I have just gotten back from a jam packed weekend of presentations and drinking in Sydney at the annual Oz-IA conference. Information Architecture is a relatively new industry, however there was a good turn out with people not only coming from Sydney, but also Canberra, Perth, London, New York, New Zealand, and even Canada with about 120 attendees in total.

There isn’t much of a web development industry in Townsville and even less of a community for information architecture specialists, so it was really good to get out and meet people with the same interests.

One of the key presentations that got everyone talking was Rashmi Sinha from SlideShare who talked about ten things that they learned by using agile design methods when developing SlideShare. Information Architecture usually requires a lot of research, planning and testing, however they took an entirely different approach and it appears to have worked well for them. I hadn’t previously heard of SlideShare, but put simply, they are an online sharing site for slideshow presentations. People can upload their PowerPoint presentations which can then be tagged and shared easily through the online medium.
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James Archer CEO of Forty Media talked at SXSW07 about his tips on issues affecting web professionals. Here are my notes on the key topics he discussed. You can download the full podcast @ http://2007.sxsw.com/blogs/podcasts.php/2007/06/

1. Limit your services
2. Find a role model
3. Don’t be flaky to your clients (stay dedicated, and follow through)
4. Document your success
“the hard part is growing your business and making other people understand what is good about your business.”
5. Don’t trust your own brain – write things down or you’ll forget
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If you haven’t heard of the IT Crowd it is a British sitcom which is absolutely hilarious. If you have a bit of technical background you will probably find it more entertaining then the standard viewer, however there is always something that everyone will get a laugh from. [view the full post…]

Last week I hit 400 bookmarks in my Del.icio.us account. For anyone who doesn’t know, Del.icio.us is an online bookmark managing site. I know that sounds really boring and you are thinking why would I possibly need that? But it has absolutely changed the way I work and I would have to say that it is one of the best and most useful web application I have come across so far. [view the full post…]

Over the last couple of weeks I have been looking into some of the upcoming conferences on web development, design, usability, information architecture, and well basically anything to do with online technology as part of my quest to learn as much as I can so that I can make the online world we live in […]