Umamiblog

Webstock mini

There were two web related events on in Wellington last week. Wednesday night saw Webstock mini at the Town Hall. Ingrid has blogged it much better than I could’ve so if you’re interested in the speakers and what they had to say, follow the link.

Something that was announced at the event was that the next full Webstock conference probably won’t be until early 2008. To me that’s rather disappointing and feels like an opportunity lost for WSNZ and Wellington as well. I won’t be surprised if something starts to happen in Auckland in 2007 and some of the momentum from down here is lost. However there may very well be some valid reasons for the wait – we’ll just have to wait and see.

Microsoft’s Expand Your Portfolio

Microsoft, under the super organisational skills of Nigel Parker, lead a tour around NZ to show off their new Expressions toolset. As a MS Gold Partner we’ve been aware of Expressions for quite some time now but hadn’t yet understood what MS was trying to achieve taking on Macrodobia. The message we got was that we “wouldn’t be replacing those tools anytime soon”.

That notwithstanding, the demonstration did show some promise especially around the areas of the WPF/E and XAML stuff. My general feeling around creating new formats, a.k.a. Sony, is that you’re generally being an asshat. But there may be valid reasons for a new approach to the interactive web that Microsoft is exploring – they’ll just need to communicate them clearly. One positive tick for WPF/E is that it is cross-platform compatible from the get-go. Well, almost…

Where almost everyone agrees this will make the most impact and has the f…ing cool stamp is the how the next generation of .NET applications will be designed in Expression Studio and then have that almost seemlessly applied to the application/development. That is a mega oversimplification but go have a look for yourself and you’ll see what I’m getting at.

Hoorah! They’ve put the Webstock sessions online. They’re hosted by CityLink so most Welly businesses should have an excellent connection to them, there’s about 25GB in total. As I mentioned in my wrapup post, Kathy Sierra and Darren Fittler were highlights for me, as was Tony Chor – check out their presentations.

Hat tip to JD who noticed Miraz’s post.

“as for all those freaks from Intergen with their identically styled hair…”

– Aquaboogie on Webstock

LOL!

I’d say the first Webstock Conference was a success. Definitely a sound platform has been built to further drive and grow not only the conference but NZ’s participation in the web world. Some highlights for me:

Kathy Sierra
Brilliant presentation, left me feeling absolutely inspired.

Darren Fitler
It was eye-opening watching him use a computer and give a presentation. A really nice guy also.

Tony Chor
I had a chance to talk to him at the dinner. Nothing overly important, but it was a highlight for me

Accessibility
It was amazing how accessible all the presenters were and how willing they were to accept questions. Awesome.

Conference swag/Branding
Excellent. Period.

Meeting cool people
This was a definite highlight for me, meeting so many cool like-minded people… the majority of whom already live here. The networking that went on can only be good for our clients and the general eco-system in the long run.

The trick now is to keep the momentum, the inspiration, and the optimism gained from the conference. I’ve already decided to start attending more events around town (including the RoR and Unlimited Potential events) and I’ll be looking at ways to share the information and experience we gained at Webstock.

Now, lets go change the world!

Kathy was an excellent presenter with excellent content. She was the person I was most looking forward to seeing.

Nobody cares about your specs, they care how you make them feel. We need to look at reverse engineering passion. Require continuous improvement. What are we trying to get better at? It about what your users do with the product, not what you want them to do.

And, it all starts in the users’ head. Mind vs. Brain. Legacy Brain vs. Logical Mind. What does your brain pay attention to? We pay attention to other people, changing light (it might be a tiger!), etc. We know conversation beats a formal lecture. Why? Because the brain thinks its all real. User study; people were worried about hurting a computer’s feelings.

Paint a picture of what its like to be good and how to get there. But, we’re just getting started… What is it like to be in the flow state?

Knowledge and skill + Challenge

What breaks flow? Keeping motivation going. Levels: think games, books, even karate. How is the user changed by the journey?

The Tribe – the t-shirt metric. Creating a brand that people would like to wear on a t-shirt. “T-shirt first development.

How do you know when you have passionate users?

CULT

Remember your users are real people! Now go change the world

With Russell Brown as the moderator. Got pretty geeky at one part and you could literally see people around the auditorium switch off. Some highlights:

Kelly: Ideas coming from the fringe

Steve: Keep it open, but lower our trust in human nature

Joel: How much innovation that has happened without Microsoft. no one wants to use the technology of the older generation.

