Last night Webstock had a mini conference, a 5-9pm thing with three speakers and networking drinks between. It was really fun! It was great to catch up with CJ, Natcol people and meet new people like Dale. And the speakers were all really great!

First up was Natasha Hall who talked about some usability examples on Trade Me. She had a huge line-up of their top traders who they had visited to better understand how they use Trade Me and manage their business selling on there. I was really amazed at just how much some people earn on there, the average gross income of her examples was like $700k!

Russell Brown then stepped through his recent trip to California, and ohhhh I wanna live in San Fran now!! LOL I'm so easily impressed, but it was a very exciting talk because it seems that there are just so many possibilities and initiatives there that are made possible by funds that are so much harder to get here in NZ.

And last, but no way near least, was Nat Torkinton who talked about 7 points of Web 2.0. Over the last few months I have been getting throughly sick to death of this buzz-word, especially when it is mis-used by marketers who have no idea what they are talking about. But Nat's talk was really great because he sought to clarify "Web 2.0", with real emphasis on the sharing of data and cross application of it.

It was a thoroughly good night! The next large Webstock conference isn't going to be until 2008, but there will be many smaller events such as this through 2007 - a great idea and I'm going to look forward to each one!! :D