Webstock, a conference for Web professionals, is happening in Wellington New Zealand this week. As usual it’s a classy lineup of speakers and a number of international webheads will be jetting in for the event. They include science fiction author Bruce Sterling, Flickr’s Heather Champ, Social Web designer Joshua Porter, Dopplr’s Matt Biddulph, Institute for the Future’s Jane McGonigal, Six Apart’s David Recordon, The Guardian’s Meg Pickard, NZ Foo Camp’s Nat Torkington, Yahoo’s Tom Coates, online performance artist Ze Frank, and many more.
Webstock focuses mostly on web design topics, but in past years we’ve seen many great discussions on a variety of Internet issues. In 2006 the heads of Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer presented updates about their competing products. And a highlight for me last year was Tom Coates’ talk on the Web of Data.
As a resident of Wellington, I don’t have far to go to attend Webstock. Some of the sessions I’m looking forward to checking out include David Recordon on the ‘Open Social Web’, Fiona Romeo on ‘Astrotagging bots and citizen scientists’ (got to attend that for the title alone!), Heather Champ on ‘Shepherding Passionate Communities’, and Google Chrome impresario Ben Goodger on ‘A retrospective of ballet classics’ (witty titles galore in Webstock this year).
Also who can resist Bruce Sterling’s talk entitled ‘The Short but Glorious Life of Web 2.0, And What Comes Afterward’ (!)
If you’re local and want to attend, you can still pick up a ticket. It runs from 19-20 February, with workshops happening earlier in the week. If you can’t attend, stay tuned for coverage on ReadWriteWeb later this week.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)