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The challenge of listening in the car is the difficulty (and danger) of jotting down notes when Eureka! moments happen. I’ve been listening to the WE05 podcasts in my car on the way to and from work. I often listen to talk radio in the car, and this is my favorite place to listen to people talking. There were multiple Eureka! moments and several near accidents.

A couple of the recordings are poor quality and are difficult to glean anything from. One in particular, SVG - the power and the passion, had less than 10 minutes of the presentation captured…and it’s over 5 minutes into it before any real content starts to happen. There are also a few instances in several of the recordings where the microphone seems to have stopped working. Overall though, it was moment after moment of motivation and ideas.

My favorite presentations were Microformats: Evolving the Web by Tantek Çelik and Zooming Out from the Trenches by Douglas Bowman. Both of these were inspiring looks at the future of the web. Also delivered was a healthy dose of responsibility for the future of the web. Part of Douglas’ presentation briefly entertained a scenario where something besides HTML 2.0 and CSS 3 comes along and revolutionizes our world, making the web as we know it obsolete.

But if we have learned anything in the past decade, it is the plausibility of the impossible.

Kevin Kelly

We don’t know what the future holds; we can only do the best with what we have and learn to change as things evolve…and perhaps one of us will be the one to introduce the next revolution. Tantek’s methods for organizing data using microformats are thought provoking and probably the future of the internet. I will have a lot of fun implementing microformats in my future projects.

Also of note was Eric Meyer’s presentation, Rapid Design Prototyping With Standards. He walks through the process of developing a website layout and getting approval from decision makers while making adjustments on the fly. Using HTML to handle content and CSS to handle presentation allows you make adjustments right in front of the decision makers. This speeds up the development process and shortens the endless parade of meetings. I already knew this, but it was fun to listen to Eric actually use this process as the framework of his presentation.

I love the existence of these conferences. The virtual relationships kept alive by blogging, IMing and email develop voices and faces. Australia is pretty far from where I live so it will probably be a while before I can attend one of the numerous gatherings that happen on that continent. For now I’m content with the WE05 podcasts and the knowledge that I will be at SXSW 2006 in Austin! This will be my first time attending such a conference and I am very excited!