On Thursday and Friday last week I attended Web Directions South 2008, my first web only conference in a while. Overall it was a good event, but like most conferences there were some up & downs. Probably the biggest two downs were the opening Key Note and the lack of coffee on arrival on Friday morning. The biggest ups were Mark Pesce’s closing Key Note and David Peterson’s Semantic web for distributed social networks presentation, followed closely by August de los Reyes from Microsoft.

So did I get an ROI for my $1,500 investment (conference fees, airfare and miscellaneous expenses)?

Yes, in several areas a few of them are:

• I got to meet a large number of people face to face for the first time after communicating online with them for so long.
• I meet a large number of new people, I tried to average 5-10 new people per day.
• Mark Pesce’s talk, as always, was inspiring.
• David Peterson renewed my hope that FOAF and the Semantic will infact become a reality.
• Laurel Papworth reinforced that yes social media can make money.
• Surface computing is cool!
• Data visualisation done well is also cool!
• There is lots of cool tech stuff going on in Melbourne, just not sure why I had to go to Sydney to find it.
• I learnt a fair bit on presentaion style, what works and what really doesn’t.
• Connections with several people that might turn into paying business, which is great.
• Finally there are a lot of books I need to read.