It's Atlanta Web Week.  Altanta Web Week is a series of events, parties, and studio hops built around Web Directions USA with the intent to celebrate Atlanta's vibrant web community.

Web Directions was founded down under back in 2004 by Johnn Allsopp and Maxine Sherrin. They put on conferences in Australia, Japan, and England.  They decided to bring their web goodness to the USA and chose Atlanta as the place to do so.  Smart folks are John and Maxine.

They take a different approach to conferences. Call it the Regator approach. They do not call for speakers, they put together programs based on current industry trends and find entertaining and practical speakers. Their overall philosophy is to put together conferences that they want to attend. Sounds good to me. To pull this all together John has been making the rounds and is working with Atlanta Web Design Meetup Group and AIGA Atlanta.

The whole week has lots of free industry events and parties.  The Web Directions conference itself is $999. Use the code ATDC to get a big bad discount. I am looking forward to dropping in from Lift for the open web landscape discussion (Loews Midtown is going to be hopping on Thursday).

If are not able to make the scene at Loews Web Directions is holding their first ever Amped hack event on Saturday at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.  It’s a free hack day for web devs and designers.  It's going to be catered. There's going to be have a party at the end. There's going to be prizes including an all expenses paid trip to Japan for Web Directions East. Sounds like a hack day like no other.

This week in Atlanta is going to be a world wide web extravaganza.

Update:  Direct links to social events.  AWDG Opening Night Party at Einstein's on Thursday. Atlanta Web Groups Party on Friday at RiRa.