Wow what an awesome conference! Russ Weakley delivered a very funny and informative presentation on letting go and allowing the users to control their own experience. He related it back to working with one of the Australian museums which wanted to structure their information by department - but this of course isn't how people will look for the information when using the site. So he was like "Well what if we tagged pages and then people could search for them and related pages by tags". And then bringing this to the next level by allowing users to comment and add tags themselves.

Heather Hesketh talked about Progressive Development - Gradual small changes, rather than large redesigns, and scheduled for say quarterly or monthly. This is really interesting because the general impression I've had from clients is that they want the project to be just finished, and we have been trying to encourage them to treat their site almost like a living thing, it needs attention regularly.

Ben Goodger did a talk on Firefox, the history and also showed a demo of Firefox 2, which looks great. I love one of the new features - if it, or the computer, crashes it reopens with all the tabs that you had open restored. There have been times when I have had 15 tabs open, and lost them all because something crashed and I hadn't got round to reading or bookmarking them yet!

Tony Chor from Microsoft did a good presentation of IE7, which is of course a huge improvement on IE6. I don't think the crowd were really impressed because I'd say most, if not all, Firefox users and IE7 doesn't really have anything that Firefox doesn't already. But I think it's awesome because most internet users only have and only know about IE, so it will be really great for them, and for our jobs!

Then there were drinks and nibbles, following by dinner, followed by Odessa playing and dancing. There were some gorgeous kids there who loved the music and were just dancing by themselves!!

More photos are of course on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/webstock/