With the financial world in extreme crisis and various government running around in what can only be described as blind panic, one would could be forgiven for joining the mass panic. Granted that when the world economy does slide into recession that it is going to be tough generally.
However have been through three down turns I can give a few pointers that maybe helpful in these times of crisis. Particularly for people in Australia and New Zealand:
During the two conferences I attended recently, Web Directions South and OZ-IA there was a distinct theme in some the sessions on opening up the corporate knowledge based.
You know the score, you have bound to have heard this before. Don’t lock the corporate information up, allow those statistics and figures, you are already presenting to the public to be readily accessed via some type of API. Allow people to remix, mashup and represent the information. The concept goes that it’s better to allow this via a controlled API then have people scrape and represent or misrepresent the information. Hence you maintain control of your information using the API than the traditional scrape method.
For the last few months I have noted on average across my clients sites that IE6 has now slipped to below 40%. Okay this is just a magical number. But for me it has great significance. This is the tipping point for an aging browser on the decline. At this point it goes from the pixel perfect section on the browser compliance matrix to the section major resemblance. This is the grey zone between perfection and the old fall back graceful degradation.
For another year the web industry from across Australia came together at the Sydney Convention Centre for Web Directions South 2008. Expectations where high could John and Maxine pull together another outstanding conference in the epic Web Directions series.
After a successful AWIA Port80 on the evening before where Clever Starfish, radharc, Free Wireless Australia, and Saasu sponsored drinks, It was in a bleary eye state that we descended upon the Sydney Convention Centre. This year I had a mind to attend topics that I didn’t know about, and stretch myself.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
