I would love someone forever if they bought me this! So cute, so awesome!

My photo “Carpeted Commons” won the Creative Commons Swag Photo Contest for 2007, and here was my prize: 100 postcards with my photo on them! w00t!

Turns out Google Maps is now higher resolution than smaps or ZoomIn. You can get down to the level where cars are blobs of pixels. Also, Google Maps has more up to date photography — you can see the work on the Inner City Bypass (same location on ZoomIn, smaps).

To be honest, I’m glad that we’ve finally got some decent competition in New Zealand’s online maps — Wises was sucking ass ever since I saw the original ‘ajax map’ maps.search.ch from Switzerland — long before Google Maps was around.

Thanks to my workmate Klaus for forwarding this one on

After more legendary presentations from Molly, Eric and Derek, I attended the Ajax session by Tim Lucas. I found myself wanting a bit more, but it was still VERY good.

Lunch came around, so I caught a cab to Found Agency. I got to meet Zak, the guy I talked to on the phone just over a week ago. He showed me around his office in Bondi Junction, and gave me a very in-depth insight into the world of SEO and Pay-Per-Click marketing. Basically, there is OMG HUGE money to be made — seeing some of the Google Adsense windows brought it to life. He also described something called A-B Testing: serving up two identical ads going to slightly different convert pages, observing the difference that the slight difference made, and deciding to keep that change. Zak said that click through conversion can be increased phenomenally just by iterating through this every 1000 clickthroughs.

I also learnt that there are three types of “SEO” people: Super Affiliates (those who partner with a company who wants to sell something and enter into a huge referral rate in the hundreds of dollars per customer), Pay-Per-Click marketeers (those who manage their adwords and search terms they appear on) and Hybrid marketeers (those who do both).

I also learnt that Google doesn’t really like what some Super Affiliates are doing sometimes, and that the Super Affiliates are listening to what Google has to say, including the rel="nofollow" microformat. It becomes obvious to me that the ones comment-spamming blogs don’t really know what they are doing; shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to Google.

I spent so long talking to Zak that I was late for the 2:15pm sessions. I really wanted to see Cameron Adams’ Javascript and the DOM session too. Oh well, there’s always the podcasts.

Thank goodness I made it back in time to catch Tantek’s Microformats session — fascinating stuff. I guess I already knew about XFN and rel=”nofollow” but I didn’t know that these were called microformats. Yay for learning!

Then Jeffrey Veen got up and did yet another PHENOMENAL session giving us all the boost we needed to go back to our jobs and do this stuff we’ve been learning about. I’m totally pumped. I’m gonna go out back and kick that tree.

For some reason, because I was that-guy-who-did-the-blog-donation-box-to-get-to-WE05, I was given a collectable WE05 belt pouch for a digital camera or iPod or the like. Sweet! Thanks people!

The WE05 afterparty was at The Pumphouse in Darling Harbour. Putting my Flickrazzi hat on, I caught some hilarious moments of the presenters on NVRAM and have put them up on Flickr for all to enjoy, namely Doug Bowman dancing, Eric, John Allsopp and Mark Harris doing the WWW, Derek Featherstone getting drawn into a pint, Tantek searching for Wifi at a dance club, and Eric giving Doug in his patented “CSS Brace”

Tantek tells me that I can probably go find many of the places where scenes from The Matrix were filmed here in Sydney; something I was hoping to do, but didn’t realise actually how easy it will be — 10 minutes of Google Searching apparently… hmm…

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here in Sydney. Will I be back for WE06? Heck yes!

Oh, and don’t forget to keep the middle of May 2006 free in your calendars — a web conference in New Zealand is being planned, and you will highly desire coming along… but more on that later…

I haven’t gone far from Central Station in Sydney, but the fast food in Australia is of par standard. It’s nothing special, but it’s certainly edible. The food at the conference is great.

