Webstock Mini
Last week I went to the Webstock mini event. It was a great evening, catching up with old friends, meeting new friends, and being inspired by some excellent presentations.
Natasha Hall gave a fun presentation on her work at Trade Me. Her preso focused on high volume sellers. As a confessed fan girl of Kelly Goto, she followed the “deep hanging out” approach and turned up some key insights on user behavior. A lot of the issues she discovered revolved around people being unaware of existing features of the site. After making some seemingly minor changes, such as re-positioning a link on a page, suddenly usage rates for these features picked up (export to excel, print address labels, etc). I wish there was more detail on the outcome: how much did usage pick up? how did that effect turnover? I’m assuming that Trade Me goes through the effort not just to show a few customers some love, but really to optimise and increase transactions. I wanted to know more about that side of the equation.
Russell Brown followed, sharing his experiences at Foo Camp and some deep hanging out he did in the Bay Area. It was nice hearing Russell’s perspective on being immersed in the Bay Area digital bubble. As an ex-pat from San Francisco, I sometimes miss being surrounded by so many inspiring people doing amazing work. It’s great to see so much of that energy being ignited in NZ and Wellington in particular. The Webstock events are just another example of the great things happening here in NZ. I’m thrilled that Russell and Nat are putting on a Kiwi Foo Camp.
Nat Torkington finished the evening, sharing his insights into Web 2.0. I feel like I’m pretty clued up on Web 2.0. Yet, Nat threaded the streams together really nicely, weaving it all together in a coherent and insightful overview. He also provided some stats that I hadn’t come across. For instance, Ebay earns 60% of its revenues through their API. Wow!
Kudos to the Webstock team for another great event. Unfortunately, they announced there won’t be another big Webstock event until 2008. Fortunately, they’re likely to put on some more of these mini events in 2007. I’m all for the mini events. It’s great to see what locals are up to.
They also mentioned that they’re considering putting on a Webstock awards event. That could be good, but I’m a bit dubious about awards. At least, it will shine a better light on quality web design and dev than things like the deeply flawed BeST awards, or the TUANZ awards which are slightly better.
I’ve always thought that the Forthemasses folks should organise a conference. I really can’t understand why they haven’t.
I am really looking forward to the upcoming Design Camp next May. I’ve been to two and really enjoyed them. They always have several really inspiring presentations from a diverse range of experts, heaps of smart and fun people, and great parties. Being around the students is also refreshing and inspiring. The student presentations are often some of the best. I highly recommend it.
Maybe I’ll see you there. Please let me know if you’re going to either Kiwi Foo Camp or Design Camp.
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Making it more for the masses - Menace | March 4, 2007 @ 3:38 pm
[...] The events feature stemmed out of a few different things going on out in the ether. For the Masses has always supported local design events, but after a post on insight topic back in December about web events in January/February, I thought we should be doing something better. It wasn’t until I read the bottom of Philips’ review of December’s WebStock Mini and Tim invited me to Facebook that it all click together. It’s a little Web 2.0, but as James kinda denies it, the site has been about blogging and social networking since it’s inception. [...]