Last Friday, I had the honour to speak at Western Australia’s premier web conference, Edge of the Web.

My talk, titled ‘Services, SItes & Snakeoil’ was a 45 minute run down on the state of the web industry, examples of possibly unsavory behavior amongst the industry, and suggested actions to put into place to encourage better ethical decisions in the future.

I also handed out paper, and requested people jot down some of their own thoughts, which I’ll be sharing here in the near future. Right near the end of the talk, I dropped mention of the wiki environment that a bunch of us have started, in order to work through the concept of a ‘Code of Conduct’ or some-such. I’d love to see you join us there, at www.webindustrycode.org

Please enjoy the presentation above, and if you like it, share it with your colleagues. Thanks to Matt Didcoe, Ashul Shah, Helen Burgess and the tram at Partner and Prosper for the great conference – it really was a fantastic event.

Feedback on my talk, or the slides above? Hit me up in the comments.

I was honoured to speak on day one of Edge of the Web 2009. My presentation, You Too Can be a Successful Freelancer, contained both personal stories of my freelancing years, as well as some of the material from my book, The Principles of Successful Freelancing.

I had a great time preparing it, and then delivering it to a enthusiastic audience (a huge thanks to you if you were there!), and have uploaded the slides to my SlideShare account. You can see them embedded below. The slides were featured on the SlideShare front page the day after I uploaded them – thanks SlideShare!

You can see a number of the presentations given at Edge of the Web 2009 on SlideShare here.

Image: Photo by Richard Giles. Original photo here.

There is less than two weeks until Perth’s second ever web conference; Edge of the Web 2009 gets underway, and the excitement is building!

One large element of the social aspects of web conferences is the ‘twitter back channel’, you know; the thoughts and musings of people who are attending the conference posted on Twitter.

With this in mind, I thought it worthwhile to go through the impressive speakers list, and link those who are on Twitter so you can also watch what the speakers are saying, before, during and after the crazy week we have planned.

Derek Powazek @fraying
Anil Dash @anildash
Alex Payne @al3x
Dmitry Baranovskiy @DmitryBaranovsk
Gary Barber @Tuna
Ruth Ellison @RuthEllison
Lachlan Hardy @lachlanhardy
Simon Pascal Klein @klepas
Kevin Yank @sentience
Miles Burke @milesb
Ash Donaldson @ashdonaldson
Matt Balara @MattBalara
Matt Didcoe @mattman
Scott Gledhill @gleddy
Nick Cowie @nickobec
Myles Eftos @madpilot
James McCutcheon @jamesmcc
Justin Mclean @JustinMclean
Darcy Laycock @Sutto

Remember, if you are attending Edge of the Web 2009, you should use #eotw09 as the hashtag. It’d probably be a good idea to also follow the @eotw Twitter account too!