As is now becoming a tradition (can twice be a tradition?) I took the A List Apart survey for people who make websites. I see Eric Meyer tweeted that 11,000 people had filled it in just as I was filling it in. Not a bad effort for a couple of days 
We are now three months out from Perth’s first ever Edge of the Web Conference, so what better time is there is announce the speaker program and workshops! There is come awesome topics there, and I’m really excited about the whole thing! Get the skinny here.
There is also now only a week and a half before entries for the WA Web Awards close, so if you are thinking of entering, hurry the hell up!
Did I mention I’m excited?
Just a quick public service announcment - if you have been waiting to purchase your tickets to the Edge of the Web and WA Web Awards (November 6-7 at University Club in Crawley) then wait no longer! You can now head over and register online.
Ticket prices are a reasonable:
Non Member: $495 (Early bird before Sept 1: $450)
Member: $450 (Early bird before Sept 1: $395)
Student: $299
Workshops (to be announced soon):
Non Member: $225
Member: $200
WA Web Awards dinner:
Non Member: $145
Member: $125
You really should be and register now. Really.
I just gave this presentation to the PRIA Young Guns - a group for younf marketing and PR people, along with Justin Davies and Ronnie Duncan (from Meerkats - sorry, haven’t got a link).
As you all well know, I’m very much from the technical side of the web, and have been known to be a little critical of some of the more, let’s say, marketing focused people, so the focus of my talk was to show that social networking isn’t all about selling, it’s about interaction. At the end of the day, online social networks should be an extension (not a replacement) for real-life networks and should be treated as such. In real life, if you only call on friends when you want a favour, you aren’t going to have any friends left - and the same applied to online social networks.
I got asked a number of times “How many hours do you spend on social networks?”. It really is the wrong type of question to be asking, because I hang put on Twitter and the port 80 forums (Yes - forums are social networks too) because I have a genuine interest is what is going on with in these groups. It’s not about ROIs or won leads, it’s about conversation. If work comes out of that (and it does) - then fine.
So how was this relevant to a bunch of marketing kids? Well, the point I was trying to make was that interaction creates an association with your and your product, which encourages online “word of mouth” marketing. It’s less in your face and more targeting that whacking whopping great ads all over numerous sites. It’s probably a little harder to quantify, but it is still a solid methodology (says the man with the Computer Science degree).
It really enjoyed listening to Justin and Ronnie. Justin has a marketing degree, but is currently working heavily in the technical side of things, which acted as a great conduit between my talk and Ronnie’s. He made some really interesting points about the changing face of PR (So what would have happened if Apache Gas had a blog?). Ronnie comes from the old school of marketing and advertising (that is the creative, clever side), and although he admitted himself that he had a long way to go to fully grasp what can be done with Web 2.0, his attitude to what can be done was pretty refreshing.
A couple of days ago, Joiku released the premium edition of their WiFi access software for Sybian phones: JoikuSpot. I’ve blogged about JoikuSpot before, and now for 15€ you can get the premium edition, which NATs mail, Skype, SSH, HTTPS and number of other protocols. They also seemed to have fixed the issue which stopped the EeePC using DHCP. This is really awesome - I can finally leave that USB cable at home. Let’s see your beloved iPhone do that!