Rehab is always tough. Especially for Webstock who, let’s face it, enjoys many of those things that lead one to needing rehab occasionally. But we’re back – invigorated and rejuvenated and looking forward to the rest of the year.

Three years ago to the day, our first conference, Webstock 06 had just finished. Just under one year ago, Tash and I left our full-time jobs to work on Webstock. We’re not doing this with a multi-million dollar exit-strategy in mind; we’re not following a business plan and we’ve long given up hopes of world domination! But along with our partners, Deb and Ben, we’re having an absolute blast trying to do something good in this industry we so believe in. Good in the sense of making a difference (hopefully), and good in the sense of quality. We want to provide events and experiences that really matter to people and we want to show that this can be done in New Zealand as well as anywhere in the world.

This relaunched site, along with the ONYA web awards and the revitalised FullCodePress competition, is a lot of what we’ve been working on for the past couple of months. We hope you enjoy it.

There’s now a shop to buy the oh-so-collectible Webstock merchandise (dog not included). Recordings from our events are back online and over the course of the next few weeks we’ll be adding those from Webstock 09. And we’ve even embraced this new Web 20 thing, with embedded videos, user-generated tags and commenting. W00t!

We’ll also be launching the Webstock Master Class series of workshops very soon with the wonderful Garr Reynolds coming back in early July.

And don’t forget to mark February 15-19 in your diaries for Webstock 2010!