maupuia calling

Ah, winning. Such an ephemeral concept. So eagerly sought after, so strived for, and yet in the end, so transient. And what does it mean to win? It’s such a relative concept, measured in so many ways. One might, for example, win on some spurious measure, some meaningless numerical counting, and yet lose in other, more important ways.

But I digress.

I’m here to pay tribute to the moral superiority, the intellectual acuity and the all-round web prowess of Philip Fierlinger, Brenda Leeuwenberg and Che Tibby. And the texting ability of Che’s partner - but, again, I digress. In a rollicking debate, the team of Philip, Brenda and Che did extremely well to negate the motion that “Web 2.0 is all fizz and no substance” against the superior charisma, humour and good looks of myself, Sandy Mamoli and Mark Cubey.

What can I say. Web 2.0 was the winner on the day and all credit to the opposing side. And special mention to the even-handed moderation of Rowan. I loved the evolution from “web debate” through “debatr” to “LOLdebate”.

It was a wonderful Webstock Mini. Opening speaker Leigh Blackall introduced us to a word of Second Life beyond that of Orientation island. I can see the appeal of hanging out online with friends, sharing an online space and interacting in real time. There’s potential to do things and develop relationships in different ways than other media. And yet, it seems a tad clunky and to come with a lengthy learning curve. Who has the time? Well, Leigh obviously, in between watching for his bosses to come see what he’s doing! :) I do take his point though, that this is all so very early days. We’re taking such baby steps, in Second life and on the internet, comparable with those early days of cinema. Ways of being are changing with online. Who knows, quite, how we’ll be relating to each other and the world in 10 or 20 years.

Robert O’Callahan is a really interesting guy. He did his PhD at Carnegie-Mellon university, worked in research at IBM, and has now come back to New Zealand inspired by the mission of the Mozilla Foundation. He wants to have more New Zealanders, in New Zealand, paid to be working on developing Firefox. How cool is that! I love talking to geeks (meant in the best sense of the word), and continually find it humbling that someone as untechy as me gets the chance so often.

There seems to be a buzz that’s developing more and more about these events. Seeing so many people from the industry there - private and public sectors, designers, developers, writers - all talking, drinking, networking, making connections and friends makes what we’re trying to do with Webstock worthwhile. The passion we have for Webstock gets fed and nourished.

It was also very cool to see Peter Griffin from the New Zealand Herald write 1, 2, 3 articles about Webstock Mini. Compare and contrast with the Wellington media who seem oblivious to what’s happening on their doorstep. Something that was apparent when we ran Webstock last year and hasn’t improved since.

We’re looking at running one or two more Minis this year. It’ll be fun!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 9:08 pm and is filed under webstock, shout outs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.