By Jade Tang

This year's Webstock in Wellington was... amazing! Covering everything from Design, development, mobile, usability, content, community, open data, innovation, there was an over-abundance of knowledge, insights, inspiration that could be applied to both your professional and personal life.

Here are some of my highlights from the conference days:

By Jade Tang

This year's Webstock in Wellington was... amazing! Covering everything from Design, development, mobile, usability, content, community, open data, innovation, there was an over-abundance of knowledge, insights, inspiration that could be applied to both your professional and personal life.

Here are some of my highlights from the conference days:

The very first Webstock was held in 2006 and I was lucky enough to attend my very first Webstock conference this year on the behalf of The Big Idea.

Webstock has always been renown for their high calibre of speakers, this year the line up of international speakers were better than ever!

Khoi Vinh, the design director of the NYTimes.com unfortunately couldn't make it in the end and at the very last minute 'with the magic powers of Webstock' they managed to fly in Scott Thomas, the design director of the revolutionary Obama campaign. In my opinion there was no way better way to kick off Webstock than with one of my favourite design heroes.

The speakers were truly all amazing in their own way, but coming from a Graphic Design background the stand outs for me were:

- Regine DeBatty, who answered a QnA on The Big Idea.

- Shelley Bernstein, who lead the community management Workshop I attended, which resulted in some very valid some key points.

- Daniel Burka, who had the most beautifully designed slides of Webstock hands down, great content too!

- Jeff Veen, who I had the pleasure of seeing speak again, first time was at An Event Apart in Chicago 2008.

- Kevin Rose, who is the Founder of Digg and has no shortage of fangirls/fanboys or, entrepreneurial skills for that matter.

- And Rives, who was one speaker you just *had* to be there for to understand the power of his well crafted poems/performance/presentation, which the audience at the edge of their seats at the end of what was an utterly tiring/inspiring Day#01 of Webstock.

There was an interesting mix of people/professionals who attended; quite a few designers, a significant number of developers, but most were actually in the 'other' category, from account managers, business development, venture capitalists, media and avid web consumers.

Which is very much the beauty of this web conference too, that, and it attracts everyone and anyone who cares anything about where the world is going on-line.

With inspiration/information overload, some notable/tweetable quotes that came out of the conference were:

"No matter how complex or disorganised you think you are, understand that you can achieve great things when you have great people"- Scott Thomas

"Family is at the core of community, so in order to build strong communities we need to look for new ways to develop strong family bonds..." - Brian Fling

"It's not the *data* that makes the people important, but the *people* that makes the data important"- Adam Greenfield

"The real world is clambering to crawl into cyber space. Open the door"- Mark Pesce

But, I think Jeff Veen summed up the whole conference with this: "I <3 WEB"

There was a plethora of live coverage from the conference too! Some would say you didn't even need to go to the conference because it was so well talked about on-line, particularly #webstock on twitter, but I guess that's the power of the web for you.

And just when you thought it couldn't get any better, New Zealand's first Web Awards - the ONYAs was a sensational way to cap off what was already truly an awe-inspiring conference. The finale for the ONYAs exceeded all expectations (seems to be the general running theme for Webstock) that many said it was worth going to, just to see this.

Thank you to Mike Brown, Natasha Hall and the amazing Webstock team of volunteers for making this all possible. Webstock was truly incredible and blows every other conference (web related or not) I've been to (nationally and internationally) out of the water. You can really tell, that Webstock is truly made with love.