Kelly: Look at the youth groups

Doug: (On internationalization) You have to allow for really long stings of German text

Tony is one of the developers at Microsoft working on IE7 and gave us a talk on where they are heading with IE7, what it is and what it isn’t. Dealt with the animosity towards Microsoft really humorously – apologies for IE6, which received a round of applause.

Talked about needing to rebuild the IE team after it was pretty much disbanded. Web browsing isn’t about the browser. Introducing a lot of features that help IE catch up. One was tabbed browsing, one of the cool parts to this is that you could see thumbnails of the tabs that are open to help navigate between them.

Zooming was another cool feature, letting people zoom the page while maintaining the relational integrity of the site’s design. Printing will now scale by default rather than cutting the side off the page.

It does look a bit like Safari which is interesting. A huge focus on fixing bugs and improving security exponentially. All but one of the bugs on positioniseverything.net has been resolved bar one. Couldn’t tell me which one it was when asked.

Rowan was an excellent speaker who talked about TradeMe and boiled things down to 6 points. There are some really big numbers associated with TradeMe. These include that today 320,000 people will visit the site and they’ll spend 3 times as much time on TradeMe as they will on any other top ten site in NZ. This year TradeMe sold for $700million to Fairfax.

How did this happen?

#1 Build great websites and people will tell their friends
– understand your users
– and then get out of their way

#2 Be like electricity
– fast
– always available
– easy to use
“Does it make the boat go faster?”

#3 Let the server run the business

#4 Seed the community
– let people participate
– make people feel safe
– be honest
– listen when people tell you what sucks

#5 Measure everything
– identify constants

#6 This is not a beta
– Just try stuff

TradeMe has 56 staff and their offices are in the Stalinist looking Anvil House

Was titled as a talk on the revolution between close source and open source software. Sadly Andreas (who also needs help with his slide design) has drunk too much of the open source Kool Aid. It was pretty much just a sales pitch for Novell.

Ben is the lead developer on the Firefox web browser. Ben talked about the history of Netscape and how that lead to the development of the Mozilla Foundation. Netscape was in a lot of trouble and was being lead by people that exacerbated the problems. Netscape 6 came out and that was the disaster that forced enough change to happen. Mass disillusionment resulted.

This then lead to a salvage operation that involved incremental improvement. However mindsets inside the organisation didn’t change and this lead to Netscape being much like the walking dead.

Out of the ashes rose Phoenix/Firefox. 1.0 launched in November 2004. 12%-25% market share.

Focus on the small details such as download size, installation procedure, and removing complexity. Be ambitious and question assumptions. AND JUST SHIP IT.

End game project management, make meaningful releases, avoid dangerous feature creep. Ensuring success and learning from the mistakes that Netscape made earlier.

There was a demonstration of Firefox 2. Most of the feature, while useful, have been in Safari for over a year…

Russ gave an excellent speech even though he only had a short time to prepare it. There are concerns we all have over the paths in our websites. We follow information down a path, then we are stuck in a silo. It’s forced inflexible structure.

Given the choice, people will always follow their own paths. Many similarities on the web to exhibition design. You cannot control users.

Imagine a stripped-back approach. There are 3 pages:
– front page with a search
– search results
– the content page

Imagine if users could add their own tags to pages? It’s very hard to let go.

Imagine commenting on anything.

Imagine not that a page is the content with media inside the page, but media that is the page that is the content. ( I’ve stuffed that explanation up ).

Imagine extending collections, galleries, museums, etc. They could come alive! Flickr like membership, where the focus is on participation.

There are downsides, it all revolves around “letting go”. Westerners are uptight control freaks.

Site mourning – comes from content editors mainly. People fly in from Google then fly out. They don’t want to admit that…

Russell Brown of Publicaddress.net fame. Gave a good speech starting with a sound track of David Longe’s Oxford Union Debate speech. Russell is the ‘content guy’ of the conference.

Started with Webmedia’s last bang to Amsterdam then moved in the history of the NZ local internet. The insanity that was Xtraville. How did broken homepages with photos of people’s cats win out as a format for the web?

The move to blogs and blogging, then citizen journalism. Citizens have the right to be defended by their government. But also, the right to be defended from their government.

You Tube (less that a year old but serving more than 2 Terabytes of data a day. Versus Google Video…why did You Tube win?

MySpace? The second most popular site on the internet. Hands up who doesn’t get it?

It’s about letting people approach on their own terms. They have stories to tell and know how to tell them.

The question of libraries and what they should digitise… Well, why not digitise what people want?