Hopefully you get to see this and hopefully it looks like it’s at my new home. This blog is now powered by WordPress and looks different to what it did before. It still has the same content, although I have a bit of tidying up to do.

If you notice anything not working or looking weird please let me know.

Otherwise I’d love to get your feedback.

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I’m in the process of moving my blog. I hope to have it done before I host the All Women Carnival next Monday.

So if you get any trackbacks that look like they have my content but come from a different domain, it’s just me testing this until I switch over to the semanticallydriven.com domain. Thanks to Meg from Dipping into the Blogpond for alerting me to a potential blog scrape.

I must say that it’s a damn site harder than I imagined. I really need to have a day off to knuckle down and do it.

A lot of the websites I’ve read that talk about moving from Typepad to WordPress give you tips but not the meat to go with the tips. Things like run an SQL command to update permalinks. I’m a little bit familiar with this type of thing, but I still need to know where to go to do stuff like this so it’s a very steep learning curve.

So the posting will be a bit light on here until I get it up and running.

Please bear with me. Thanks.

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I know it’s been conference this and conference that around here lately. I’ve got my web hat on and will no doubt soon take it off, put on another hat and resume back to blogging all about the place like I normally do. But I brought the conference up because after the conference my Facebook friends quadrupled, that is I went from three friends to 12. This is why.

When you get added as someone’s friend in Facebook, their friends can see that you’ve been added and then might think, oh well I met or know her, I’ll add her as a friend as well. This can happen at your end too. I added an old work colleague tonight and through that another old work colleague saw that I’d been added to her friend so she added me to hers. Confused? That’s because it happens so quickly you’re left shaking your head.

I’m writing this down because I still don’t know how long I’ll stick at this Facebook thing. I’m hanging around at the moment because I’m curious and am genuinely interested in maintaining contact with friends that have moved away from me. I’m not so interested in adding people that I see or work with all the time because I see or work with them all the time. I’m also conscious of what I write on people’s walls because everyone else can read it. It’s like being at home at night with the blinds up and the curtains open and the lights on. Everyone can see in and see what you’re up to. I’m not a leave the blinds open and the lights on kind of girl. I like my privacy.

What I’m saying is that I’m not that active on Facebook now. I’d rather just watch and participate periodically when I feel like it. I haven’t installed every application, I don’t send gifts willy nilly, I don’t ask lots of questions, I haven’t rated any movies, etc etc. I also reserve the right to cut and run, although I’ve heard it’s difficult, if not impossible, to delete a Facebook account.

For the moment, I’ll let Facebook sit around like a fairly dormant virus and hope that it doesn’t take hold.

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Read my previous summaries of the conference: one and two. This is the third and final part of my Web Directions South wrapup.

The closing talk on the first day was by Chris Wilson, an Internet Explorer Platform Architect from Microsoft. He opened the talk with who he is and what he does and put up this slide of his haircut from the 80s – I’m guessing. He asked if anyone remembered the Mosaic web browser. A fair amount of people did, including me.

His talk was about moving the web forward, but because he’s from Microsoft, there was a lot of talking about their web browser and its use, or not, of standards.

He said there were three main groups of people when it comes to web users. That is 1 – developers – and he acknowledged it’s painful for this group (think numerous hacks to get pages to work in different web browsers). 2 – browser vendors – browser hacking is lucrative and security is hard (think numerous browser security patches). 3 – everyone else – have to consider browser upgrades for this group.

He did say they’re working on a new web browser and committed to working with standards, and it will have to work for his ‘mom’s banking’ otherwise he’s in the poo because she has his cellphone number and can hassle him.

There’s no rhyme or reason to the order I’ve summarised what I heard at the conference, so I’m jumping to the morning of day two and Scott Berkun’s opening talk The Myths of Innovation. We were lucky to open with this and to close with Mark Pesce, it helped make a great day.

