Jams == Kicked Out ++

Webjam Sydney went completely and utterly off last night!

16 rocking peeps stepped up and delivered incredible presentations that included topics like open source development, the advance of technology, mashing videos, the future of CSS, making your own wedding registry, getting funky with MathML, looking famous and even how to present at Webjam! There's a full list at the end, but we're going to call out some highlights and the winners

Nick Cowie led off the night with his advice on how to rock a Webjam presentation and demonstrated it too. Word has it he'll be converting the presentation into an article soon. Andy Clarke spread word of his latest caper, CSS Eleven. Chaals McCathieNevile demonstrated some of the new features in the latest alpha of Opera. James Crisp shared his awesome free wedding registry with us and Aaron Gustafson showed off some hotness he calls FigureHandler (I'm sure he'll be blogging about it as soon as he gets back stateside, right, Aaron?)

The Winners

3rd place and a $50 SitePoint book voucher went to the team from Digital Eskimo, Dave Gravina & Grant Young for their Raise the Bar project, which is a community campaign focused on changing the liquor laws in NSW

Myles Eftos took out 2nd place with his incredible work on delivering in-browser debugging capabilities for Ruby on Rails developers. He won a $150 book voucher from SitePoint and a ticket to the Web Directions 2008 conference of his choice

The first placing for the night went to a Webjam stalwart, Dmitry Baranovskiy! Dmitry has presented at 3 previous Webjams and is a definite crowd favourite so it was awesome to see him totally dominate the voting with his fantastic new contribution to the Microformats community: Optimus - the Microformats Transformer. Dmitry released it last week, but he unveiled a special new feature last night: validation. You can now validate microformats at any URL, meaning developers can check their own work. Even more importantly, you can programmatically check the validity of of a site's microformats before pulling them for a mashup. Optimus will utterly revolutionise microformats. Dmitry won $300 worth of books from SitePoint and an iPod Touch from the cool team at Binalogue

We love everybody!

Huge thanks to everybody who made this amazing event possible. All our sponsors for covering the costs and providing the prizes. Not to mention the bar tab! A massive thank you to Opera for paying for the first big run on drinks and then coming back and doing it again later!

Thanks to all the volunteers who gave their time so generously: Leo Faber, Marcus Stenbeck, Danielle Szetho, Simon Wright. And to everybody who pitched in on the night like Andrew Krespanis, Ruth Ellison, and especially Pat Allan who offered his laptop for stage use when we were having technical difficulties (legend!)

Lastly, thanks to everybody who came along and got into it, making this easily our best event ever. The vibe in the room, the feeling of community, sharing and inspiration absolutely made the night. We love you all. Keep rocking!

Stage Rocking Peeps

16 amazing presentations. More details will be provided as we get them. Check them out

1. Nick Cowie: "How to present at WebJam"
2. Myles Byrne: The Zen of HAML and SASS
3. Laurel Papworth: Social News Media sites
4. Aaron Gustafson: FigureHandler
5. Gavin Gorazdowski: www.lookfamous.com.au
6. Mike Cannon-Brookes: A day in the life of Atlassian
7. Dmitry Baranovskiy: Optimus - Microformats Transformer
8. Andy Clarke: CSS Eleven
9. Dave Gravina & Grant Young: Raise the Bar
10. Myles Eftos: Debug Rails in your browser
11. Jesse Desjardins: Global Gossip's MyGossip
12. Silvia Pfeiffer: Vquence
13. Chaals McCathieNevile: MathML in Opera Kestrel
14. James Crisp: YourWeddingPresents.com
15. Nathan de Vries: TileFile.org
16. Rajesh Kumar: 1site.com.au (goes live next week)