Observe & Report

Last Wednesday I went to the Webstock ‘Mini’ event of ‘Trade Me, travel and Web 2.0 goodness’ at the Town Hall in Wellington. The event was part of a follow-up to the successful Webstock four-day web experience: two days of intensive workshops, followed by a two-day conference. The aim of this event being to improve how websites are built through ‘inspiration, education, insightful analysis and practical application’.

This latest follow-up event begin with a full day workshop from CSS Maestro Russ Weakley. Russ is a standards-based web designer, developer and trainer from Max Design who has worked in the web industry for 10 years. Russ co-chairs the Web Standards Group and co-founded Web Essentials. Russ has produced a number of CSS-based tutorials including Listamatic and all its sequals. Also he recently wrote his first book, “Teach Yourself CSS in 10 Minutes“. Also He is also has a very black sense of humor which makes for fantastic listening (and learning)!

My posse and I attended the Evening Presentations, which began with Natasha Hall, the resident user-tester expert from Trade Me, discussing the functional improvements Trade Me has made to assist its users who make a living from their site. Very interesting (and comical) stories, statistics, and behavioural oddities were revealed. It would have been great to hear a bit more about how new or inexpericed users are being assisted or catered for. But none the less a very interesting insight into useability.

This was followed-up by aclaimed blogger, columnist for the Listener (voice of HardNews.) and authoritative media commentator Russell Brown. Who discussed, in his usual comical camp-fire-story delivery, his recent trip to America visiting Google, IBM, and attending the uber-geek ‘foo camp‘. He also threw in a speil about the re-design of his blog, www.publicaddress.net for $10,000k – which kind of seemed like shameless self promotion pushing the point that people can advertise on his site, but I like the man’s sense of humor so I take that back…

The evenings presentations were finished off by O’Reilly author, Perl guru and Web 2.0 commentator, Nat Torkington. Nat blogs on the O’Reilly Radar where, with Tim O’Reilly, he identifies and tracks technology trends – this blog is a very up-to-date and helpful resource of online trends and events. In his talk Nat discussed the “Seven Threads in Web 2.0″. Which was an incredibly interesting and informative presentation! He discussed how websites like Amazon make their site is as sticky as they can be, how Microsoft thinks about its data centers, the real lessons of Ruby on Rails, and what startups like Meebo and open source heavyweight Ubuntu have in common. Nat is a great speaker and he skillfully dissected specific strategies, techniques, and tools that are behind the success of these latest startups and industry leaders.

This latest Webstock event was, like they say in their copy, a great ‘mind-expanding’ event – the speakers all delivered well thought out, professional and enlightening presentations. There was also, like last time, much opportunity to network with like minded web-lovers and the web ‘experts’ .