I’ve been so busy reading other people’s accounts of WE05 that I’ve only started writing up my own now. I’m going to start with one of the speakers who really got me enthused to get out there and start implementing the ideas he was talking about – Tantek Çelik.
Appropriate actually, because I wore my new Technorati t-shirt to work today. Picture it now:
Coworker: cool t-shirt, where’d you get it?
Me (casually): Oh, we were at the pub discussing American politics on Friday and Tantek gave it to me.
Heh heh. Name dropping aside, Tantek and his girlfriend DJ Amber are really nice people and very interesting to chat with, as several of us Perthites found out. The question time at the end of Tantek’s first day session was cut short by an (extensively-blogged) evacuation, just before I was certain someone was going to ask his opinion on the XHTML mimetype serving issue. The second day breakfast with Tantek was interesting for me, as one of the few non-Apple toting WE05 attendees (I love my TabletPC, as documented elsewhere) – it was refreshing to hear a balanced view on both Apple and Microsoft as companies. But Tantek’s session on the second day on microformats was really motivating and one of my WE05 highlights – I was sitting next to Adrian and Miles from Port80 and we could almost see the wheels turning in each other’s heads during demonstrations on the hCalendar, hContact and hReview microformats. Look for them on the Port80 site sometime soon!
So anyway, download the podcasts and be prepared to be inspired. You won’t be disappointed.