What did we do before APIs, jQuery, XML, application frameworks, and open source blogging tools? Well. The truth is we did quite a lot. But, even as our wrenches and pipes have matured and even transformed, it’s more worthwhile than ever to ask ourselves what we’re producing with all of that massive horsepower.
In his Friday afternoon keynote on “Bold Ideas and Insane Possibilities,” Merlin Mann will explore the question of how our creative output has kept up with our technological innovation and whether we’re driving a legitimate revolution in how the world sees, thinks and collaborates, or simply devising a more sophisticated method for telling millions of people about what we had for breakfast.
It’s time for bold ideas and the realization of insane possibilities. That’s what the future of the Web is all about.
WebVisions is excited to announce that Luke Williams of frog design will deliver our opening keynote address on “Thinking the Unthinkable: How To Spark Disruptive Innovation.” Luke is a leading consultant, speaker, and educator in the area of innovation strategy and disruptive thinking. For more than a decade, he has worked internationally with industry leaders like Microsoft, American Express, Sony, Virgin, Disney, and Hewlett-Packard, to develop new products, services, brands, and business models.
Williams is a Fellow at frog design—one of the most influential innovation companies in the world—and an Adjunct Professor of innovation at NYU Stern School of Business. He speaks throughout the international community, and his opinions have been featured in BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of the forthcoming book Disrupt! A Step-by-Step Guide to Transforming Your Business (FT Press, 2010).
Erin Malone is the founder of Tangible UX and has over 20 years of experience leading design teams and developing social experiences for the web. Prior to Tangible, she spent four years at Yahoo! where she founded the Yahoo! Pattern Library, and we’re excited that Erin will present a workshop on “Designing Social Interfaces” with her cohort, Christian Crumlish.
In their three-hour workshop, they’ll explore the landscape of social user experience design patterns and anti-patterns, focusing on the contexts in which specific interface designs work well and the unintended consequences that make some UI ideas seem like a good idea until they turn around and bite you in your app.
So, in brief: take their workshop, look smart and do great work.
The WebVisions team has been working mighty hard to assemble a great collection of half-day and full-day workshops with the likes of Erin Malone and Christian Crumlish, Christopher Schmitt and Kimberly Blessing, Kris Krug, David McFarland and more. And new for 2010, the workshops are available as package deals, all at exceptional prices.
Can you believe it’s December already? The program committee has started reviewing speaker submissions for WebVisions 2010 but you still have a few more weeks to send us your idea. Our emphasis this year is on Design, Technology, Business Strategy, and Innovation. This is a time for pragmatism as well as vision, so the presentation ideas that stand out include best practices and practical ideas that attendees can immediately integrate into their work. We’re also looking for big ideas that will guide the Web as we move rapidly into the future.
We’re pretty excited about new ideas in Web design, augmented reality, cloud computing, new ideas and practices in Web development and application development. Remember, this is not a social media conference. If you have a social media idea to submit, it had better tie directly to the four areas of emphasis above. WebVisions is a Web conference by Web people for Web people.
We are also accepting workshop proposals. These are half-day teaching opportunities in addition to the regular conference program. If you have an individual session, panel or workshop idea, submit it here and we will get back to you. The deadline is December 31st. We look forward to reviewing all of the good ideas out there and will bring the best of the best to Portland in May 2010.
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In the Web 2.0 world, market capital flows from having high social capital. Without Whuffie you lose your connections and any recommendation you make will be seen as spam, met with negative reactions and a loss of social capital. Tara Hunt, author of her new book The Whuffie Factor, will dig into some Whuffie in her Friday morning keynote on “Makin’ Whuffie: Why You Should Raise Social Capital in Online Communities”
Tara is no stranger to the magic of social media — she co-founded Citizen Agency in 2006 with the mission of teaching her clients how to work more effectively with the communities they serve, how to embrace and adjust to all of the changes in culture businesses are facing, and has more recently moved onto Intuit to lead the marketing efforts for their partner platform.
In his session on “The Future of Work,” Raymond King of AboutUs.org discusses how the art of working with total strangers requires new rules of engagement. First, Assume Good Faith—planning for constructive collaboration is a better strategy than building walls to keep the bad guys out. Then work transparently and, better still, use your real name. Do work that matters and find others who wish to do the same. Be bold and remember, that change is cheap. Using various examples from the wiki world, Raymond will examine changes in the way we work today and make some predictions for the future.
Vanessa Fox, the creator of Google’s Webmaster Central, rolls up her sleeves and digs into the crunchy “Future of Organic Search” in her Thursday, May 21 session. She’ll illustrate that being found in search engines is quickly moving from being a bonus acquisition channel to being a primary one. If you aren’t found in search engines, then you don’t exist for many potential customers. Learn about where search is going next: blended search results, personalized search, enhanced search results, browse within search, and searcher input are just the beginning. Get the scoop on where search is heading and ensure you’re not left behind.
Author and CSS expert Christopher Schmitt explores the decision process and steps involved in converting a finished graphic design into a sensible, valid XHTML+CSS Web document in his informative, half-hour workshop on “From PSD to XHTML+CSS 4TW!.” Christopher will also unlock the mysteries of creating beautiful web forms in his session “Designing Our Way Through Web Forms” on Thurs., May 21st.
