So @media 2007 is over and, after a lit­tle breather, here’s a short break­down of what I saw, in chrono­log­i­cal order, along with links to pre­sen­ta­tions where possible.

There were lots of great, inspir­ing ideas, which should spin out into a few more posts in the near future.

Beyond Ajax (Jesse James Garrett)

Not, as I thought, a tech­ni­cal talk about web appli­ca­tions, rather a look at how we make sure that appli­ca­tions work for the user. Para­phras­ing slight­ly, he said that the suc­cess of Web 2.0 was in hid­ing tech­nol­o­gy from the user, rather than show­ing it off.

The Broken World (Molly E Holzschlag)

With a sub­head­ing of ‘Solv­ing the Brows­er Prob­lem Once and for All’, again I was expect­ing code exam­ples to fix cross-brows­er incom­pat­i­bil­i­ties. Instead, this pro­mot­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion between brows­er ven­dors, stan­dards com­mit­tees, and end users.

High Performance Web Sites (Nate Koechley)

In con­trast to the pre­vi­ous pre­sen­ta­tions, per­haps a lit­tle too tech­ni­cal. 12 steps to speed­ing up your web pages, from using image sprites to doing some­thing on the serv­er that is beyond my com­pre­hen­sion level.

Interface Design Juggling (Dan Cederholm)

Tips on colour, design, typog­ra­phy, and imple­ment­ing Micro­for­mats on your site. Real­ly inter­est­ing, prac­ti­cal stuff, which I’ll be putting to good use very shortly.

5 Simple Steps to Better Typography (Mark Boulton)

Anoth­er prac­ti­cal pre­sen­ta­tion, with plen­ty of good advice on mak­ing your sites eas­i­er to read. I’d read much of this in slides from a pre­vi­ous pre­sen­ta­tion, but still good to have the mes­sage reinforced.

When Web Accessibility is Not Your Problem (Joe Clark)

I missed the begin­ning of this pre­sen­ta­tion owing to an emer­gency at work, and the rest was ham­pered by muf­fled sound. Still inter­est­ing, though; what you should do to make your pages more acces­si­ble, and what isn’t your responsibility.

How to be a Creative Sponge (Jon Hicks)

Prac­ti­cal and inspi­ra­tional; where to get ideas from, how to look at life with a design­er’s eye, and how to store and ref­er­ence your ideas.

For Example… [Slides One] [Slides Two] (Hannah Donovan & Simon Willison)

Case stud­ies of last.fm and lawrence.com; inter­est­ing, although not direct­ly rel­e­vant to me at this moment.

One Web, Acid 2 and CSS 3 (Håkon Wium Lie)

My favourite of the whole expo. The impor­tance of open stan­dards on the web, the state of mod­ern browsers and look­ing for­ward to the future of front-end devel­op­ment. I wrote a lit­tle more about this on CSS3.info. Also got a chance to see the $100 lap­top — it’s tiny, but I guess you’d expect that of some­thing aimed at children!

Royale With Cheese (Andy Clarke)

The most open-end­ed of the pre­sen­ta­tions, but none the worse for that. How much — if at all — do cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences inform web design, and is the glob­alised mod­el the best to follow?

There was an inter­est­ing Hot Top­ics Pan­el at the end of the event, which I rec­om­mend you lis­ten to if it’s pod­cast­ed lat­er. All in all, it was two days very well spent.

Update: All of the events slides and pod­casts are avail­able now.