Last week was busy. I was home pretty much only to sleep and lived off train station junk food. Not the best life, but a lot of fun and cool things happened.

One of these was the Next Web conference, a great startup event where a lot of interesting people from the European and American startup scene were present. The conference was complicated for me slightly because Eelke and I volunteered to shoot a report of it for Frankwatching, one of the Netherlands’ leading Web 2.0 blogs.

The report is in Dutch but there are some choice bits of English interview in there, especially a Q&A with Robert Scoble which cuts pretty much to the essence of what he told us at The Next Web. It is up at Vimeo:

Frankwatching @ The Next Web 2008 from Eelke D. on Vimeo.

I’ve never done something like this before, but I’ve wanted to for a long time. This was a great opportunity. Suffice it to say that it was a lot of fun, very tiring and I learned a lot. I have a lot more respect for (video)journalists now.
I expect to do more with video in the future especially for travelblogging and ambient recording and I’m thinking of getting a Flip.

The Next Web was a great conference with a spectacular ambience fitting the growing European startup scene. I didn’t hear a lot of new stuff from many speakers. I like my speakers in depth, on the edge and interdisciplinary because I learn the most from those. But maybe that’s not everybody’s cup of tea.

This week the Next Web conference is taking place in Amsterdam. There’s a contest where startups who want to attend can make a movie pitching their concept and the best ones get a free ticket.

We had a lot of fun making this movie:

Tipit.to Startup Pitch (English) from Alper Çugun
This is a rough cut, we’ll put up a better version during the course of the week.

So if you like it and want to help us, you can vote for us at pitchstorm.tv. There’s a poll on the page but you can only vote after you register in the box on the top. The registration sends a confirmation mail which can take some time. Once you get that, you can login and cast your vote.

Thanks and see you at the Next Web!

From this Friday on Four Starters will be coming to you from Berlin. Cristiano (and Melinda), Reinier and myself will be driving to that beautiful city to attend Barcamp Berlin and the Web 2.0 Expo, and to sample the flavour of that great city.

Picture by Eelke

Four Starters has never been together in a single geographic location since its inception and though that’s normally not a problem, it is a nice change to be able to meet face to face for a change.

And talking about meeting face to face, if you see us at either the Barcamp or the Expo, drop by and say hello.

It’s less than 10 hours to the start of the Future of Web Apps conference in London, and I started to think about some interesting things to ask all the startups at the expo. I decided that, instead of asking the obvious things like “what does your app do?” it might be more interesting to focus on some of the bad issues we have with web applications these days. Here are the 10 probably really interesting questions (in no particular order) we will be asking at FOWA tomorrow:

1. Why would we really need this application?
2. Do I need to login to Facebook before I can use your application?
3. Do I need a Twitter account before I can use your application?
4. What other company does your corporate logo feel close to?
5. Do I need to register before I can even look at your application?
6. Do I need to re-add all my friends when I join your site?
7. If I join, will you start spamming my friends with invites?
8. If you get bought, will you screw over your users?
9. If you get bought, will you screw over your users?
10. Does your mom understand how to use your app?

Got more questions we should ask, then add them to the comments before tomorrow.

I was at the constitionary conference of the Dutch guild of frontend coders today. The guild is an initiative by Peter-Paul Koch to form an authoritative institution on standards based web development.

A lot of meetings and consultations with various institutions and freelancers etc. have taken place and have resulted in a mission statement, guidelines and proposed organizational structure. Information on the guild can be found on PPK’s webpage (in Dutch).

Front End Guild

The idea of the guild is to certify frontenders so clients know they are hiring somebody who knows about webstandards and is able to make standards aware choices for your web project. The guild will have a certificatory exam and candidates who succeed on this exam will receive a ‘standards aware’ certificate.

The fact that such a professional organization is being formed with standards based webdevelopment at its heart, says a lot about the standards movement and the progress that has been made. A lot of companies have been pushing standards for a long time and this is a way of formalizing that push, while at the same time serving as a wake up call for those firms who still haven’t adopted web standards.

On the other sides these kind of certification programs serve for large clients and large contracting firms to help each other out and in the process close off their markets. I have not become a member because I am naturally suspicious of certification and I don’t see any immediate benefits of membership at the moment. Furthermore I don’t think any exam taken by a commission would prove much about my knowledge or add anything of value to it.

Controversy

The guild has not been without its share of controversy. Some web developers in the Netherlands most notably from Q42 have raised questions about the objectivity and independence of the organization. These have been both questions about the place where the discussion should be hosted but also a lot of issues about strategy, mission and focus.

In the discussion on PPK’s server some comments by people were deleted without clear reason or procedure. This lack of transparency and obviously strange practice of censorship created a lot of doubt in people (including myself).
At some point Lon Boonen of Q42 posed a counter candidacy to be chair of the guild.

I visited the conference on webstandards organized prior to the constitutive meeting. Because I arrived a bit later I did not sit in at all of the panels. Here some short reports from the panels I visited and the issues raised.

Clients Panel

This panel with some clients (‘opdrachtgevers’; couldn’t think of a better translation) told about their requirements for websites and how they got aware about the necessity to code sites with standard awareness in mind.

They seemed to be a very clued in group with a lot of knowledge about standards and why to use them. One of the arguments they gave was that separation of content, style and behavior gives them more grip on a project. A lot of problems why standards could not be properly implemented was put on the CMS and editor level.

One of the issues they did raise and which directly relates to the raison d’être of the guild is that they have a hard time finding parties who can guarantee standards compliant code. They expect the guild and its certification to offer an easy way of finding standards aware front enders.

