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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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 […]

Don’t get me wrong I actually like Google Adwords. But there is a time and place for them. Here is a good example of how NOT to integrate google AdWords into your website that I came across while looking for AJAX tutorials today.