The last WebBlast for 2011 will be on at the Pumphouse Bar in Darling Harbour on the 8th of December. Come join us to celebrate the start of Summer!

Thanks to our generous sponsors Campaign Monitor, Happener, Microsoft , and Stamford Interactive twho are providing the night’s cool drinks and refreshments, the stage is set for a wonderful evening of catching up with friends from the industry and finding new ones.

So what are you waiting for?  Register Now!

We’ve got a policy of one ticket per registration. Let us know via email, Twitter, or telepathy if you can’t make it and we can free up your unneeded ticket.

So if you want to ensure your friends and colleagues are coming, tweet/facebook/Linkedin so they can register for themselves.

Cheers,

Alan, Joe, and Caryn

If you’re not already on the mailing list you might want to make sure you get on the list as the tickets for this upcoming webBlast, the webBlastSYD September 2011 edition is just around the corner. Sponsored by Campaign Monitor, Happener, Microsoft and Stamford Interactive the spring 2011 edition will be a very warming affair, in part from the drinks and nibbles the sponsors help with but also the fantastic atmosphere created by the attendees. J J Halans has some excellent pics from the previous webBlastSYD in June in case you want to spot yourself in the  crowd.

Everyone is talking mobile this year, and while we’ve been noticing the huge wave of mobile activity for quite some time, it seems the field is quite mature now and the depth of understanding growing. The number of people I’m talking to who are involved in mobile projects has grown rapidly this past year, and I’m sure will continue to take up more of our attention as we get to the end of the year. Interestingly, the number of mobile sites and apps attracting ire has reduced, as more people learn to understand how to construct an experience that makes sense for people using the internet on the go.

All our sponsors this month are very interested in your mobile projects, and your opinions on their mobile projects, so be sure to bring your devices and betas to the party to share and get feedback.Oh and of course the back-channel at @webblastSYD, #webBlastSYD is always open to pre-, during- and post-event discussions as well.

See you there!

Just one more thing…

Oh, and speaking of mobile, one more thing, in the inimitable fashion popularised by Mr Jobs.

As some of you may know, I’m rather keen on two wheeled travel. I decided to put my wheels on the line and join up with 99 other people and raise funds for the very worthwhile organisation, The Black Dog Institute, who are in constant need of financial support due tho the current Australian government’s completely lacklustre investment in mental health. Full details on how to donate are on my own fund-raising site

To fundraise, I’ll be donning lycra and polyester and riding from Sydney to Dubbo, over The Black Mountains.That is 420kM, over three days, over a mountain. Day one: up a mountain, day two: further up the frikkin’ mountain, then over the other side, Day three: no more MoFo mountains thank you, but 115k still to go…. The full details of the route can be found on the organiser’s site, zoo2zoo if you’re interested.

The Black Dog Institute is an educational, research, clinical and community-oriented facility offering specialist expertise in mood disorders – a range of disorders that include depression and bipolar disorder (formerly called ‘manic depression’). The Institute is attached to the Prince of Wales Hospital and affiliated with the University of New South Wales.

Therefore I’ll be asking you to consider supporting my efforts and donate generously to the ride, in order to help the 50% of Australians directly affected by depression and mental health issues.

I forgot to mention the @remixau winners from last week were: @mountainash and @benjamin_payne, who, I’m sure will tell you all about their experiences if you come along tonight.

For example, you could tweet:

I want to win the #webBlastSYD free ticket offer to June’s @remixau because it looks chock full of innovation & cutting-edge thought leaders

The best 2 tweets will be chosen by midday Wed May 25 and we will post details of the winner on our site, so you can gloat over your good fortune at webblast the following week.

Good luck and we’re all looking forward to seeing you there!

“Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.” – Victor Hugo

We’d love to see you at this Winter’s WebBlast to help us drive the cold away for the night!

It’s on again at the Pumphouse Bar, just next to the Sydney Entertainment Centre in Darling Harbour. Come along for a warming drink and chat.

A big welcome back to our most generous sponsors Campaign Monitor, Happener, Microsoft, Sassy SEO, and Stamford Interactive.

It was great to have such a big turnout at our March WebBlast, so we’re going to continue with the policy of one ticket per registration. It helps us get a more accurate idea of who’s coming, and more importantly who isn’t. Don’t worry if you register but realise you can’t make it. Let us know via email, Twitter, or telepathy and we can free more tickets.

So if you need more than one ticket, you’ll just need to tweet it or email it to your colleague so they can follow the link to the registration page. If you have any better suggestions how we manage this, we’d love to hear from you!

Special giveaway from REMIX 2011

There are 2 tickets to the upcoming and awesome REMIX conference, 2 June at the Seymore Centre, a $310 value. For a chance at this excellent opportunity, tweet #webBlastSYD to @remixau, filing up the entire tweet, that’s right, all 140 characters, with why you should have the tickets.

For example, you could tweet:

I want to win the #webBlastSYD free ticket offer to June’s @remixau because it looks chock full of innovation & cutting-edge thought leaders

The best 2 tweets will be chosen by midday Wed May 25 and we will post details of the winner on our site, so you can gloat over your good fortune at webblast the following week.

Good luck and we’re all looking forward to seeing you there!

I get as excited by online and hardware technology as the next guy. My wife cringes now when a new gadget is released onto the market, because she knows it won’t be long before I start working out ways to squeeze one into our budget. I’m a sucker for any new, over-hyped shiny techy goodness.

But I get more excited about human behaviour. Never mind the gadget, widget, web app or whatever – it’s how people end up using and innovating with it that motivates me. People have a nasty habit of using things in a way never intended by the designer.  That’s why, I think, customisable gadgets like the iPad have been so successful by allowing people to use it in whatever way they want (almost).

Sadly, online human behaviour is often reduced to zeros and ones in an Excel report. “Today, there were 324 clicks on our ads and 23% were converted into $x revenue.” Those aren’t clicks, they’re people!

Digital marketing has encouraged a tendency to view transactions, conversions and marketing as merely another technical challenge, rather than an exercise in anthropology. But the success or failure of an online marketing strategy or piece of web technology is more often contained in the anthropology and not how wonderfully clean and clever the web code is.

That’s not to say technical innovation and skill doesn’t have an impact – of course it does. But credit the user with some independence of choice as well. After all, your widget, website link or whatever didn’t control the user’s action to make them click – the choice remains theirs. And that choice is impacted by so much more than your technical trickery.

They have so many unique motivations, emotions, distractions, priorities that it’s not surprising it becomes easier to view your customer base as figures, rather than the complex messes of behaviours and conflicting motivations we really are.

The moment a business starts to view online consumers as a technical rather than a behavioural challenge, problems arise. Just look at the music industry. It doesn’t matter how they try to control the technology, they can never change an entrenched behaviour around the sharing of music that has been around since way before digital came along. Trying to fight it with more technology is just prolonging the agony instead of looking for new business models that benefit from this natural behaviour.

Ditto the news media. The New York Times is just the latest newspaper to enforce a paywall on its online readers. It didn’t work for The Times in London and is predicted to fail on the other side of the Atlantic as well.

OK, so far, so much you already know. But I point out these oft quoted examples because I get so frustrated when I see people still using web technology to lock things down, rather than open them up – web strategies used to wall people in instead of tapping into the natural flow of online behaviour.

Of course, Twitter and is one of the best examples of going with the flow of its users. Twitter was a very different beast when it first launched five years ago this week. All the things we take for granted on Twitter today – @ replies, hashtags, retweeting – were all features built into Twitter because of how natural behaviours evolved. The users were the ones to create all of those now standard Twitter protocols, to get around perceived limitations in the system and use it more effectively how they wanted.

Twitter never dictated how their service should be used. It was originally intended as a one-way microblogging service without replies, not a new form of instant messaging or a replacement for chatrooms, etc. They never said “hey guys, we built it to be used in a particular way so here are the fixed rules we will allow.” Instead, they took notice of how people had found ways around the limitations of the original platform and then developed features to enhance and formalise those behaviours.

Social media has tested the boundaries between technology and behaviour a lot in recent years and we are beginning to see how some businesses are adapting to the new world order. Group buying sites are an obvious example, as are various content sharing mechanisms.

The new buzz is around cloud computing and how this may also free people up from the walled gardens of hardware and single-point access. Yet there are still vendors trying to lock people in via contracts, plans and account management. That is not the spirit of the cloud, just as creating spambots for Twitter isn’t the spirit of social media.

How do your customers or users want to use the web – particularly your corner of it? If you can’t meet that need without somehow limiting or restricting normal behaviour, I would suggest the ingenuity of your technology won’t save you.

The people have spoken – and always will.

And there is no bigger conversation it seems than the seemingly cockroach-like IE6 hanging around like a bad smell.  Will IE9 put an end to this thorn in every web developers side?  Possibly, but not completely.  So with all the major browsers releasing their wares around the same time, we thought we’d test drive the current market leader, and see if it can claw back the market share it’s been steadily losing for quite a while now.

First up, a quick review of where we’re at for the newcomers.  Microsoft was pretty late to the whole Internet party, with Bill Gates on record saying he thought it wouldn’t amount to much.  That was until a spring break gathering for the top echelon of the company back in 1995 where he performed a complete about turn, deciding to plough all his energies into beating the then ubiquitous Netscape browser.  And oh how did he succeed.

So, through the late nineties we had the browser wars, culminating in Microsoft releasing Internet Explorer 6 in 2001.  At the time, this browser was cutting edge, and given the rapid evolution thus far, no-one expected it to be the last update for some time.  But it was.  Microsoft, by Chris Wilson’s own admission got complacent, and just like like Fat Boy slim once said “I’m #1 so why try harder”.  And there we stayed.  For five long years.

It was only the rise from the ashes of Netscape that spurred the Microsoft machine into becoming a good web citizen, and to their credit they have done a very good job under the guidance of Wilson in releasing versions 7 and 8.  They were never going to go from IE6 to Opera-like standards compliance overnight, but It’s finally got them to here – IE9.  Their first browser they can say with a straight face that is properly standards compliant.

So is it?  Well on initial inspection it seems to do a good job.  ACID3 compliance is always a good test for the purists, and comes out remarkably well  (95 / 100).  But this I think is always a bit academic, and in the real world, who needs some of the hyper-obscure DOM manipulation that means a 100% score?  What we’re after as developers is the more day to day stuff, particularly around HTML5 and CSS3, and also a very quick Javascript engine would be nice too.  So lets focus on those and leave the propeller heads to debate the academic stuff.

HTML5

One of the major arguments against us lot learning HTML5 any time soon has been Microsoft’s reticence to implement it.  Mozilla, Safari and Opera are all chomping at the bit, but they are not market leaders.  Ultimately, until IE embraces it, it’s all a bit ‘future’ for most devs.   That all changes with IE9, where support for core features such as canvas and video is included – maybe not to the level of other browsers yet in some areas, but definitely ahead of them in others –  but it’s a definite step in the right direction.  It means we can all get off our arses and learn our first new markup language for a generation.

CSS3

It’s kind of like London buses that we wait over 10 years for a new standard to emerge, and then two trundle along at once.  Entirely separate to HTML5, but potentially just as game changing is the introduction into the browser landscape of implementations of CSS3.  Again there are great frameworks out there such as Modernizr that emulate this at the moment, but there is no substitute for the real thing, and the introduction of such things as border-radius for rounded corners and  websafe fonts can only be a good thing.  At this stage they’re all using the –ms- prefix as they are not ratified standards, but it means we can use CSS3 today without fear of ‘breaking the web’ tomorrow.  It is Microsoft’s born-again commitment to standards that will make our life better in the future.

Javascript

The third big win for IE9 is the engine for running Javascript code.  Previously perceived as the ugly baby of web development, Javascript has been very  unfairly treated by the so-called ‘proper’ programmers for years, being called all sorts of nasty names like ‘fat’ and ‘slow’ and ‘a bit hard of thinking’.  But with frameworks such as jQuery, and the rise of asynchronous page refreshes known as Ajax, Javascript has become every bit as essential as the other disciplines in web development.  And in order to perform  these sometimes very advanced workflows, the processing engines needed to raise their game too.   For a long time IE pretty average in this department, but tests on IE9 show it is right in the mix now with it’s peers.  Moral of this story?  All current versions of the big browsers have the best Javascript performance.

Source: IEBlog

Other bits

One thing I don’t like is Microsoft going back to their proprietary bells and whistles.  They do less of it in IE9, but the implementations of Web Slices and Accelerators really just looked like Microsoft trying to force new technologies on the browser market.  Unsurprisingly, they’ve largely been ignored in the marketplace.  So long as they focus on collaboratively making the browser a unified place to do great work, and less about proprietary rubbish, they’ll be headed in the right direction.

Conclusion

So, did they do a good job?  Yes they did.  Is it perfect?  Far from it, but it never was going to be.  Will it continue to get better in the future?  Hopefully, but a big concern is the departure of Chris Wilson to Google, as Wilson had been there working on Microsoft browsers since the very start.  He was as much to blame as anyone for IE6’s complacence, but has also been instrumental in raising Microsoft’s game since then.  We can only hope that Microsoft never gets to the near total dominance they enjoyed with IE6, in order to keep them hungry.  And that isn’t ever likely to happen again either.

It’s too easy to bag Microsoft for their past, but IE9 ticks a lot of boxes in the ‘trying hard to play well with others’ department.  Lets hope it’s just the springboard for some more real innovation and competition in the browser space.

Well, no sooner is summer over and done with, and the nights are drawing in, it’s WebBlast time again!

It’s on at the Pumphouse in Darling Harbour, and is as free as it always has been.  Also, this time round we welcome a couple of great new sponsors – Stamford Interactive, and our main sponsor for the night – Ninefold .  It’s great to have so much love for our event out there, makes our jobs organising it so much more enjoyable.

As well as our new sponsors, we’re equally pumped to welcome back our existing sponsors Campaign Monitor, Happener, Microsoft and Sassy SEO.

Tickets will be made available here from noon Tuesday, 8 March. Register Now!

Oh and a bit more housekeeping… Unfortunately, even after our pleas to not waste tickets last time, we still saw a significant absentee rate, so this time we’re trying something different – one ticket per registration.  It helps us get a more accurate idea of who’s coming down to WebBlast,  and more importantly who isn’t. You were great at sending your apologies so we could free more tickets last time, we still would appreciate that, but we’d also like to just release the right amount, so we can continue to keep the event free.

So if you need more than one ticket, you’ll just need to tweet it or email it to your colleague so they can follow the link to the registration page.  If you have any better suggestions how we manage this, we’d love to hear from you!

We even increased capacity again up the to absolute maximum the venue will allow us, but you still snapped them up in record time.  Wow!

So, it’s even more important now that if your plans change and you can’t make it, please recycle the tickets, either by emailing us at contact@webblast.com.au, or by putting them up on twitter with the #webblastsyd hashtag.  Conversely, if you did miss out on tickets, just register for the waitlist and hopefully a recycled ticket will come your way.

This one promises to be the best one yet, and there have been some pretty good ones so far!  We’re excited, we hope you are..

See you all in a couple of weeks..

cheers

Alan, Joe and Caryn