A List Apart invites us all to participate in a huge web design survey for developers. Random participants will win glamorous prizes such as iPods, tickets and t-shirts. Read more at ALA.

My biggest concern here is that 80% of the participants will probably be residents in North America, since most of ALA’s readers are from that region. The 1st prize (a ticket to an Event Apart in the U.S) also confirms this. It will be exciting to see the results, but I would really like to see ALA push the target audience to involve the entire planet, perhaps using translations and a more open approach in it’s questionaries.

500 responses an hour doesn’t really say much - the ALA team should be looking for a representative cross-section of their target group, and that group should be as international as possible.

From ALA:

Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?

A perfect resort after a hard party week in Berlin, My Tropical Island is an old Zeppeliner factory from the WWII that has been re-build into a 24/7 tropical paradise, with rainforests, beaches, lagoons, bars (of course) and even a hot-air ballon. All indoors. You can hire tents or just crash on the beach as we did.

A must-visit.