I was lucky enough to attend the .net award ceremony this year. Boagworld was again shortlisted for podcast of the year, for which we won, and that nice man Paul asked me to collect the award as he was hosting the event.

It was a glitzy affair (I had to wear a suit!) held at the Altitude 360 which is on the 29th floor of Millbank Tower in London. The views are astounding!

The view from Altitude 360

Boagworld won podcast of the year for the second year in a row which is fantastic. We were up against CreativeXpert and Freelance Radio which are great podcasts and well worth a listen to.

Podcast of the Year - Boagworld

Other awards went to:

Design agency of the year: ClearLeft
Web application of the year: Dropbox
Viral campaign of the year: Best Job in the World by Nitro
Best community site: Twitter
Open source application of the year: jQuery
Redesign of the year: whitehouse.gov
Innovation of the year: Google Chrome
Interactive site of the year: Nvidia Speak Visual by Odopod and Cutwater
Standards Champion: Jeffery Zeldman
Blog of the year: Smashing Magazine
Best API use: TweetDeck
Web personality of the year: Stephen Fry
Infamy award: IE6
Vodcast of the year: Diggnation

Congratulations to everyone who won.

A definite highlight of the evening was Stephen Frys acceptance video for his award!

Was also awesome to catch up/finally meet: Dan Oliver, Tom May, Oliver Lindberg, Richard Rutter, Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith, Natalie Downe, Sarah Parmenter, Sam Brown, Elliot Jay Stocks, Jason Cale, Cath Boag, Paul Boag, Ian Forrester, Natalie Jahangiry, Simon Campell, Simon Collison and Jamie Pittock.

Congratulations to the .net team for throwing such a successful event. Maybe I could be nominated for Vodcast of the year next year? *wink wink*

Also thanks for the goody bag!

.net Awards Goody Bag

So Mr Stanton and myself jumped on a train and headed down to London. This was my first time catching the train to London, I’ve typically driven, and I have to say I prefered it, it was much easier, and I got to work on this site on the way down so that was good.

We travelled down on the Wednesday so we could meet up with some friends (Anna and Emily) and get settled before the conference.

Anna and Emily swapping shoes??

@media was held at the SounthBank Center which is a cracking venue that easily accomidated the 800 or so people that were there. The days are split into a main track and alternative track you can see the schedule here.

My personal favourites were:

• Designing Our Way Through Data by Jeffrrey Veen
• Underpants Over My Trousers by Andy Clarke
• Designing User Interfaces: Details Make the Difference by Dan Rubin
• Professional Front-End Engineering by Nate Koechley
• Building on the Shoulders of Giants by Jonathan Snook

A minor complaint about the event was that they seemed to split the more design focused talks to the first day and the more technical, development talks to the second. It would have been nice for them to have been mixed up a bit more. For example Andy Clarke and Dan Rubins talks where back to back and with them being two of the best, it often felt like a long time before we saw another great speaker.

Dan Rubin, Indi Young, Jeffery Veen, Andy Clarke, Bronwyn Jones

Probably what I enjoyed the most about the conference was the social aspect. I got chatting to some great people, and quite a few of the speakers. Free beer in the evenings always goes down well. And getting chance to spend some time with Dan Rubin and Jonathan Snook was really cool. Both great blokes and Dan I’m looking forward to reading your book! ;-)

I have to admit I was mentally and physically drained after the event. Late nights and long days of concentration don’t mix well and we didn’t roll back into Leeds until after 11pm! Well worth it though, and I’d recommend @media to people in the future.

You can see the rest of my pictures on my flickr stream and everyone else by doing a search for @media2008.