Webvisions 08

Webvisions is officially done and over with. It was an awesome time. I think I will have quite a lot to say, but I’m going to attempt to break things up into smaller, segmented posts. We’ll see how that goes—my conference writeups are always sorely lacking and out-of-date.

From my standpoint as a librarian, Webvisions was everything I wanted Online Northwest to be…but without all the pink sweaters and discussion of cats. Also missing is a critical discussion of aboutness, classification, and human language. That is, Webvisions is an awesome place to geek out about design, but as a practicing librarian I have to take all of that design and interface geekery and apply it to the library context.

In general it was a supremely refreshing experience to immerse myself into design, interface, and interaction but I did find myself wishing for less theory and more practical application. I know, those of you who know me are finding it difficult to reconcile that statement with the theory monkey you’ve come to love and tolerate. I think my friends would tell you that I am pretty intolerable after several days of immersive geekery—I become hypercritical of the discrete elements in the world and how they fail to seamlessly flow together.

Rather than attempt to apply a structure to the posts, I’ll just do them chronologically. I’ll leave it to you to decide how the session information interrelates.

Day 1 at Webvisions

Day 2 at Webvisions

  • Data portability, privacy and identity: Welcome to the Open Web (Scott Kveton)
  • The language of interaction (Bill Rouchey)
  • The Web is dead (Roger Black)
  • Website optimization in seven easy steps (Kim Blessing)