Summary: Episode 182 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews John Allsopp (@johnallsopp) about the series of conferences he works on, Web Directions and more. Listen in Your Browser Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: Download this Episode You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link: SitePoint Podcast #182: Web Directions with John Allsopp (MP3, 41:25, 39.8MB) Subscribe to the Podcast The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly. Episode Summary Louis and John talk about the Web Directions conferences, what has been added to them in terms of startup talks, and his history of the web timeline at WebDirections.org/history using Timeline JS. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1328644474660-10'); }); Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/182. Interview Transcript Louis: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. With me on the show today, returning to the show, is Mr. John Allsopp. Hi John. John: Hey. Good to be back. Thanks for having me. Louis: It’s good to have you back. John is best known as one of the founders of the Web Directions series of conferences of which the flagship event, Web Directions South is coming up in just a couple of weeks, so I really appreciate you taking the time out of what I imagine must be a very busy schedule this time of the year. John: Yeah, it gets hectic. You think you’d have all your ducks lined up, everything ready to go, but there’s always keynote speakers who can’t make it. Louis: Yeah. John: Actually, it’s the first time it’s ever happened, but it’s always very challenging, and, you know, I’m continuing to do “hacky” things that hopefully we can do at the conference, “Well, let’s just see if they work.” So I probably should have put the whole thing to be about a month ago, but, “No, no. Let’s just see if we can build this thing over here that’s really cool that people will talk about.” Louis: Well, that’s what makes those conferences great. I definitely know from the ones I’ve attended that it’s always a great experience. So you guys have got a lot of great speakers this year. John: Yeah, no. It’s a pretty amazing line-up. It gets sort of bigger and better each year. I think we’ve got 65 people this year, and one particular reason for that is we’ve added a start-up track to the conference this year. Obviously, start-ups are the hot, hot thing, and, you know, there’s a lot flying around about the whole kind of starting up your own business thing. We’ve been doing that for a long time and been involved really since the early ’90s, I guess with what’s come to be known as start-ups, and I see a lot of hype and a lot of nonsense out there. What we’re really trying to do is address that by having people who’ve gone out and done it come back and share what they’ve learned. We’ve basically given people the brief to say what they wish they’d known before they started out. So that’s what that’s all about. Then, of course, a great range of people across the design and development kind of world, and then people who kind of think big telling us about what they think is happening out there. So yeah, it’s lots of fun, very challenging to put together a great program year on year, you know, to get people to come all the way out here or across the country, but always very rewarding and a fantastic couple of days, which increasingly, we actually get to enjoy, whereas in the past we’d be so stressed that we probably wouldn’t [...]
