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 […]

Webstock – Ze Frank – The Explicit
Ze Frank is an American online performance artist, composer, humourist and public speaker. He wanted to share notes, practical advice and war stories on the value of contribution through to the challenges of feeling a virtual audience. Words don’t do justice… Frank’s presentation was an act of creative genius. Indescribable but and act of genius […]

Webstock – Michael Lopp – Being Geek
Michael Lopp is a veteran of Apple, Netscape, Borland and Symantec. He explores the class of people who span both Generation X and Y and that he calls “The Geeks” – a group that has spent the last two decades moving amongst the dark technological fringe and is now a mainstream demographic. Michael contends that […]
Webstock – Heather Champ – Shepherding Passionate Communities
Heather Champ is the director of community at Flickr, seeing it grow to 24 million members sharing 2.8 billions photos and videos with 3 billion page views per month. Heather started off warning the audience that she would swear during her presentation, consider yourselves warned by extension! Heather loves that Flickr allows users to see […]

Webstock – Adrian Holovaty – A Mashup Case Study, Everyblock.com
Adrian is a journalist (ahhh – that’s a good thing – a dying breed) and a developer of web apps for washingtonpost.com, lawrence.com and LJWorld.com. If that wasn’t enough he also co-created Django the open-source development framework. Adrian described how the long tail relates to news and current events. That there is significant specific content […]
Webstock – David Recordan – Open, Social Web
David is a tech lead for Six Apart, home of the blogging software that powers most of the worlds pro blogs, Movable Type. How do we make it easy for people to join sites, bring friends and profiles and take advantage of the substance of your offering? Why is it so hard currently – profiles, […]
Webstock – Meg Pickard – Content, Communities and Collaboration
Meg Pickard is the head of communities and user experience for guardian.co.uk. She points out that users interact with content in many different ways. Consume, React, Curate, Create… If people can create recommendation lists on the likes of Amazon, why can they not on traditional news sites (writers comment – isn’t this what digg is […]