
Clown Computing–Entertaining and Attention Grabbing but a Flawed Thesis
Recently I attended Webstock, a conference in Wellington, New Zealand that is well known for bringing together technology, design and general brain stimulation. It was a great event, with some awesome speakers but one presentation, by Jason Scott, part of an activist preservationist group Archive Team, kind of stuck in my craw. In his presentation, […]

T Shirt Friday #33 – Webstock #2
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with […]

T Shirt Friday #32 – defrag
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with […]

T-Shirt Friday #23 – Defrag
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with […]

Defrag… And That’s a Wrap
After the recent defrag conference, I traded emails with event organizer Eric Norlin. Defrag was the second Norlin Inc event I’d been to after attending Glue conference in May this year. After defrag I tweeted saying that Defrag and Glue, along with Antipodean event Webstock, are the three best conferences I’ve attended (and I’ve done […]

T-Shirt Friday #6 – Webstock
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with […]
Sterling Rant Goes Viral
I posted back during the Webstock conference about the Bruce Sterling presentation where, depending on your point of view, Sterling either crushed some Web 2.0 deities, or proved himself once and for all an arrogant bore. One of those deitites who came in for Sterling’s criticism was the father of Web 2.0 (at least the […]

Webstock – Damian Conway – Web 2.0.1
Damian Conway is a PhD in computer science and, until recently, was honorary professor of computer science at Monash University. He’s a designer, a columnist and an author. Why does the web still suck for most mortal users – and how can we reduce the suck-tion. We need a service pack for the whole damn […]

Webstock – Bruce Sterling – The Short but Glorious Life of Web 2.0 and What Comes Afterward
Bruce Sterling is a science fiction author, a design essayist and a net critic. He’s also one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Sterling says he respects Web 2.0 – and that it was a great success (past tense!) Web 2.0 has been realised, has spread worldwide and has crushed Web 1.0. Web […]
Webstock – Tom Coates – Incrementing Your Life
Tom Coates is a product designer who has worked for UpMyStreet and the BBC and now works for Yahoo. He’s currently working on fire eagle. a location capturing, managing and sharing service. Fire eagle has two initiatives – giving people tools to use, and giving people the control over the information that those tools develops. […]
Webstock – Matt Jones – The Demon-Haunted World
Matt Jones is a designer who was formerly creative director for the BBC news online. He was with Nokia as the director of UX design and he’s now with Dopplr. Informed by two overwhelming mega-trends in the world – rising urbanisation of the planet and the rapid digitalisation of those cities. It is projected that […]
Webstock – Russ Weakley – Open Web, Open Data, Open Panic?
Russ Weakley has a 13 year pedigree in graphic design, web development, interface design and standards based development. He’s the author of “Teach yourself CSS in Ten Minutes” and he works for the Australian museum. Two years ago he presented to Webstock suggesting that navigation be torn apart and be replaced by total reliance on […]
Webstock – Jasmina Tesanovic – The Design of Crime
Feminist, political activist, translator, publisher and filmmaker Tesanovic is a creation of the 1999 Kosovo war. She wrote a war diary based on the war “Diary of a Political Idiot”. Tesanovic gave a disclaimer that she would be telling horrible things to nice people – given the important things in life it has to be […]
Webstock – Annalee Newitz – Your Business Plan is Science Fiction, and That’s a Good Thing
Annalee is editor of science/fiction blog i09.com and a former policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She asks what today’s science fiction telling us about where our technology will go tomorrow? Science fiction doesn’t cause innovation but it becomes an environment within which we innovate – so as technologists we need to watch what […]
Webstock – Derek Featherstone – On Accessibility
Derek is an international accessibility expert. Can we do things on the web that go beyond the “can we just meet the guidelines?” and make things truly more accessible for users? People with disabilities will have their preferences and needs always available so the web/environment could adapt to them for a change Derek described the […]