Blog @ twiist.be

Photos

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:47:29 +0200

The “official” photos are available on Flickr (if you missed the tweet). Feel free to tag the people you know!

A big thanks to Pieter Van Impe (in Dutch) for taking way too many pictures. It's a great summary of the day.

Slides

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:39:12 +0200

Transient Semantics and Microformats (Brian Suda)

Semantics add more value into our daily lives, but even short-lived small steps toward more meaning are helpful. Microformats enable us to give these small building blocks of semantics into our HTML to give more meaning to our mark-up. By looking at our surroundings we can learn more about transient semantics as the flashes, beeps and alerts bring meaning and attention into our life.

Transient Semantics and Microformats

10 Cost Effective Web Development Techniques (Drew McLellan)

How to make the best use of limited design and development budgets in increasingly challenging economic times.

10 Cost Effective Web Development Techniques

The importance of beauty in absolutely everything (Elliot Jay Stocks)

Dare to be different, dare to innovate. Look for the beauty in your work.

The importance of beauty in absolutely everything

Experiments in data portability (Glenn Jones)

As social media sites start to share profiles, friends and content, new types of user experiences are emerging. We are now continually reusing, remixing and representing our personnel content. A growing wealth of new technologies allows us to blur the boundaries of individual sites and build composite identities across the web. This portability of information is driving a new wave of social media sites. We now need to learn how to design new types of interfaces and user experiences which allow users to port their content, but more fundamentally we need re-evaluate data and its role in our online lives.

Experiments in data portability

The open, social web (Chris Messina)

The rise of the social web is undeniable. But with the success of Facebook, Twitter and others, the question looms: should its future be determined solely by a handful of prominent players or is there an opportunity to enrich the entire open web by weaving social functionality and features into the fabric of the web itself? Distributed social networking is the natural evolution of the web, and the subject of this talk.

The open, social web

Some feedback

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:37:15 +0200

We crave for feedback. Twitter is probably one of the most direct and most honnest feedback channels we can wish for so we followed the stream closesly and noticed some valuable comments. Here are some things we'll try to remember:

Three microformats related talks was a little too much. The subject was good but got too much focus.
The Flash opening sessions didn't really fit in the ‘open web’ subject of the conference.
There was room for networking with the speakers during the conference and after party, this is vital for its success.
The location was great but the catering could have been better.
It's a small scale and cosy event, keep it that way.
The Twunch was a huge success, we warned the Quick in advance but that was not good enough, we need a backup plan.

Tweets are only one way to get feedback, lengthy blog posts show more insight so I collected the ones I could find:

Slides and transcript by Chris Messina.
Slides and impressions by Drew McLellan.
In depth review of Aral Balkan and Glenn Jones their presentations by Benoit Vrins (French).
Some good and could be better impressions by Litrik De Roy.
To use his own words: absurdly positive feedback by Steffest.
Robin Tulkens highlights Aral's and Drew's presentations (Dutch).
Microformats, portable identity and delight by Bart Vermijlen (Dutch).
Round-up by Lennart Schoors.

I will spare you all the twiist.be advertising from before the conference but this one shows we got the message out right I think: pre conference opinion by Weble (Dutch).

Feedback is still welcome: mail, tweet, blog or shout in some digital form and we'll look for it (it may help when you use #twiistbe).

Backnetwork

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Thu, 14 May 2009 02:09:41 +0200

We are happy to introduce our twiist.be backnetwork! ConfNetwork builds an online networking tool to connect event participants. They have a new beta version of their software out and needed a real life platform to test it out. As it is - and always has been - our intention to bring people together in the hope they might come up with something great we would like to give ConfNetwork a chance to try out their tool. Head over to the backnetwork, register and connect with fellow attendees.

Make sure to send your feedback to ConfNetwork if you find a bug or have an improvement idea, there is a "Give feedback" link at the bottom of the backnetwork pages.

Mobile schedule for our attendees

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:34:38 +0200

As we have nothing betters to do at this point I thought it would be nice to have the schedule close to me during the conference. Paper schedules are so last century so we created a small iPhone ready schedule at m.twiist.be. Add it to your phone's bookmarks if you'll attend the conference to have a nice overview of the presentations to come.

Back to the more important stuff now.

Twunch at twiist.be

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Wed, 13 May 2009 13:06:02 +0200

What is a Twunch? A twunch is a lunch in Twitter style. It's an informal get-together of Twitter people to eat and talk about life. The locations are restaurants where you can eat fast, cheap and without reservation. Send a reply to @twunch if you wanna join so that your fellow Twunchers know they have to wait a (little) longer. You are free to propose a Twunch yourself as well.

There will be a Twunch in the Quick (a hamburger chain) in Leuven during the twiist.be lunch break. You can see who has confirmed at twunch.be (in Dutch).

The Quick is a 10 minutes walk from the venue. Take the main road (Bondgenotenlaan) from the station to the center and the Quick will be on the very end on your right hand side. You can also take the bus from the railway station, almost all buses going to Leuven stop at the Fochplein right in front of the Quick. Look for the hamburger icon on the twiist.be location map.

Kosmopol after event

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:31:36 +0200

What is a conference without networking? What better place to network as a pub? A Belgian conference without beer?!

Exactly our thoughts! We are happy to announce the twiist.be after event on Friday evening. We hope to see all of you in the Kosmopol, a pub right acros the railway station, close to the conference venue (find this location in Google Maps). You can walk from the venue to the pub, have a drink and still catch your train home.

Kosmopol

Martelarenplein 10

3000 Leuven

A big thanks to netlog for sponsoring our drinks!

Registrations are open

none@none.be (Filip Bunkens) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:31:59 +0200

The registrations are open now! So go and grab your conference passes now at our registration page. A ticket costs €100 (excl. VAT), a cheap price for an impressive line-up if you ask us.

You can pay via PayPal or wire transfer, whatever suits you best. Please add the invoice number (check the confirmation page) if you wire transfer the money to make our life a little easier. We'll send you an invoice when we receive the payment (this may take a few days).

See you all in Leuven!

Chris Messina

none@none.be (Filip Bunkens) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:26:45 +0100

We are happy to announce that our speakers line-up is complete. We managed to get Chris Messina to join us at twiist.be.

Chris Messina is a San Francisco-based advocate of the open web, known for helping to advance such communities as Spread Firefox, BarCamp, coworking, and technology initiatives such as OpenID, OAuth and microformats. He is on the board of the OpenID Foundation and works for Vidoop on the DiSo Project.

Also we opened the registrations today, but due to paypal confirmation that takes ages to complete we are only releasing 20 tickets at the moment. As soon as the process is completed by paypal we will release the remaining tickets. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it is out of our hands.

Registration

none@none.be (Simon Schoeters) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 03:04:00 +0100

We know you are all getting very nervous about registering for twiist.be, so we are sorry that the registration is not yet open.

While working on the registration part of the website we ran in to some problems, both administrative as well as code wise. Because we take things very serious and we don't want anything to go wrong for you or for us, we decided to postpone the registration till the week of 15th of march.

We're very sorry for the delay, but trust us we are working very hard to get it all working.

If you know any possible sponsors for our event, please let us know on info@twiist.be, there might be a surprise waiting for you if you deliver us a sponsor.