I flew down to Wellington on Thursday morning to attend my first Webstock and it was excellent. I made plenty of notes and in the rest of this post I will try to summarise my thoughts on the event and each of the speakers, and hopefully do them all some justice.

Playing works

US game designer Jane McGonigal explained how playing real-world or video games involves similar activities and experiences to those identified by the science of happiness as being beneficial to us. She also said that by turning normal tasks into a game, you increase participation and that you can use this to address real-world problems. For personal reasons that I mentioned in an earlier post, I didn’t approve of her enthusiasm for World of Warcraft however!

Fail to succeed

Local web guru Nat Torkington provided some fascinating insights into the innovation process and how it needs to be sustained, inevitably involving a degree of failure. He reminded us how Sony’s success with Walkman ultimately made them latecomers to the mp3 revolution, allowing Apple to take the lead. He encouraged us to screw up, because failure also increases knowledge, but he also advised us to to fail small, and fail early.

Wisdom of crowds

US designer, author and web commentator Derek Powazek discussed the wisdom of crowds but noted that for best results a reward of some kind is required. Often this reward is simply a higher profile within the community, but it doesn’t have to be. Derek also revealed his silver bullet for trolls – a sincere ‘Dude, are you having a bad day?’ email which, if unsuccessful, is followed by encouraging the community to ignore them. If all else fails, this is followed by a cone of silence that hides their comments, and hides others’ comments from them. Ingenious.

Twinkle twinkle

In the first breakout session I attended the presentation of the (UK’s) National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory’s Head of Digital Media, Fiona Romeo. Fiona revealed how the Observatory is achieving its goal of increasing public participation in astronomy after their visit. Coinciding nicely with Jane’s point about crowdsourcing earlier, the Observatory and other institutions built the Galaxy Zoo website where, with a few pointers, amateur astronomers classify galaxies from images captured by telescopes.

Creative coding

In the second breakout session I opted for Cameron Adams‘ presentation. Cameron is a well-known Australian blogger and author of Simply JavaScript. Cameron showed a spectacular selection of his and others’ work in JavaScript, Actionscript and Processing. I felt that his conclusion that everyone could use code like they would Photoshop or Illustrator was incredibly gracious but a little naïve.

Neighbourhood watch

Adrian Holovarty is the man behind the concept of ‘journalism via computer programming’ which is best demonstrated by his current project Everyblock.com. The website currently aggregates data, beautifully visualised and overlaid on city maps, from the authorities, news outlets, blogs and Flickr photos for eleven American cities. The thing I found most impressive is that the website gives users all this without the need to sign up.

Community spirit

Canadian Heather Champ is the Director of Community at Flickr, one of the largest and most respectful online communities, and due to the nature of the content, one of the most challenging to guide. Unlike other websites, Heather and her team believe in moderating Flickr’s community and have formulated its famous guidelines. However, she also stressed the importance of respecting your members and giving them all the tools you can.

Definitely maybe not

The penultimate presentation of a satisfyingly intense day one, Silicon Valley veteran Michael Lopp took a light-hearted look at the taxonomy of nerds, geeks and dorks.

Play ball

Ze Frank (pronounced Zay) is a web humorist and performance artist from the US who has been producing popular web projects since 2001. Originally self-initiated, these have gradually became more community-driven. Most are fun (The Scribbler, Youngme Nowme and Earth Sandwich) but occasionally some have a profoundly moving contribution, such as the person who submitted an Angrigami flower and explained how his father had died that day. In closing, Ze said, ‘We’ve been so obsessed with building baseball parks, we’ve forgotten to play in them.’

Made for web

Kicking off day two, Kiwi journalist and blogger Russell Brown changed his original presentation to address New Zealand’s looming internet legislation which has caused much controversy here and overseas. On returning to his original theme, Russell suggested that because TV is totally scalable and can more effectively target its audience there, it will soon be the dominant form of web content. He encouraged TV companies to reduce their geographic and scheduling control over the online distribution of their content.

