So the crew here at Blue Flavor have returned to Seattle from the two day wild ride in Portland that is WebVisions 2006. The event was a huge success we had rooms that were packed to the gills and plenty of after hours parties to choose from each night.
Wednesday night I arrived in Portland via train and was wisked away by the conference director, Brad Smith. After dropping off my bags at the hotel I headed down to Henry’s on Burnside (in the location of the former Henry Weinhard’s brewery) for some drinks with Jared Spool, Kevin Korpi, Keith Robinson, Brian Oberkirch, Kit Seeborg, Thomas Vander Wal, and Garrett Dimon. We talked about everything from the size of our camera screens to from to the longevity of advertising as we know it. But it wasn’t all geek talk, we talked a lot about snowboarding and global issues as well. A great time was had by all.
Thursday was a early day for me, I had to wake up and head down to the convention center to prepare for the flocks of attendees that would be arriving shortly there after. I did manage to attend a few sessions on Thursday but it was such a busy day that I wasn’t able to see Brian Fling‘s Designing for Mobile workshop. Brian will be posting the slides shortly for everyone to enjoy. I also missed out on Jonathan Snook’s Rapid DOM/AJAX Development session, yes I got to give the intro but there was no room to sit or stand when I returned with my camera to take a few snaps.
I did manage to find a place to sit for Bill DeRouchey‘s The History of the Button session which was very interesting, he even had props to boot! I also missed out on Dave Johnson‘s session on The AJAX Experience because, you guessed it, totally full room… I couldn’t even get a good camera shot of Dave. After the presentations were wrapped up several of us headed to Kell’s for the Digital Web Magazine dinner.
I finally got to meet Rael Dornfest for the first time (Rael living in Portland for several years when I did but I was never able to meet the guy, I thought he was a myth for a while there) and several other people from O’Reilly.. not to mention several other geeks. From dinner we went next door into the bar for a while then down to Rose and Raindrop for even more drinking. All said and done I stumbled back to my hotel room at I-have-no-idea-what-hour and passed out.
Friday went a little bit better for me. I got to see Mark Wyner‘s presentation on Building Better HTML Emails, and Garrett Dimon’s excellent presentation on Improving Front-End Architecture. Tristan Louis did a great talk on Thinking Globally and Thomas Vander Wal did a talk on Tagging in the Real web World. I got see some bits a pieces of their presentations.
The keynotes really blew me away this year. First up was Luke William‘s keynote The Naked Interface. Hillman Curtis followed up luke with another packed room for his keynote on Short Films for the web. To end the conference Jared Spool graced the stage to give his keynote on The Dawning of the Age of Experience which made me really re-think how I see user experience on some levels.
From there almost all of the speakers and several of the attendees headed to the Greek Cusina for the wrap party. I won’t try to explain in words what went down that night you will just have to find the photos and video on Flickr and Your Tube to see for yourself. Most of them should be tagged with webvisions06, webvisions2006, or just webvisions.
This year was a very memorable experience for me and I hope it was for those who attended and spoke at it. I hope to see you there next year!
Wish we could have been officially introduced, Nick. It was weird to see you everywhere, even eat dinner with you and still not get any time to talk ;) I let Keith know that I was going to be in Seattle next month and would love to see what you guys are up to. Hopefully you will be around.
In lieu of a personal thank you, here is a digital one. Thanks for everything you did to make my first Webvisions a great one. I honestly can’t wait for next year.
Again, hopefully we’ll get a chance to meet next month.