g.r.

Somehow I've ended up in Adelaide Central Market... It's the only place with any people in the city this morning.... http://bkite.com/3kqvj 5 days ago

• All webby people – Support this on Kickstarter. Cadence & Slang is a book about interaction design.: http://bit.ly/DTob6 #

• About to check out jumpchart for wireframing/speccing
  – http://bit.ly/12Npap #
• Chutetastic – http://bit.ly/8NglJ #
• Rode to work this morning for the first time; thought it best given that it's ride to work day in Sydney. York St = too many buses. #
• #agawards09 At the AG awards ceremony- http://twitpic.com/lpwzz #
• Thanks to @PayPalAustralia for picking my submission as the winner in their #wds09 comp. Off to San Francisco for a few days! #

I was fortunate enough to attend Web Directions just last week. It was a great couple of days – 700 webby folk in a room together certainly makes for some interesting, stimulating talks and discussions. It was great to feel like the web industry in Sydney has pace and vigour, and is as forward looking as anywhere in the world.

Opening Keynote: Escalante – Matt Webb

The opening keynote was clearly designed to be both inspiring and thought-provoking. Matt waxed lyrical about his love for hiking; the bizarre thought-processes and decisions behind today’s world of mass production; how the internet enables micro-production in the vein of etsy.com; and the concept of Social Capital and how the web enables link between services, objects, and ultimately people and therefore brings about a better, more connected world.

There was a lot more that I can’t begin to articulate, but I have snapshots in my head of the Argos catalogue, the Chilean Communist government’s thought room, and how behaviour might change if a product’s emissions generated in production were displayed around or on it in clear view.

In his words-

The 21st century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government? We can look at the Web – breaking down publishing and consuming from day zero – for where we might be heading in a world bigger than we can really see, and we can look at design – playful and rational all at once – to help us figure out what to do when we get there.

Unfortunately I can’t find Matt’s slides online (yet); I’ll update the post when I do.

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Pre-conference blog post intro

Beyond SEO – Scott & Cheryl Gledhill

Scott and Cheryl tag-team presented for an hour, discussing briefly the SEO basics and then moving onto why we need to go beyond the simple stuff that’s become a no-brainer for any savvy digital content producer, and start targeting new ways that users search for information online.

The key points I took away from this duo were…

• SEO is everyone’s job – across tech guys/developers, content producers, site managers and marketers
• We should be including components of SEO in every part of the site build and launch process
• We need to cater for the new methods of search – e.g. horizontal searchers and associated display of results. It’s not enough to simply tag up content correctly anymore. You need to go the extra length to cater for searchers across specific platforms for news, video, images etc.
• It’s estimated that searchers of content can currently be broken down as follows: 40% are real-time searchers, and looking for content/information that’s happening now; 20% are navigational searchers, and are looking for key terms like a brand or store name; the final 40% are informational searchers, where they are looking for content on a specific topic or around a specific niche.
• Mobile search will probably overtake desktop search within the next year or so.

It’s clear from the last points that we need to focus our efforts on not only getting the basics of SEO right, but also set up the mechanisms to ensure that content appears for all kinds of search, in the right context – across business, real-time, mapping, video and image searches. In Australia, this means Google as they have around 92% of the search market.

Designing for Suits – Pete Ottery

Pete Ottery is the Group Interface Designer for News Digital. His hour was a little different, with 1/2 hour taken up with 3 ten minute videos interviewing lead designers and execs at News Digital, Fairfax and some indie agencies on the design process, how designers deal with the suits and vice versa.

Pete’s 3 videos from the presentation are online at Vimeo:

Pete Ottery on Twitter

Information Seeking Behaviours – Donna Spencer

From Donna’s own summary…

When people use websites and intranets they are doing more than just ‘finding’ information. They may be looking for something they know about or exploring something brand new; filtering through large volumes then comparing results; getting an overview of a topic or diving deep. They may even think they want to find one thing, but actually need something entirely different. Each of these information behaviours needs very different approaches to information architecture, information design and page layout.

Couldn’t have summed it up better myself :-). This talk was neat, and very relevant for the kind of content I am working with on Qantas Travel Insider and Top Gear, where we’re trying to present our content not only as articles, but as searchable data so that users can slice and dice this info in the way that suits them, what they are looking for, and they way they are looking for info.

And one of the best bits? Donna featured the Top Gear Car Chooser – one of the sites I produce :-)

Closing Keynote – Cameron Adams – Making Waves

Cameron is one of the drivers and engineers behind Google Wave, which has been causing a stir in the world of web applications, online collaboration and everything Google over the last month or so. There’s no easy way to some up this presentation without Cameron’s slides, other than one word – Awesomeness – as outlined in the “Awesomeness Manifesto” by Umair Haque of Harvard, which encourages us to disregard the term innovation and push for building with a combination of Ethical Production; something Insanely Great; with Love, and Added Value. Doing this will create something truly awesome.

http://Cameron Adams – wds09 Keynote Audio Recording

• "Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard." #qotd – http://www.caterina.net/archive/001196.html #
• Off to #wds09. Need coffee. This is too early. #
• The @topgearaus car chooser just featured (+vely) in 'information seeking behaviours' talk at #wds09. That's one of ours :) #
• That would be daytum.com. #
• Decompressing and drying out after a great, inspiring Web Directions South 09 conference. Pure Awesomeness. Posts on fave talks soon. #wds09 #
• Sydney – seriously, get your act together, the weather has been appalling. #
• Chances of suffering from post conference come-down at work today? High. #

Just been reading this post by Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr.

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that's what you like to do.

A great reason for me to justify a day of ineffectiveness or unproductivity, maybe, but a great observation all the same.

• Love behavioural studies- RT @TrekWomen: To get more cyclists on the road, figure out what women want: http://ow.ly/rVM1 (via @TrekBikes) #
• Sushi time. #

Seaplanes, Rose Bay, originally uploaded by newformula.

Hanging out in Rose Bay after tennis, we watched the seaplanes go by. Actually, land and take-off, but same difference.