Ok, so that title is so played out, but what can I say? I am sitting in my office and it’s 102 degrees outside, in Portland. I forgot to mention, my office is my garage, my garage has no AC. I am sitting in here cooking. No worries though, the tail end of this week was spent at WebVisions, which is conveniently located across the river from my day job.

I went and saw four different speakers. From the four that I went to, nothing groundbreaking, or new to me was presented. However, I think it was a huge value to the majority of the audience there. Out of the four I attended, I got ideas for more posts, found I was thinking in the right direction, and thoroughly enjoyed the celebration of geekdom that is webvisions.

What follows is my account of the minority of speakers I saw.

I have to admit, this is all from memory. I didn’t take notes in school and I am afraid I don’t take notes now.

“Rapid DOM/AJAX Development” - Jonathan Snook

Aside from my A.D.D., Jonathan’s presentation at WebVisions helped clear up whether or not the plethora of libraries available on the web are a good or bad thing. Ultimately he said something along the lines of, there is no need to re-invent the wheel. Hence, I have decided I am going to take on Prototype as it’s somewhere in the middle of potential and file size. Now where were those resources?

“Ruby on Rails” - Michael Buffington

I wasn’t lost in any of the other presentations as much as I was lost in this one. Staring at an unfamiliar coding language is a bit of a “deer in the headlights” experience for me. I am by no means, even good at server-side coding. But for some reason, when Michael showed us all how to create a game, he made it look easy.

Part of his advice was to download textmate for macOSX (recent switcher) so I will gladly oblige. I really need a simple language to turn the ideas in my head into actual applications. I know this will be no fast ride, but I am definitely jumping on the bandwagon.

He also made a, “who cares about internet explorer users,” comment which is something I have been thinking myself (having some eleven3.com IE issues). I chuckled.

Thank you Michael.

“Tagging in the Real Web World” - Thomas Vander Wal

It was a trip watching Thomas Vander Wal speak, I kept thinking, “this is the guy who coined folksonomy.” He’s a bit of a celebrity in my industry. I also couldn’t believe I didn’t bring a notepad, a laptop, or a camera. And then it came to me, “CELLPHONE!” Hence the grainy photo you see here.

The topic of his speech was tagging. I find myself thinking a lot about tagging and the outright awesomeness that encompasses it. I freak out a bit when trying to tell people why they should use del.icio.us or some other social bookmarking service. It’s relevant data, and it’s a lot of it.

Thomas also brought up the two sides of the coin that I have often explained to people, why users are doing it for themselves (which makes it useful), and the fruits they reap (tag-based rss feeds). Of course he went more in depth to the how’s and why’s, but for me it affirmed many of my suspicions (like the fact tag clouds suck), and it was really nice to hear it dissected by someone as prominent as him.

** As the memory comes closer to present time, the posts get longer. Imagine that.

“Social Metadata and the Relevance Revolution” - Gene Smith

Gene is from the middle of nowhere, Canada, and being from the middle of nowhere Alaska, I felt like we should play hockey or get drunk and fight. None of that happened, but I was entertained by some audience participation and discussion of socially constructed information architectures (as he said, fancy websites).

Essentially he discussed certain elements of highly trafficked websites, elements that were created by the site for visitors to use. At some point in the process the visitors take over and the elements become useful.

He had a graph that explained surfer actions, from personal to participatory on the y-axis, and low to high engagement on the x-axis. This activity I am doing right now? Half selfish, half social good, and my engagement is very high. Cool, a paradigm to explain why we do all of this internet stuff, and how ego-centric it all is.

He went on, I am done giving his presentation an injustice, the rest of it can be view here (PDF).

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So what did I think? I think WebVisions was very cool. Granted my conference experience is very limited. But I just can’t help but love a salesguy-less conference about the internet. It was the real issues presented by real people. Thanks to all of the speakers and the folks at WebVisions. I will definitely be there next year.

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