Typography for the World Wide Web

Another day in sunny Brighton

6th September, 2008 | conferences, dconstruct, microformats

Going down to Brighton for whatever reason always seems to be fun, whether it’s for a conference like d.construct, or a day out on the beach. There’s something special about walking down the hill from the station towards the sea. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for walking back up the hill in the morning with a raging hangover, but that’s the price you pay I guess. Having said that, I managed to avoid the morning stagger up the hill this year, leaving as I did fairly early from the after party, and heading back up to London the same evening.

Speakers were good. Highlights included the two Matts of Dopplr, Aleks Krotoski on the games industry, and Steven Johnson who gave a slightly different take on the classic John Snow Broad Street Pump map. Weirdly, I probably came away from Tantek Çelik’s talk about portable social networks with the most food for thought. Weirdly, as there wasn’t that much new in it, but it just got me thinking about profile pages for social network sites, and being in control of your own data. I might have more to say about this at a later date. Also, I’ll never get tired of listing to Tantek advocate Microformats.

Jeremy very nearly wrecked the day with a talk that was all too close to slipping up it’s own arse for the first ten minutes. I was genuinely worried for Richard and Andy that he was going to undermine the whole day with what might have come across to those that don't know him as an ego-inflating, and slightly premadonnaish performance. As someone said to me afterwards, I think he thought he was doing a TED Talk. Fortunately, he did manage to bring it round to something that made some sense in the end, and I must admit that I quite enjoyed the change of pace, even if my brain wasn’t moving quite fast enough by the late afternoon to quite pick up the points on relativity and the Copenhagen interpretation (seriously!). I look forward to reading some of the other fallout from this talk.