Takeout’s from Scott’s talk:

• The less you use the word innovation, the more likely you are to innovate. It’s hard to define what the word actually means. I liked this because it made me think of team meetings at work where we discuss innovation a fair bit.
• To innovate though, you need to delegate responsibility, allow mistakes – as they will be made, and reward initiative.
• Google have a 20% rule. That is one day a week is your own time to play around and hopefully think up some great new ideas. This was 3M’s idea from the late 1940s.
• Someone at the end asked how to get people on board with a new innovation and Scott said to involve them in the process from the beginning as they’re less likely to feel threatened.

He’s written a book about the Myth’s of Innovation and after listening to this talk I’d really like to read it.

Lastly, but by no means least as it’s a topic close to my heart, was Lisa Herrod’s talk on Usability: More than skin deep. Points of interest:

• Personas for web testing are often shallow, they don’t usually consider users with disabilities.
• A W3C check doesn’t mean the site is accessible. A software accessibility tool can’t check for things like contrasting colour. A holistic approach is needed.
• Role specific checklists are a good way to go. Therefore each person throughout the process of building the site has a checklist of accessibility items to check off. The person responsible for the front end has the most items to check off, but accessibility is not their sole responsibility as other team members have items to check also.

Our website at work has been following the accessibility guidelines for four years now and quite often when talking to colleagues who are responsible for content and front end development, accessibility and usability are words I use very frequently when providing feedback, but it’s really worthwhile. Oh, and Lisa also kept saying accessibility expertise when building a website is essential.

After having learned a fair amount at work and in my reading about accessibility, usability and web standards I really cringe when I think of that website I built about five years ago that used frames before I really knew about CSS etc.

There were other sessions I attended but the ones I’ve written about I found the most interesting. And before we all knew it the conference was over and it was off to a nearby venue for the after party sponsored by Microsoft. It was a good way to finish the conference and I met some people I hadn’t met yet. Consequently my Facebook contacts have expanded threefold and now I can see a good use for Facebook. Hint, these sorts of contact details are on my About page.

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The first day of the conference – particularly the afternoon – went quite slowly and in the early afternoon sessions I struggled to stay awake but the second day was over before I knew it. It did end on a high with Mark Pesce’s talk as I pointed out yesterday.

To continue along with the free drinks time I had in Sydney, Adobe put drinks on after the conference Thursday night. Microsoft paid for the party after the conference on Friday which was down the road at the Shelbourne. As that one was away from the conference venue it was more of a party vibe.

But back to the conference.

The main point I’ve taken away with me is this – mobile. Many of the talks were either about it, or they mentioned it. That is, applications and/or websites that will work on mobile devices. Can you imagine the website you built five years ago using tables or, god forbid – frames, working on a really small screen? For a start it would take forever to download and then it wouldn’t display very well because of the fixed width type layout and no stylesheet telling it how to display on a small screen or handheld device.

Brian Fling talked about Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 = ? He said:

• Mobile subscribers are about 1/5th of the population of the world and half of them have internet access through their mobiles. This is more than the amount of internet users using a desktop computer.
• By 2010 mobile users will be about half of the world’s population.
• Mobile will revolutionise the way we gather and use the internet probably within the next three or so years.
• Mobiles provide the ability to get location-based services – eg where good restaurants are etc
• The mobile web browser is the next killer app
• Mobile web applications are the future
• The mobile user experience sucks at the moment
• The mobile carrier is the new ‘c’ word (think walled garden – Laurel Papworth talked about this at the conference and on her blog)
• The iPhone is the first mobile device worthy of being called mobile 2.0. (My note here – look at the discussions over at the Whirlpool forums. iPhone talk is hot hot hot.)
• CSS3 is ideal for mobile development

An aside to the mobile talk – iTouch was also buzzing around the conference. I’m a bit out of touch here (excuse the bad pun) but iTouches must have just been released and a couple of people I saw at WebJam on Saturday night had one so I was able to have a bit of a play. iTouch is the iPhone without the phone and camera components and it’s really easy and intuitive to use. I imagine, therefore, that the iPhone is quite similar. By the way they’d sold out at Myer in Sydney centre and no more are due for two weeks.

