I had the plea­sure of meet­ing Mike Brown at Web Direc­tions South the other week. Mike is part of the team that puts on Web­Stock, the New Zealand web con­fer­ence. I’ve never been able to attend a Web­Stock event, although I’ve heard many rave reviews.

Mike has just writ­ten a post about some changes in the Web­Stock camp: essen­tially, Mike and Natasha Hall are “going pro” — they’ve quit their day jobs to con­cen­trate on run­ning Web­Stock full time. That’s really excit­ing for them, excit­ing for the peo­ple who get to attend, and excit­ing for the peo­ple who will be given an oppor­tu­nity to travel to New Zealand to speak (I hear it’s lovely).

Mostly how­ever, I think this devel­op­ment is excit­ing because it means that the “best prac­tises” web indus­try is flour­ish­ing in a way we would never have imag­ined back in the early days of web stan­dards. There’s enough space on the Australian/trans-Tasman cal­en­dar, and an ever-expanding audi­ence of inter­ested patrons, for Web Direc­tions and its new spin-offs Web Direc­tions User Expe­ri­ence and Web Direc­tions Gov­ern­ment, Web­Stock, the Local Gov­ern­ment Web Net­work con­fer­ence, and the newest kid on the block, Perth’s own Edge of the Web, of which I am on the organ­is­ing comit­tee. That’s a lot of edu­catin’ going on there, and that’s just the gen­eral web audi­ence events. You could also count con­fer­ences cen­tered around Flash, Flex and Cold­Fu­sion like WebDU and it’s New Zealand sis­ter con­fer­ence, Web on the Piste.

It looks good world­wide too – Web Direc­tions North has been held twice now in Canada with a third event planned for 2009, and Web Direc­tions East will be hap­pen­ing in Japan at the same time as Edge of the Web.

Edge of the Web’s story is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from that of Web­Stock in that our con­fer­ence is being put on as a part­ner­ship between AWIA (the Aus­tralian Web Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion) and our fab­u­lous event man­age­ment com­pany, Red Hori­zon Events. So while it’s the energy and enthu­si­asm of vol­un­teers that is plan­ning the for­mat and con­tent of the event, sea­soned event pro­fes­sion­als are han­dling the logis­tics and mak­ing sure every­thing runs smoothly. I think that’s an ideal situation.

So far it’s turn­ing out well – per­haps ask me again on Novem­ber 8, when it’s all over.

At an rate, con­grat­u­la­tions to Mike, Natasha and every­one else who is involved in Web­Stock, I hope to sam­ple your fine con­fer­ence expe­ri­ence myself one day soon and I look for­ward to meet­ing you again at The Edge.