What a cool night, one of my fav Webstock Minis for sure. I found Leigh’s presentation on Second Life fascinating. I hadn’t seen/used Second Life before so it was an education to learn about the interface, greifers, teleporting, camp fires, and all the other second life wackiness.
Leigh struck me as a very smart guy who thinks freshly and imaginatively about everything.
One example in his presentation was to not only see the huge potential that Second Life has, particularly in relation to the education sector, but his observations about one of the forward thinking educational institutions that already utilise Second Life demonstrated this.
I loved the hilarious analogy he made between early cinema and Second Life: a tobacco ad from circa 1897 which was filmed as though it was a stage production (pre the era of edits, cuts and all the usual film industry post-production goodness that we’re accustomed to); and a Second Life learning environment that resembled a lecture theatre. A case of new technology (film), but still using the paradigm of the old technology (stage). Second Life is at a similar stage. Anyhoo, he has much better write-up on his site.
It was great to meet Leigh and Sunshine; they’re both absolutely lovely people and dog lovers too. Charlie Bird took a particular liking to Sunshine!
Robert O’Callahan is another lovely, mega intelligent guy. He is doing NZ proud with his efforts for Mozilla in Auckland.
The highlights of his talk included the demo of some of Firefox 3’s new features that included:
- support for Ogg Theora video (absolutely brilliant news for Linux users if it gains better support)
- the SVG support
and
- the re-iteration of the mission of the Mozilla Foundation. It’s about keeping the web open for everyone and stopping a monopoly from controlling it. Put another way, “taking back the web”. It’s for all of us, not just those with the money or means to control it.
The Grand Finale was the debate. Rowan made a great moderator, and the old classroom debating format was used. All the participants were superb, and there were plenty of “icanhascheezburger” references to keep me amused. However, Mike “1.0” Brown stole the show with a fantastic argument – “Web 2.0” is nothing more than a conspiracy by the letter “r” [although by definition conspiracy involves more than one party, so surely the number “2” is also involved? Or is it “0”, that until recently indivisible enigma….] Judging by the number of bloggers mentioning Mike’s performance (too many to link to), everyone loves a good conspiracy theory. Great fun, and the video will be available soon on the Webstock site.
After that, it was on to Sweet Mothers Kitchen for gumbo and hot sauce. That seems to be becoming a Webstock Mini tradition, and with such tasty gumbo and boom boom chicken long may it endure.
There are heaps of blog posts about it, Peter Griffin (of the NZ Herald, not the cartoon series) has a nice summary here.
A huge thanks to Richard Naylor and Jeremy Naylor for recording, hosting the recordings, the sound, providing the internet connection, and the all the other technical support.
Lastly, big ups to Tash for doing the bulk of the organisation on this one… 🙂