elements with mechanisms to allow people to access multimedia content, including audio and video. Such developments are also useful beyond accessibility needs and will lead ... Read more »

Doug Schepers — W3C and web standards big picture

Doug will talk about the technologies currently under development at W3C which we are likely to see in browsers now or in the near future, and will have demos of as many of them as possible. Some of these demos will ... Read more »

Pete Ottery — Designing for suits

Designing websites in amongst the “suits” and their business models, targets, projections and synergies (ha!) can be death by dot point. Or fun. What are manager types actually thinking when they brief (or don’t) you. How do you translate their KPI’s ... Read more »

Kerry Taylor — Semantics & sensors

The Semantic Sensor Networks W3C Incubator is an international initiative to develop standards for sharing information collected by sensors and sensor networks over the Web, including an ontology for different types of sensing devices and their observations, and new approaches for ... Read more »

Renato Iannella — Opening up social networks

Social Networks have been a world-wide phenomenon and their proliferation poses a pressing interoperability and usability challenge to both web users and service providers. Web users have different social networks accounts and utilise them in different ways depending on the context. ... Read more »

Scott Hollier — Boosting new media accessibility

This talk focuses on the efforts engaged by W3C and its members to promote and improve web standards and in particular HTML 5 with mechanisms to allow people with disabilities to access multimedia content, including audio and video.

Rob Mason — Pervasive computing

What is driving this accelerating diffusion of networked technologies? How do you really measure or control how “pervasive” something is? Why would you even want to? We’ll introduce you to a practical framework for analysing and measuring your “spatial perception of ... Read more »

Mark Birbeck — Marking up content with RDFa

RDFa is at the cornerstone of the Browser Web and the Semantic Web. With RDFa, publishing data becomes as easy as publishing HTML, and can help web pages authors to join the linked data cloud and leverage all the URI-based data ... Read more »

Kevin Yank — CSS frameworks

With the proliferation and widespread adoption of JavaScript frameworks, smart developers have wondered if a similar approach to smoothing over the rough spots of CSS might work. Thus, CSS frameworks like Blueprint, YUI Library CSS Tools, Boilerplate, and many others were ... Read more »

WCAG2 — Gian Wild

So WCAG2 - version 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as set out by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative - has been released as a Candidate Recommendation. What does that mean for Australia? There are many issues that ... Read more »

Ben Galbraith — The state of developer tools

In this session, co-founder of Ajaxian.com, and The Ajax Experience conferences, and now head of Mozilla Foundation’s new Tools team Ben Galbraith will take us on an expedition through the developer tools landscape. Learn what’s out there, and what they can ... Read more »

Win a ticket to Web Directions South from Opera Software

If you've not been able to get along to the conference next week, our excellent friends over at Opera Software are giving away a place to Web Directions South 09.All you have to do is submit an abstract detailing what you would do to showcase the new breed of web ... Read more »

Atlassian Startup Space at the Web Directions Expo

Thanks to the support of Atlassian, Aussie startups turned worldwide success, at the Web Directions Expo this year we have a dedicated startup focussed area, the Atlassian Startup Space.7 recent startups, with a broad range of products and services relevant to the web industry have been chosen for this ... Read more »

McFarlane Prize 2009 Shortlist

The Judges have been hard at work with the higher than ever before standard of this year's Prize, and have decided on the short list for the 2009 Prize.Last year's winning designers, Propeller Global, after two grueling rounds of judging have three sites they designed in the short list ... Read more »

Website Spark — loads of (almost) free stuff for web designers and developers from Microsoft

Late last week, Microsoft announced a new program for web designers and developers, WebSite Spark.Included in the program areMicrosoft Web design and development tools, including three licenses of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, two licenses of Microsoft Expression Web 3 and one license of Microsoft Expression Studio 3 Four ... Read more »

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