Webstock 2009: Peace, love and a eulogy for Web 2.0
February 23, 2009
It opened with a call for website creators to help save the world, and closed with a call for Web 2.0 to grow up already… In the course of just two days, speakers at New Zealand’s Webstock conference evoked the perils of ecological disaster, suggested that computer games might be able save the world and performed a eulogy for Web 2.0. A heady, visionary blend of themes, attitudes and exhortations – this was Webstock 2009.
Heading to NZ for Webstock 2009
February 16, 2009
I’m heading to Wellington, New Zealand on Wednesday to attend Webstock 2009. It will be my first Webstock and indeed my first trip to the land of the hobbits.
Check out the program here – I’m particularly keen to hear from Ben Goodger (who was project lead for Mozilla’s Firefox browser before he moved to Google where he is the User Interface Tech Lead for the Chrome browser project), Bruce Sterling and Annalee Newitz (longtime tech writer and sci fi blogger at io9) . Actually, the list of speakers is pretty damn impressive, rather than namecheck a bunch of people you can browse the list yourself.
I’m covering the conf for ZDNet and I’m also filming an interview with Annalee which will be published on the Webstock site. Fun! Exciting! Hopefully I’ll also have time to do some sightseeing in gorgeous NZ. 
NEWS09 Presentation: How to get your student publication online
February 7, 2009
Welcome to students visiting from today’s NEWS09 conference. Please feel free to ask a question or leave a comment. Keep me posted if you decide to try out any of the ideas or tools that were mentioned today – I would love to hear how you get on.
As promised, here’s a copy of the presentation I gave today on How to get your student publication online.
Upcoming talk on Citizen Journalism
December 8, 2008
I’m pleased to confirm that I’m speaking on Citizen Journalism at the “Free as in Freedom” miniconf at Linux.conf.au in Hobart in January. My talk is called “It’s all fun and games until someone wants to sue you: Reporting in the age of citizen journalism.” My talk’s slated for 1.45pm – further details can be found on my “Upcoming Appearances” page.
This event looks like it’s shaping up to be a good one – I’m happy to be sharing the stage with some great speakers talking about their work in ensuring open access to information, including the people behind OpenAustralia.org.
Linux.conf.au 2009 – Call for papers
July 7, 2008
Linux.conf.au is heading down south to Tasmania in 2009, so if you fancy a trip down south and you have some technical knowledge you’d like to share – put your name forward as a speaker! Ben Powell from the “March South” organising team emailed me to let me know that the Call for Papers is now on. Check out the details at the LCA page. You can also suggest a “mini-conf” topic.
I tried to get some more tidbits of news out of him, but could only get this: “We have two international speakers confirmed so far and I’m currently chasing the final one who is likely to be local.” So it looks like they’re continuing the tradition of having 2 overseas keynotes and 1 local keynote. That’s good to hear.
OSCON 2008 – call for participation
January 20, 2008
OSCON – the O’Reilly Open Source Convention is being held in Portland Oregon this September – and this year will be celebrating not only 10 years of OSCON, but also ten years of “the Open Source Initiative, of Mozilla, and of the term “Open Source”, blogs Allison Randall at O’Reilly Radar.
OSCON will be co-located with the Ubuntu Live conference, if you need another reason to be there.
Submissions for OSCON presentations close on February 4th, and they’re especially keen to see proposals for papers on state-of-the-art open source technology, which also look ahead to the future of open source.