I wrote yesterday that I went along to every female speaker’s talk and this included George Oates from Flickr. I’d met George at an Adelaide Flickr meet not that long ago and hadn’t realised she was speaking at the conference until I reacquainted myself with the program.

She talked about how Flickr started – it was based on an online game that a bunch of them used to play and Flickr is similar in many respects. She said that the less rules of behaviour there are, the more room for creativity there is. The photos are a good way of telling stories about people and getting them involved in the Flickr community. But to start this community off there had to be human contact at the beginning. Flickr staff members are still heavily involved in discussions and so forth. Unfortunately she ran out of time to finish her talk and was therefore unable to take questions at the end.

I have one more post to come about this conference – tomorrow or the next day.

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So Web Directions South finished on Friday and it’s taken me this long to compile my thoughts and even begin to write some stuff down about the conference.

I took my laptop to Sydney and didn’t get it out of the case once – the plan had been to blog as I went. The last thing I wanted to do was use it in the hotel room because I was tired every time I was there, and I didn’t use it at the conference because I was either at a session, eating, getting some fresh air or talking to others. Many people did take advantage of their laptop though as is evidenced by many of the available photos.

I went to Sydney by myself and knew that I wouldn’t know anyone at the conference so thought I’d try to hookup with people who would be attending. Due to the power of the internet I found out there was going to be a Port80 meetup on the Wednesday night prior to the conference so I went along.

They were very welcoming and everyone had a good night. We were there on trivia night so most of us played and the table I was on came second overall. We won some vouchers, and a six-pack of beer. I don’t know who ended up with that but as the drinks were free I didn’t care that I didn’t get a share. I was also getting over the after effects of a sore tummy from a bug I had earlier in the week.

I’m glad I hooked up with some people at this meetup because I didn’t meet many people at the conference itself. I’m not a natural networker and find these things quite hard. The conference organisers had the Mikons idea but apart from talking to a couple of people about them I didn’t find it a real conversation opener. I did earn myself a Mikons t-shirt, however, because I’d designed one that ended up on the t-shirt.

I had arranged to meet with Leah McLean from Working Solo. We talked a couple of times over the two days and it was good to talk to someone who used to work in the corporate world and then left it to go out on their own. It takes guts to do that and I admire her for it.

There seemed to be a good mix of people at the conference, a good mix of genders and ages. As for presenters, I think I went to just about every female presenters session, not by design, but just because I was interested in their talks. There were sessions I missed but all are supposed to be available as podcasts so I will catch up.

I’ll talk about a couple of sessions I attended here and save the rest for another day.

Rashmi Sinha’s Peril’s of Popularity was the opening one on the first day. I met her at the drinks on Friday night. A few points from her talk:

• LinkedIn and Friendster were first generation social networks but have been superseded somewhat by Flickr and YouTube.
• Digg – people conform. If people Digg a story then others will usually follow. It encourages mobs.
• Facebook – viral navigation, ie applications getting passed around therefore making spammers out of all of us.
• Good content is key – eg Shift happens (I’d just seen this before I went to the conference).

Sebastian Chan from the Powerhouse Museum talked about social media and government and how they opened its collection and research database – to public tagging, and dynamic user-driven recommendations. This got their audience more involved in their exhibits and collections and as a result they were able to learn a lot about their audience. I kept thinking during this presentation at what it must be like to have management that let them go ahead with this. They did start small and when it proved a success were able to continue and grow.

The standout session for me, and I think many others, was Mark Pesce’s – Mob Rules (this link has a transcript of his talk and I recommend reading it). He was one of the few who tied his talk in really well with his Powerpoint. It was inspiring and I didn’t want it to end. There’s not many talks I attend where I feel this way and it was very refreshing. A quote from this talk – ‘The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around

Flickr was mentioned at just about every talk I went to. I think this makes it just about the most widely used website available. George Oates gave statistics on how many photos are uploaded each minute and each day and it’s phenomenal. For the Web Directions photos alone, there are nearly 1500 as I type this. That’s more than two photos for every attendee there.

I didn’t take any photos of me, but others did.

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