WE05 was a real blast – so many talented speakers and delegates and so many insights and ideas flowing that my head is full of a great, buzzing, excitement for improvements to both wasabicube and to the Web applications and site at work.

The highlights were many; I was able to meet with some of the individuals that have been a huge influence to me over the years such as Eric Meyer, Doug Bowman and Jeffrey Veen and to be inspired by the likes of Molly Holzschlag, Kelly Goto, Tantek Çelik and Derek Featherstone to name but a few. In addition, it was a great opportunity to put faces to the names that I’ve come to know through the Web Standards Group and other nooks and crannies of the Web.

My hopes for live posting from the conference were dealt a blow by the WiFi connection requiring Windows users to disable all their security software before being able to establish a connection to the University network. Yeah, right! So it was with some envy that I watched the (large number of) Mac users blogging live. Should have brought C’s iBook along – so it goes. I was left with pay by the half-hour access from the hotel, so my last post and posts to Flickr were rather hurried, frantic affairs – minimal tagging, pithy descriptions and so on.

WE05 was all I expected and more. Starting with Jeff Veen’s workshop on Wednesday; a full day delivered with incredible enthusiasm and humour that has turned my thinking around to figuring out how we can build user-centric applications rather than our current product-based approach.

The conference proper began with an excellent keynote address by Molly Holzschlag on the State of the Web and was followed by a full programme of tremendous quality. Particular highlights for me were Jeff Veen’s presentation on Designing the next generation of Web apps, Doug Bowman’s incredibly inspirational presentation Zooming out from the Trenches, Kelly Goto’s Web Redesign: Workflow Redefined, Tantek Çelik’s discussion of microformats and Eric Meyer’s demonstration of Rapid Design Prototyping with Standards.

As I said, the quality of the presentations was outstanding, so it’s very hard to pick out the highlights. Russ, Peter, Maxine and John, along with all the others behind the scenes, did a fabulous job.

If you couldn’t attend or to relive the experience, WE05 was podcast, flickr’d (and flickr’d some more), Wikied and blogged extensively this year.

I’d absolutely recommend WE06 if this year’s is anything to go by!