A feast for thought

In years past we've been fortunate to have had Jeffrey Veen, Molly Holzchlag, Jeff Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Carrie Bickner, Vincent Flanders, and Bebo White among many others discuss how to's and the big ideas that spark great disucussions and new goals.... In Doug's place we had a free-form moderated panel that included David Sklar, Bebo White, Michael Angeles, and Allan Marcus.

This week I'm having a wonderful time at a web conference that I helped organize at the Lab. This is an annual conference for Laboratory web professionals to hear about the latest in web standards, technologies, trends, information architecture, and more. In years past we've been fortunate to have had Jeffrey Veen, Molly Hoschlag, Jeff Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Carrie Bickner, Vincent Flanders, and Bebo White among many others discuss how to's and the big ideas that spark great discussions and new goals. This year's conference is no exception.

I'll report more after tomorrow's presentations. After today's discussions, my mind is stimulated and refreshed but my body's a bit drained.

4/29/2005 - Okay, I made it and here's the rest of the conference report :-)

Day one was a bit nerve racking due to some juggling of the schedule, but things worked out nicely. Doug Bowman was forced to cancel his appearance at the last minute due to illness. In Doug's place we had a free-form moderated panel that included David Sklar, Bebo White, Michael Angeles, and Allan Marcus. Topics spanned from Ajax (I need David to submit the travel site he presented) to Web Engineering, to del.icio.us (which I'm finally using, thanks Michael), to personal privacy and the web. It was a wonderful exchange of ideas.

After the web app hacking demo and David Sklar's PHP security demonstration I shall begin to use PEAR Quickform religiously.

Michael Angeles presented the use of blogs and social bookmarking at Lucent Technology's Bell Labs. There are many similarities in the evolution of Bell Labs' and LANL's intranets. I look forward to corresponding with Michael to exchange ideas and experience with blogging at our respective workplaces.

Steve Arnold's Google search presentation was chock full of great information about Google's underlying infrastructure, functionality, and business model. Karen Cangialosi and Gary Schroeder presented interesting views of portals, UCSD's which is driven by a large-scale commercial web portal and Brookhaven's which is a mix of HTML and a collection of smaller DB-driven sections.

The final presentation was a mind expanding and "big idea" talk from Bebo. Following up on his presentation from last year, Bebo updated the state of the semantic web address. (Note to Bebo: I tagged the hell out of this blog entry) :)