For the last two / three years I’ve been increasingly vocal - and annoyed - at the lack of human factors and user interface work at WWW. I’m glad to say that in 2012 things seem to have changed - lets hope for continued change into 2013 and beyond. Finally, the Web Conference gets a ‘real’ human factors session! After a number of years bereft of user interaction and human factors work - beyond a submissions track - UI work makes a welcomed return to WWW 2012.

As you probably already know, this years slightly confusing (thinking of the Web4All co-located conference) www theme was, yes you’ve guessed it ‘Web For All’: The Web has had a glorious existence of over two decades and has revolutionized the way we work and live. It has been the catalyst for proliferating information across boundaries, enabling effective communication and 24/7 service availability all leading to a digital, information based economy that we have today.

This years W4A was yet again a triumph, especially Bebo White’s ‘Geezer’ - doing William proud for this second Memorial Address! Now, normally I pick out a few technical papers which I think pretty good, however, departing from convention I decided to summarise each paper, both technical and communication, in as near to 140 characters or two sentences as possible. In this way I hope that anyone interested will be able to quickly understand the gist of the paper and use this understanding to decide if they want to read further.

We did present at ASSETS 2010 as I previously said and I must say that I think this years conference was solid. Maybe the work presented was not completely within my frame of interest; indeed, there was Rehabilitation Engineering, Assistive Technology, Educational, and advocacy work there which are interesting but for me not directly relevant. However, there were a couple of papers that did in principle offer the promise (if not yet realised) of being transformative, and providing some good solid scientific understanding.

So I recently attended the Web, Art, Science Un-conference / Camp and I must say it was pretty good. While it was a small affair attracting about 35 participants, the bulk being Web Scientists from Southampton, it was refreshing to see different literary work and analysis in a scientific context. I’d say that for the next one a greater effort needs to be made to attract practising artists and writers as opposed to scientist and academics studying literature.

This years conference focused on Developing Regions wishing to investigate accessibilities Common Goals and Common Problems1. The rationale was that the community thought that a revolution in the information society was starting, based on the use of mobile phones in developing countries. The hyper-growth of mobile phone penetration was deeply changing the lives of people in most of the world; their ways of communicating, working, learning, and structuring their societies.

…but before I get on to that, a word or two about WWW2010. So this years Web Conference was an organisational triumph, great food1, great venue2, great location3, and great events4. Indeed, of this last the Carolina Chocolate Drops and, for me, their tune ‘Genuine Negro Jig’ was the highlight; an 18th century tune so powerful in melancholia it is at once both painful and absorbing. Back to work - my top three talks where: