Sally Tudhope works at Land Information New Zealand and recently bought a Webstock compendium and Webstock notebook.

This is her desk and cubicle before the purchase.

This is Sally’s desk now. It wouldn’t have happened without Webstock!

If you’ve got a Webstock story and photos of Webstock products doing their job, let us know!

Past recordings from Webstock 08 and Webstock 06 are also available. There’s 72 recordings now available from some of the most respected, innovative and exciting people in our industry: Kathy Sierra, Doug Bowman, Kelly Goto, Tom Coates, Peter Morville, Jason Santa Maria, Simon Willison, Liz Danzico, Ze Frank, Bruce Sterling and more.

We’ve been asked a few times why we make the recordings so widely available - surely it must impact on numbers attending Webstock? Or why they’re available free, instead of something we could charge for.

It comes down to this, what Tash has called “good web citizenship”.

Most of what we’ve learned about the web, (and I suspect pretty much everyone else except, maybe, some of the people mentioned above) has been the result of others sharing with us. Initially through mailing lists and bulletin boards, then through blogs and articles and more recently through video and screencasts. This culture of openness, of sharing and of feeling like we’re all learning as we go has been a huge factor in driving innovation and growth on the web. It’s humbling for us that so many people we respect and admire have made what they do so freely available for others.

We hope that by making these recordings available we’re repaying that debt as well as we can.

And a huge thank you to all of the speakers who’ve given us permission to do so.

The Webstock A5 compendium really is a sign that you’ve made it:

And the Webstock stickers just look good in any situation:

Pamela Fox - Client Killed the Server Star: The new client/server model

Derek Featherstone - Accessibility Beyond Compliance

Annalee Newitz - Your Business Plan Is Science Fiction – And That’s a Good Thing

Joshua Porter - Designing Sign Up Screens & Flows

Toby Segaran - Why Semantics?

Enjoy! The remaining conference recordings will be posted next week.

Garr is on a crusade to make presentations more interesting, useful and relevant. His blog is widely-read and his Presentation Zen book was ranked #3 on Amazon’s Top-10 Business books of 2008.

Those who attended Garr’s workshops here last year uniformly raved about the quality of the teaching and the lessons and tips they learned. These workshops are a chance to learn from one of the world’s best teachers on presentation.

Why should you come?

It’s simple. You’ll leave feeling more confident and assured about the presentation and talks you’ll need to give in the future. And presentation matters more than ever in today’s world. The ability to present well dramatically increases your chances of success and of conveying the information you want to get across. It’s a skill that can be learned, and these workshops will shortcut the time you require to become a good presenter.

The workshop will cover all aspects of presentations - from preparation to design to delivery. They are for everyone who needs to talk in front of an audience, big or small.

And there’s also an optional lunch where you can eat and hang out with Garr and the other participants in a relaxed setting.

You can register here for the workshop.

Here’s the new ones:

Cameron Adams - Programmers are the new creatives

Heather Champ - Shepherding Passionate Communities

Ze Frank - The explicit

Adrian Holovaty - A mashup case study: EveryBlock.com

David Recordon - Open, social web

Enjoy! And the next group of recordings will be available next week.

Three years ago to the day, our first conference, Webstock 06 had just finished. Just under one year ago, Tash and I left our full-time jobs to work on Webstock. We’re not doing this with a multi-million dollar exit-strategy in mind; we’re not following a business plan and we’ve long given up hopes of world domination! But along with our partners, Deb and Ben, we’re having an absolute blast trying to do something good in this industry we so believe in. Good in the sense of making a difference (hopefully), and good in the sense of quality. We want to provide events and experiences that really matter to people and we want to show that this can be done in New Zealand as well as anywhere in the world.

This relaunched site, along with the ONYA web awards and the revitalised FullCodePress competition, is a lot of what we’ve been working on for the past couple of months. We hope you enjoy it.

There’s now a shop to buy the oh-so-collectible Webstock merchandise (dog not included). Recordings from our events are back online and over the course of the next few weeks we’ll be adding those from Webstock 09. And we’ve even embraced this new Web 20 thing, with embedded videos, user-generated tags and commenting. W00t!

We’ll also be launching the Webstock Master Class series of workshops very soon with the wonderful Garr Reynolds coming back in early July.

And don’t forget to mark February 15-19 in your diaries for Webstock 2010!

The Workshops

Designing and Sustaining Creative Communities
Online community management 101
Day One Mastering CSS & HTML
Day Two Agile Goodness
Day Three Accessibility and Ajax

Day one

Webstock day one
An Australian perspective
Nix online legalese, says Flickr
Ze Frank: Hot or Not?
Web/community
Games are the food of life
Shine a light on me

Day two

When Sterling attacks
How to Improve the Web
Medieval gobbledegook, modern oxymorons

Webstock overviews

Week of geek
So that was Webstock
What I learnt
On Webstock and life
Peace, love and a eulogy for Web 2.0
Webstock 2009 - A Look Back In Anger
I went to Webstock and I all got was a brown t-shirt
What we learned at Webstock
Why Webstock rocks
Tools for the Online Community Circle
Webstock 2009 - Roger Hudson
Webstock 2009 - Xero
This is why Webstock rocks
I love you Webstock 09
My take on Webstock 09
thoughts on webstock
Webstock 09
So that was Webstock 2009

Live blogging of Webstock

Ben Kepes
Kalena Jordan
Kalena at SiteProNews

Multimedia

IdealogTV
Webstock video - Roger Hudson

Colin Jackson - live from Webstock [.mp3]

Bruce Sterling - deserving of it’s own links section!

What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09 - verbatim transcript
Javascript, the world’s most misunderstood programming language - it doesn’t matter that Javacript has nothing to do with Sun or Java!
Bruce Sterling at Webstock
It’s Turtles All the Way Down
Why Does Bruce Sterling Hate Web 2.0?
Sterling rant goes viral

In 2009 Click Suite is a major sponsor of Webstock. As part of our sponsorship they are providing an experimental interactive experience for the Webstock community.

Entitled, the SUITE SPOT, it takes live data feeds from blogs, Twitter, Flickr and SMS messages (TXT 4848) then ‘repurposes’ all of this into an exploratory scene which grows and reacts to the incoming content.

You can experience the SUITE SPOT…

WITH YOUR VOICE
Explore what people are saying about Webstock. Add your own voice with your blog, Twitters, Flickr set or TXT a message to 4848 (TXT messages cost 20 cents).
WHERE: On the web: http://suitespot.clicksuite.co.nz

WITH YOUR HANDS
Try the gestural user interface and swim through a sea of Webstock feeds!
WHERE: In the lounge next to the Peoples Coffee Espresso.

WITH YOUR EYES
See what people are saying right now about Webstock.
WHERE: Occasionally on the big screen in the Town Hall auditorium.
The SUITE SPOT is available on the web [http://suitespot.clicksuite.co.nz]. Go visit there now to input your own feeds, send a message or simply explore.

To help with the probability of your content appearing in the right place at the right time use the official Webstock tag (#webstock09). Also tag your Flickr photos (of speakers) with their full name. The application will search the web for appropriately tagged content and interpret this content into graphical streams. The content can also be filtered via a timeline of the event or by speaker.

This system has been developed in-house by Click Suite and was created using emerging technologies which enable more natural ways to interact with computers and data.

Visit the Suite Spot Website.

Webstock: *experience is a fairly new company. Tell us about how you got started and what your focus is?

John: Well, like all good Wellington companies we started over a coffee - in our case at the Chocolate Fish Cafe! From our design agency / corporate backgrounds we saw the gap for a specialist online experience company – a company with a brand and communications focus, and the ability to be the neutral bridge between customers, business, and the mysteries of web development.

After that first coffee the brand, name and business plan fell into place and *experience was born in mid-2006. We quickly picked up some great clients – large corporates, government agencies and smaller organisations – and we haven’t stopped since.

So now we’re living the dream – our clients tell us they work with us because we keep them real. We challenge them, we advocate for their customers, we champion their business targets, we translate design and technology to create great online experiences and we have fun! Our team is awesome – they’re experienced, dedicated, and passionate; we continue to work with some of New Zealand’s finest technology houses, and our clients all know how to work our coffee machine – we’re loving it.

Webstock: What’s the importance of someone’s “experience” when they interact with a website? Does it really matter? Aren’t they just trying to do something?

John: Exactly! For us, the “experience is everything”… so no matter how you get people to your website, how flash your tv ad is, how flash your flash is, or how big your logo is – if people can’t achieve what they want on your site then… FAIL! That experience becomes your brand, your reputation, your credibility… and it’ll become the dinner story, the blog post, the tweet. So it’s vital that companies get the experience right – and it’s our job to help them do just that.

Webstock: With regard to the “global economic situation” what changes are you expecting to the web and online industry here in the next couple of years?

John: The current global economic situation just means we’ve all got to get smarter. We need to work even harder to get our clients to maximise the new, smarter, leaner, more agile technologies and get their websites working harder – and get them out there in the smartest way possible! (and we’re hoping the term ‘enterprise solution’ will disappear from the online vocabulary too…)

Webstock: *experience is associated with Meg Pickard at Webstock. Why is Meg a good fit with *experience?

John: Miriame and I come from a brand and communications background and (as the rest of our team will tell you!) we’re news junkies too… as such we’ve always admired the Guardian as a publication – it’s always been a leader –in its ‘old media’ form – and now especially in its new media evolution.

So when we saw that Meg was coming out for Webstock we jumped at the chance to be involved! And we love that she describes herself as a ‘Creative geek’ – as slightly geeky creatives, we should be a good match.

Webstock: You’ve both been to every Webstock to date. What brings you back and has attracted you as a sponsor this time?

John: We still remember that day (in our previous lives) when you came to us with a twinkle in your eye and this great idea for a thing called “Webstock”… back then we were rapt to help craft the Webstock brand strategy, and this year we were really proud to be able to step up and be sponsors of what is now an awesome, world renowned event.

Why do we keep coming back? We love the Webstock buzz – the world class speakers (yay Meg), the chance to catch up with our mates (that includes all our clients!), to see everyone in our industry, and to watch all the newbies getting involved – magic!

Webstock: Thanks John. We think it’s magic too!