I uploaded the best photos I had from the conference onto Flickr last night via Telstra wifi from the comfort of my 6-share. My favorite has got to be Tantek and Eric Meyer staring each other down

There was an emergency evacuation yesterday. Apparently it’s the first almost-live podcast recording of a building evacuation! One of the guys from the conference was telling me he got a hilarious pic of Eric Meyer crouching outside the venue with his laptop out on his knees trying to get on Wifi! [photo]– can’t wait to see that on Flickr! Check out all the we05 photos on Flickr

All the talks yesterday were awesome. I especially liked Jeffrey Veen’s presentation on usability, Kelly Goto’s presentation on workflow in the agency, and Douglas Bowman’s visionary presentation reminding us that it’s only been 10 years and our art will most definetely look completly different in 10 years.

I’m really looking forward to the AJAX session, as well as Cameron Adams’ Javascript & DOM session. Tantek’s microformats session should be very interesting too.

I’m off to meet Found Agency today too. Probably around lunch time. We’ll see.

Took some photos of the Cable Car and some things in the Botanic Garden near the top. The Cable Car driver was nice enough to let me take a photo of the control panel So many buttons!

Thanks to Chris who gave me the vouchers I used to buy this t-shirt

I found this on Manners Mall. It’s part of a display called Sugarcube, which consists of a wooden cube with sugar sachets stapled to it. Each sugar sachet was drawn on by someone in a Cuba St cafe. The cube is locked in a transparent perspex display, protected from the elements.

I saw this photo, immediately thought of my friend Matt, snapped it, uploaded it to Flickr, then sent the url to Tuatha who confirmed that it was indeed doodled by Matt because Tuatha was there when Matt drew it.

Update: Taniwha took more photos of Sugarcube

The Red Panda Encounter at Wellington Zoo cost us NZD$60 each, and was worth every cent We spent what seemed like ages in the enclosure with the red pandas, along with the really helpful keeper who was telling us nearly everything there is to know about these cute critters. They’re an endangered species, and there is an international breeding program going on. What was really interesting was that the breeding program is administrated, and the decisions for which animals get to breed together is influenced heavily by DNA sampling and trying to keep genetic variance in the population… wow…

It was quite strange, as the first red panda that came up to us would come and eat some food, then climb back into the tree and then climb back down and eat some more. And it was eating the food right out of our hands!

Wellington Zoo has (I believe) five Red Pandas, all of which are extremely cute and cuddly. That said, we didn’t get to cuddle them Actually, towards the end, Matthew asked if we could pet them, and the keeper said sure, if they’ll let you. I tried, but they kinda shy away a little. They are quite timid and secretive creatures. Apparently they don’t have much of a personality, when compared to other mammals like cats, dogs or chimps.

Anyway, a stackload of photos were taken. Check them out, and feel free to leave comments

• GodCast.org — Creative Commons licenced podcasts with christian content, especially The Living Word and Rev Tim’s Podcast
• Flickr — Finding cool photos that get your creative juices flowing has never been so easy, and never so fun!
• Picasa — Makes performing simple photo improvements fast and easy… if only it would integrate with Flickr…
• Walking around Wellington — especially to places I’ve never walked, such as the Interisland Ferry Terminal. I’m doing the 10,000 step program, so reaching 10,000 steps before I go to bed is a real motivator… and taking the new camera makes it fun too … walking to the ferry terminal that day got me up above 20,000 steps for the first time!
• Getting Things Done — or more specifically the methodology outlined in the book Getting Things Done (slashdot review)… being organised and completing tasks is a motivator!

I scored much less swag. I got t-shirts: “Joystick Junkie”, “Esc”, and “You are Dumb 2.0″. So good!

Photos on [ webfroot gallery | flickr ]

I’m still enjoying my time at Dev-Zone. Christmas looks like it’s going to be fun. I’m going to Otaki for a few days, then heading up to the Bay for a day or two, then come back on the 28th Dec with Sheree. Keep an eye on the moblog Oh, it has an RSS 2.0 feed too…