Sydney Port80 meet

This was a fun evening at the Quarryman’s Hotel. with around 35 geeks from all round Australia, which took over the local triva night and won. The socialising continue late into the night.

A few hours of sleep later it was time to head down to the convention centre to help out by handing out conference satchels.

Rashmi Sinha

After John Alsopp’s great conference introduction. We had a keynote from Rashmi on social networking. While it was a interesting talk, it was a pale comparision of her 10 lessons from the design of SlideShare given at Oz-IA.

Andy Clarke

Andy gave a visually stunning presentation on what web designers can learn from comic books. Definitely got me thinking about how I build web pages.

Justin French

Justin had a tough task following Andy Clarke and competing with Cameron Adams. The presentation was not not what I was expecting with Pushing beyond design, which was all about designers moving on from the design space, starting with Justin&8217;s personal history. While not being a designer the presentation was a little of target, but there was some nuggets for me.

Sebastian Chan

This was the presentation I was most looking forward to. The PowerHouse museum is one of most interesting and advanced website amongst Australian Government Institutions. I learnt a lot about their process and a little about how it was done.

Designing sites people love - balancing emotion with business reality - Elizabeth Pek & Andy Coffey

This presentation delat with the redesign of the Sydney Morning Herald website. Interesting for me because of the time I spent with News Digital Media and how both major media companies structure their online teams and business. Also the SMH is an information site much like the State Library should be. Time to adapt the lesson SMH learnt to my next project.

Is length still an issue? - Iain Barker

Dovetailed beautifully into the previous presentation, as the SMH homepage is close to 3000px long. Some interesting research, but to put it simply users will scroll on the home page, if they expect to find the information there and it can improve usability and the overall user experience.

“There’s no I in team” – a case study in collaborative information architecture - Patrick Kennedy

I need to improve the quality of IA and UX at the Department of Culture and the Arts, mentoring as described by Patrick is exactly what we need.

Fast, cheap & somewhat in control - 10 lessons from the design of SlideShare - Rashmi Sinha

Some great lessons that Myles would of killed to of heard. But the same lessons can be applied to small discrete projects that you can afford to fail, in the Government or business.A very useful presentation for me.

Post Oz-IA

Drinks courtsey of Greg and Happener Recruitment, followed by another dinner at I am Spice, though not as spectacular as the night before, maybe my expectations where too high. Good company though.

First stop today was Pistol Clothing which does tshirt printing on demand. Apparently most Sydney geeks does not know that this service exists. Unfortunately they did not have some of the more exotic colours in my size in stock. So I have to pick up the results on Monday.

Next was Geeks on the Grass in Hyde Park, time to catch up with a few old friends and make some new ones, before getting a quick tour of the museum care of Ajay aka funkycoda.

Next involved Ben sneaking me into a internal News Digital Media presentation on the mobile web. It was good to see such an intelligent approach to the mobile web by a large company. None of this get rich quick that seems to permeate the mobile space. But a balance approach of new opportunities for existing services and the limitations of the mobile web. The other surprise was how many people I know who now work for News Digital Media.

Back to the hotel, before pre dinner drinks with Ajay and Stephen Collins while waiting for Ruth and Gary before heading of to Spice I Am for dinner. The place has an fantastic reputation and it deserves it, the food is truely amazing, I highly recommend eating there at least once when you are in Sydney. I know I will eat there more than once in the next week. If want to see what it looked like keep an eye on Ruth’s and Gary’s aka Tuna flickr stream. Looks like Gary is uploading as I type this.

A final drink with Lindsay Evans, before heading back to the hotel with Ajay so he could look at problems on a web site. And Myles you thought you were they only one who gets help the website is breaking while having a quiet drink late on a Friday night.

With both WDS07 and OZ-IA/2007 rapidly approaching, and a most of the local blogspace reminding people to sign up with Web Directions before the discount pricing ends this Friday at 2200 WST. (You should go at least once Ashul!).

It is time to put in plug for Oz-IA/2007. Disclaimer, by putting the Oz-IA logo on this post, I am will go into the draw to win a free ticket to Oz-IA. However, as soon as registrations opened I bought a ticket, so if I do win the ticket to Oz-IA/2007 I will have to find a fair way to redistribute it.

My willingness to buy a ticket straight away, should indicate how much I enjoyed Oz-IA last year and how much I am looking forward to this year’s Oz-IA. Actually I have been harassing Eric most of this year, to hold another Oz-IA close to WDS so I attend both. I am so glad Oz-IA/2007 is on the weekend before WDS2007, after Mark Bernstein attempted to make my head explode with his keynote at 0830 on the first day of Oz-IA/2006 after fours days of WDS06.

So I will tag Andrew_K, Ben 200ok and a youthful Tim aka Toolman Tim

tagged: photo meme, wd07, wds07, web directions, westcoastbloggers, flickr

Since that time Port80 has evolved in AWIA, the WA Web Awards, a few talks by national and international speakers as well helping organise BarCamp Perth and WebJam Perth. Still one of the important events each month is the social get together, where people from various sectors of the web industry (freelancers, employers, employees, educators, students and many more) get together to talk shop.

While I don’t know of any births, death or marriages that Port80 has be responsible for. It has been responsible for a number of people finding jobs, employees and collaborators and giving the Western Australian Web Industry a real sense of community. If you are in Sydney for Web Directions 2007 or any other reason on September 26 then come along for an evening of social networking with web people from around Australia not just WA, talking shop (and complaining about clients;-).

Details

September 26th 2007 6:00pm start
Quarryman’s Hotel
216 Harris St (Cnr. Pyrmont Bridge Rd)
Pyrmont NSW 2009
Map to the venue

Cost

Free as in pizza (or similar nibbles provided) and beer (which maybe provided by sponsor).

Any questions, head over to the Port80 forums.