The other finalists in the category were Alison Green of WebWeaver for The Gathering Archives, and Jared Gulian for Moon over Martinborough. Sorry guys!

What makes the ONYAs so special is that the judging panel was a team of top web professionals – Alex Wright (NY Times), Brian Fling (pinch/zoom), Bek Hodgson (Etsy), Thomas Fuchs and Amy Hoy (slash7), Russ Weakley (Max Design), Rachel McAlpine (Contented), Donna Spencer (Maadmob) and Jason Ryan (State Services Commission) – woah!

A little bit of history…

This website first went public in June 1995 as the result of a major project for my degree in Broadcasting and Communications.

I chose ‘the web’ – over a project grounded in radio, television or film – as I saw the amazing potential it had in store as a broadcasting (or what I then called ‘narrowcasting’) medium.

The paper was entitled “Zef’s Exploration into the World Wide Web’ and is an interesting insight to the dawn of the modern internet we all know well today.

I then wrote:

“…I’ve come to believe that it (the internet) could be regarded as a life-force all of its own. Not of the ‘artificial intelligence’ sort that clogs science fiction novels, but an organic intelligence, sourced purely from ‘in the flesh’ internet creators, users and players themselves – human-kind”.

Looking back, I guess I was hinting at ‘Social Media’?

So, the birth of this website was a music e-zine (entitled ‘Global Groove’) and it has essentially remained as an online magazine ever since. In its heyday this site was drawing so much overseas traffic it would frequently overload the bandwidth entering Dunedin and would be unceremoniously cut-off!

Had I been more entrepreneurial I would have realised this was actually an opportunity, not a hindrance.

Oh well.

Related blog: When the Web Was Young

And now…

My website, in its current form, is about sharing my ideas, thoughts and experiences as a web industry professional.

This partially came about through my frustration of the ‘wall of silence’ which, sadly, used to surround many of my peers and the web industry as a whole in the early 2000s.

In my experience, knowledge-sharing back then was uncommon. In fact, withholding knowledge was actually used by some as some sort of power-trip.

So when I branched into User Experience I was, in most cases, forced to look overseas for inspiration…

I owe a lot to Jared Spool’s UIE newsletter (back then it was sent to me, on paper!), Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, Alan Cooper’s book ‘About Face’, and Lou Rosenfeld & Peter Morville for their book ‘Information Architecture for the World Wide Web‘.

As you know, I’m not the type to sit on that exciting pool of knowledge. I believe that by sharing what I know and what I’m working on, it helps to make my local web industry better and stronger.

Today, it’s really great to see that the User Experience community in this country is one of relative openness and healthy discussion. I’ve learnt a lot from my colleagues in recent years – including those I’ve trained and mentored, who, in turn, have inspired and taught me as well.

Without openness much of the content on my blog would not be possible, so I would like to acknowledge the following people who have helped make this website an ONYAs success…

Colin Phillips and Emma Martin: Some of the people in the early days who did share their knowledge and ideas!

Mason Pratt, Provoke Solutions: My employer from 2004 – 2008. He allowed me to write about client work and share insights to the Provoke User Experience team.

Emily Loughnan, Clicksuite: My current employer, who shares my belief that sharing ideas is a good thing!

The User Experience community: You should know who you are!

My 1001 regular subscribers: I wish you would comment more but I know you’re out there! The statistics don’t lie!

What’s in store…

Life is a bit crazy for me right now, but when I have time again I’ve been thinking of a project I’d love your help with.

It’ll involve understanding our own industry better – ever tried creating personas for the (types of) people you work with every day?

That’s a big clue.

Stay posted…

A big hit of Webstock was internet phenomenon and chief chef of Earth Sandwiches, Ze Frank.

Ze Frank is an online performance artist, composer, humorist and public speaker based in New York. He rose to internet fame ever since his “How to Dance Properly” viral video (born as a party invite for 17 friends) – hit the Web in 2001.

