My head is still spinning with the exciting ideas and conversations from the past few days at the conference. One thing that really came out as a common thread was the need for focus on people in all of the wonderful stuff we create for the web. That was a really nice tie-in to my very quick talk on What it means to be human at the 8x5 session. 

Some of the key ideas I took away from the conference were:

• OpenID helps to solve a lot of increasingly difficult problems and looks very promising.
• As the challenges of the web increase, we can look to nature, music, and sociology for examples to help us out.
• There's still a lot of fundamental web design problems such as confusing visuals, tiny text, and flash-only interfaces that impede basic usage of many sites.
• Data is becoming increasingly important as a front-end to a "site." 90% of Twitter traffic is from APIs.
• The people I met were all quite eager to attack the problems we face and move the web forward.
• SilverStripe as a company, and the product, are both well positioned to take advantage of a lot of the exciting stuff people talked about.
• The People's Coffee is quite good and staffed with people who really put in the extra effort.

What Webstock means to us is that we'll be taking a lot of what was discussed and seeing how we can fold the ideas, techniques, and technologies into our core product. We're very excited and can't wait to apply what we've learned!

Big thanks to the Webstock team (including Siggy!) who put the whole thing together. Great job, guys.