As you’ve probably heard by now, Clearleft is organising another d.Construct conference this year, set for Friday 8th September. Like last year we’re keeping it nice and cheap – the idea is that even freelancers can afford the £75 entrance fee. But because it’s cheap, you’ll need to be quick – last year sold out in half an hour!. Tickets go on sale on Tuesday 18th at 10am (British Summer Time) and to help you get in quick, we’ve put together a funky little countdown on the registration page. We’re hoping plenty of folk can stay the weekend in Brighton (which is why we put the conference on a Friday) but if you do, beware that another conference is on shortly afterwards, so hotel rooms may get booked up pretty quickly.
d.Construct is essentially about building the new wave of web applications – Web 2.0, Ajax, tagging, user-generated content (authentic media) and all that. You can now see a run-down of the schedule, and on it you may spot the main focus for this year is APIs. For me this is the biggest thing about Web 2.0: websites sharing information and content by design. We have Jeff Barr from Amazon; Simon Willison and Paul Hammond from Yahoo!; and our own Jeremy Keith talking about different aspects of APIs – innovation, business implications, inspiration, technical challenges and group mashups are all covered.
Also on stage, and back by popular demand, we have Aral Balkan who will once again be opening our eyes to the – frankly astonishing – world of Open Source Flash, Flash Platform and Flex 2. We can’t talk about Flash without mentioning accessibility, and that’s exactly what Derek Featherstone will be doing, by way of giving us strategies for making Web 2.0 design patterns more accessible. And we can’t talk about Web 2.0 with mentioning tags. Thomas Vander Wal will be explaining how we can make tagging systems live up to the hype (incidentally, if you’re blogging about d.Construct 2006 please you tag your blog posts with dconstruct06 for easy Technorati collation). Last but not least, we’re dead chuffed to have Google’s Jeff Veen wrap up the conference with thoughts and solutions on designing the complete user experience – anyone who saw his talk at @media will understand our excitement about having Jeff with us in Brighton.
As with last year, we’ll be podcasting d.Construct. But for this year we’ve started podcasting early. Jeremy has done a fanastic job of splicing together a review of last year’s conference. He’s also been chatting to attendees and speakers for this year’s conference, something which Garageband makes fantastically easy to podcast as it automatically detects an iChat and puts each particant on an individual channel so that filters and levels and be applied to each. Pretty cool stuff, I thought. Anyhow, you can subscribe to the feed directly or go the podcast page for more info, iTunes and Odeo links etc.
Update. Feel free to advertise your presence at d.Construct on Upcoming. Another Update. d.Construct 2006 is now sold out.
Ulco wrote:
Jeff Veen was very impressieve at @media but I am really looking forward to Simon and Paul discussing the new (or upcoming) Yahoo API’s.