Some of the most brilliant thinkers and doers from around the world convened in Sydney in October for Web Directions South — Australia’s blue-chip web conference. Four tracks (Design, Dev, Big Picture and W3C) offered a broad range of valuable talks for the attendees. It’s hard to identify my most memorable takeaways because there are so many, but that won’t stop me from trying. Here are but a few…

The venue, located in Sydney’s beautiful Darling Harbour, was perfect for the event. Spacious, elegant, and near the heart of the city, the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre offered every amenity a presenter and attendee could ask for.

The audience was lively, engaged, and eager to absorb what every presenter had to offer. It was hard not to feel the social energy.

Rahul Sen gave an amazing talk on what he called the Interaction Design Bauhaus. Rahul drew several insightful comparisons to the early 20th century Bauhaus movement and present day interaction design. Our presentations had some overlapping themes which we briefly discussed beforehand. If my talk focused more on interaction design at a micro level, Rahul’s macro perspective turned out to be a brilliant compliment.

Christopher Giffard‘s talk on captioning and timed metadata had me very excited about what’s emerging with HTML5 video. I can envision all kinds of ways to use the techniques and formats he presented.

Stubbornella is someone to follow to keep current on emerging CSS techniques and best practices. Her talk, CSS Power Tools, was dense with valuable information.

The Lanyrd Story was a honest and delightful account of how Natalie Downe’s and Simon Willison’s Y Combinator backed idea became reality, all starting their honeymoon in Africa.

Big thanks to John Allsopp and Maxine Sherrin for a wonderful job in organizing a world class event.