Here’s how Ze opened his talk recently at the Webstock conference in Wellington (a realtime artwork is created in response to the audience reaction):

Video by Nigel Parker

It appears that Ze lived up to the legend and made quite an impression in New Zealand. The Suite Spot captured the following responses from the Webstock audience:

Sarah: “Zefrank broke my headache into lots of little pieces at #webstock09. And made me cry a little bit. Both ways.”

Alana: “Would love to see inside Ze Frank’s head, his ideas are brilliant!”

Ludwig: “Zefrank is giving me goosebumps!!”

Joanna: “Is there anyone in this room who _wouldn’t_ have sex with zefrank right now?”

Never heard of Ze Frank? Neither had I until it dawned on me that I’d been playing with his internet creations on-and-off throughout the years…

Here are some of his greatest hits:

Earth Sandwich

In 2006, Ze challenged his viewers to create an “Earth Sandwich.” The goal was to place two pieces of bread on the ground at points directly opposite each other on the globe, creating a giant sandwich between the two pieces of bread. The task was completed by teams in Spain and New Zealand.

Voice Draw

A drawing tool which responds to sound and volume. Here’s a performance artist using Ze’s software to create a great piece of theatre.

Try Voice Draw yourself.

The Scribbler

The Scribbler turns any doodle into a generative masterpiece.

Try The Scribbler yourself.

YOUNGME – NOWME

My favourite is Youngme/Nowme, a recent meme started by Ze Frank, where people recreated childhood photos of themselves.

View the full gallery of Youngme/Nowme submissions

The SUITE SPOT (

The feeds might look simple enough on screen but deciding what appears on the timeline, where and when were all challenges faced during the design and development.

The result is a single timeline for the Webstock community to explore feeds, but content can actually appear on several different spots within the timeline.

This is because we considered the Webstock community and where they might look for content.

Here’s a few scenarios for our hypothetical user, Charlie Bird, who was, hypothetically, out dancing last night with Webstock celebrity Jane McGonigal:

“I just contributed a feed…”

Charlie Bird is a prolific Twitter and has just submitted his feed to the SUITE SPOT. He also could have sent a SMS message or uploaded some photos (of his dancing with Jane) to Flickr. We expected that Charlie Bird would expect to see his content appear right away on the SUITE SPOT timeline. We allowed this so his feed will appear within a few minutes.

“I was out dancing with Jane last night…”

But what if Charlie’s Flickr photos were taken the previous evening? Should they also appear in the timeline at the time the photos were actually taken? We thought so. So a photo taken at, say 11pm, on Tuesday night (but uploaded to Flickr 9am the next morning) will appear in both timestamps on the timeline. This assumes Charlie Bird has a modern digital camera – these add a ‘time-taken’ timestamp with every photo.

“I just want to see all stuff related to Jane…”

We can do that! This works with content which has been tagged and has relevance to Webstock or one of the speakers. So Charlie Bird’s photo of him dancing with Jane might be tagged [Webstock09, JaneMcGonigal, CharlieBird].

We created an administration system to decide which tags people are likely to use when tagging content.  To broaden the information displayed about each speaker we included tags for their company, projects and interests. We also prioritised tags so some have more weight. For example, a photo tagged [Webstock09] AND [JaneMcGonigal] has a higher chance of being displayed on the SUITE SPOT than a photo only tagged [JaneMcGonigal].

Pictured: These tags relate to the speaker and their presentation timeslot.

Because Jane McGonigal is presenting at around 9am on Thursday morning we can then display all content tagged [JaneMcGonigal]. If the content is also tagged [webstock09] then we make this a higher priority and bump-off less relevant feeds.

The result

The feeds on display at any one time are a mixture of realtime feeds (Twitter, TXT messages and direct messages) and subject-related content (Flickr and blog posts).

This ensures that the SUITE SPOT always displays feeds relevant to what people are saying “right now” as well who’s presenting “right now”.