Web conference: connection.07

Me, Erik Johansson, Joel Larsson, Sara Silfverberg and Line Everlund Matulac from Crew 12 attended the connection.07 conference in Gothenburg, Sweden today. The title was “a conference about the new web”, which was exactly what it was about. All 5 speakers were actually really good, and had a lot of interesting thoughts to share with the audience. The “new” in the title was about the web as a platform, mobile web, usability & accessibility, web standards, user generated content and in general the wisdom of the crowd. The information in itself maybe wasn’t totally new to me as i’ve done this web thing for some time now, but it’s always nice to listen to lectures about the area. Also the mobile platform is pretty new to me, and it would be exciting to experiment with it’s possibilities. The photos here were taken by Jens Wedin.

In addition to the other four excellent lectures it was really nice listening to Roger Johansson, a person who’s blog i’ve been reading for quite a while. Just to see his stubborness (one might call it passion) with the usability & accessibility + the standards issue (all of these of course are more or less related) was something. I can say that I totally agree with him here; i mean, what would happen if the people who are building a bridge didn’t either know how, or simply didn’t care, to add adequate support structures. Exactly. Or, to be more on the subject, maybe a library should only allow people in who are not wearing glasses, or more specifically just not allow them to wear their glasses, the aid they have to help with their disability. Yep.

Alright, the examples may be a bit but as Roger put it “why do it wrong when you can do it right”.

Unfortunately the major part of the web is still in the bad old days, with bad design (talking about application/code and structure, not so much graphical), and pretty much total ignorance for the disabled, not to even mention the cross-browser problem. Roger’s on a mission to improve that, which i think is really great. I’m sure you’ve read an article or two at his blog but if you haven’t i encourage you to do so: www.456bereastreet.com.

A flickr group for connection.07 has been set up and a couple images have appeared there already. Go check out the photos.

All in all the inspiration is just flowing and i can’t wait to get back to work, to get my hands dirty. Thanks to everybody who was there.