Yes we can

A leading online accessibility evangelist, Derek Featherstone (US) proposed that the current process of creating standards-based client-side web code (HTML content, then CSS presentation, then JavaScript behaviours) was flawed. It omits the fact that Ajax dialogues can alter the order of content and affect screen-readers which he demonstrated with Amazon and Chapters (Amazon fared better).

Kirk to bridge

Annalee Newitz proposed that science fiction creates mythologies that shape your audience’s expectations, hopes and fears. She mentioned the most famous example, the 60′s Star Trek tricorder, which directly influenced the modern mobile phone. She went on to name other products such as the Segway, which failed to take off because it compares unfavourably to superhero tech such as the Batmobile or Iron Man’s suit, and Bluetooth, which conjures the fear of mind control.

Bloodshed to blogshed

For the first breakout session of day two, I attended the presentation of Bosnian political activist and blogger Jasmina Tesanovic. Her chilling account of the genocide of her neighbours by a group of local Serbian sympathisers in 1995 threw the conference and indeed, our lives, into stark relief. If we’re lucky, we create websites that enhance people’s lives. Jasmina’s blog, because it came to the attention of the Western news agencies, probably saved hers.

Give it away

Australian designer and author Russ Weakley presented the development process behind his team’s forthcoming Australian Museum website redesign. The website will feature an unprecedented level of participation for a museum. Pages or sections can be assembled by staff or members of the public from the exhibit assets. It will also allow users to add assets and tags. They must be expecting a big community, so how will they control it? Reward good behaviour, let them take ownership of their content, and let it go.

Connected cities

In his presentation, Dopplr’s Lead Designer Matt Jones started by exploring previous generations’ visions of what future cities will be like. In the sixties and early seventies, Archigram, a group of avant-garde British architects, believed that human behaviour was the raw material they were building with, and that it would be enabled by technological systems they uncannily termed ‘social software’. They likened such software to ghosts in the machine of the city.

Matt then presented guerilla gardening and psychogeography as examples of how people seek to shape and understand their city better. More recently, the raising of Tower Bridge can now be followed on Twitter and lasers project climate-change tide lines or energy consumption clouds on vapour from a power station chimney. Matt concluded that through technology, the secrets, or ghosts of cities are gradually beginning to reveal themselves. All this, and he was really funny too.

Real-time futures

San Fran-based Brit Tom Coates works at Yahoo! Brickhouse, ‘making bets on the future’. Virtually picking up where Matt’s talk left off, Tom’s FireEagle project attaches user-generated data such as tweets or tagged Flickr photos to real-world maps. This demonstrated that combining data from numerous sources adds far greater meaning. He stressed the value of data over infrastructure, adding that your site is not your product. Finally, he proposed that by giving users complete control over their privacy, the holy grail of combining and geo-locating data in real-time becomes possible. Tom was hilarious throughout.

2.0 for effort

Bruce Sterling is a sci-fi author and Wired blogger from the US. He is probably the best-known speaker at Webstock, and unfortunately my least favourite. As undeniably smart and funny as he is, ridiculing Web 2.0 is not only shooting fish nailed to a table, it’s doing so about 18 months after everyone else did it. Even if he had chosen a different topic, I think he would have still clashed with the generally upbeat tone.

Elves and orcs

Australian Damian Conway has a PhD in Computer Science, has authored many popular Perl modules, and also spoke at last year’s Webstock. He introduced himself as ‘the bossy little schoolgirl of Web Design’, and his presentation was a hilarious way to close the event. In it, he likened the relationship between designers and users to elves and orcs, outlined a Hippocratic oath for designers and then ripped into the cardinal sins of amateur websites. According to Damian, if we heed his words, ‘the slumbering electronic princess of the web will wake up’.

Conclusion

My favourite speaker was Matt Jones for his fascinating subjects and entertaining delivery. Tom Coates and Ze Frank were very close behind. The speakers I saw were all outstanding, the timekeeping was immaculate and overall the event was incredibly well-organised. I’m looking forward to the videos of the speakers I missed going live soon. Thanks, Webstock!