Interesting to hear the perspective of these clients, but these seem to be clued in more than your average client. It would have been interesting to hear more about ways to convert clients who do not yet see the importance of standards.

Code Review and aside on XHTML

Tom Greuter from Info.nl did a short code review on a project they did at Info.nl with a look inside of the templates. You could see that they have a lot of clue at Info.nl and that they produce some very tight templates, CSS and JavaScript. Also interesting to see that jQuery is indeed quite popular both at Info.nl and with the people at the conference.

I do keep being surprised that XTHML 1.0 Strict is heralded here and at pretty much every shop as the new gospel. What happened to using POSH and HTML 4.01 which will work everywhere. Did they simply go out of fashion because they were not new and snappy enough anymore? It’s not like there is no literature on the subject or that XML is at all alive on the web.
You can have a technical discussion on this issue, and you could side with either one considering the technical merits. The actual distribution however suggests that nobody has looked at the technical merits at all but that everybody has simply jumped onto the same bandwagon. If we want a vital and really standards aware frontend community, it would not hurt to incorporate more independent critical thought into it and teach people to make their own informed decisions.

Flash within the guild

To end the afternoon Bobby van der Sluis made the case for why Flash should be taken into the guild as a discipline in front-end coding. He took a very circumspect way of getting there and posited Flash as a plugin technology in the continuous development of the web and in its relation to the other technologies we already have to our disposal. This was a very smart way of putting things but unfortunately it did not really address any of the real issues.

Here is my take on Flash. (This could become an article in its own right.)

Whenever the issues of accessibility and search engine indexability with Flash are raised, there are always some Flash developers who say that it is possible to make accessible websites in Flash. While this may be possible in some distant galaxy, it certainly is nowhere near common practice and as long as that is the case Flash programmers need to be called on their bullshit.
It clearly is not easy enough for your common Flash developer to create an accessible Flash site. This lack of interest and capability within the Flash platform to play nice with others makes me think that there is too much work to be done to clean Flash up before it deserves an equal place in a standards based movement.

Right now Flash is only justified when used for complex visuals, animation and/or media. I have yet to see media poor Flash sites which provide the user with a decent experience. A notable exception for this argument is I’m In Like With You which had some very nice Flash integration in its previous version, and where they are pulling off some truly virtuoso work in the current.

Flash sites do not even adhere to the most basic tenets of usability. Usability dictates that people spend more time on other sites than they do on your site. Therefore your site should look and act similar to other sites.
This does not stop common Flash developers from re-inventing user interface, interaction and controls time and time again. In almost all cases they reinvent all of these paradigms very very poorly, rendering a grave disservice to their users. Every button in every Flash site is different (because it is skinned) but a button may seem like an easy control to implement, it definitely is not.
Add to this the impossibility of altering text sizes (which always seem to be too small) or to apply user style sheets for other special needs and you have a usability disaster.

Finally Flash is not a part of the Open Web. Web standards are open technology to promote an inclusive and open web on which everybody can participate. Flash is a closed proprietary technology which locks in both authors and consumers to a single vendor. For only this reason alone Flash should be avoided like the plague and handled with extreme care in the rare circumstances where the benefits outweigh the multitude of cons.

Constitutive Meeting

After the conference everybody went somewhere to get some dinner and prepare for the final constitutive meeting. I could not attend this meeting, but we should have blog posts summarizing the events of the night and the outcome of the elections some time soon.

Update: PPK himself has a post on the meeting and it seems that the differences have been solved amicably and the guild is off to a good start.

This Monday night in Amsterdam there’s going to be another road trip drink for a big Web event in Europe: The Future of Webapps. Check out the road trip site (Upcoming) there are quite some people coming out to hang out, chat about webapps and say hello to Ryan Carson.

The location for this event is set in Café de Jaren just like the last one with the O’Reilly people for the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin this October. Come say hello and join us.

Future of Webapps

The Future of Webapps looks to be an event with a great lineup of speakers scheduled this October 3-5 in London. Cristiano from Four Starters is going to attend and covert this event for us.

Four Starters will be in Café de Jaren in Amsterdam this afternoon attending the O’Reilly meetup. Maybe see you there?
Pictures will be up tonight.

Update: The pictures are up on Flickr and it was a great event. A nice mix of people in Amsterdam who kept it real and who had lots of interesting conversations. Also the two people present from Blognation the Netherlands, which should launch any moment now.

I hope Brady and Jennifer came out with a lot of insight on the Dutch perspective to startups and the internet and that they can piece all of these various European fragments together in what surely looks like what will become a great expo. See you in Berlin… maybe.

dConstruct

And furthermore I just registered my attendance for dConstruct this September in Brighton.

Get your tickets while they’re hot.

Next Wednesday it’s time for the Essential Web conference. I was invited by Jeremy Knight to come and blog about the startup companies that are presenting, but I decided to arrange for a camera (a good one this time, not the one I used during The Next Web conference) and do a few short interviews with the most interesting companies. Only problem is to get access for Dan W. who will have to do the interviews while I operate the camera.

Since I last talked about the Essential Web conference, the organizers (LibraryHouse) have offered some more information about the day’s agenda and the presenting companies. To start getting into the atmosphere of the conference I will therefore be handpicking some of the companies and showcase in the following days. I then hope to be able to get an interview with their CEOs and post them on FourStarters for your enjoyment. Keep an eye on this blog for the following few days.

I decided to attend the first London Hackday last weekend. I actually didn’t know what to expect, but in the end it was a lot of fun. This article covers the event, the hacks created and my own progress on a little project I have been working on for a while.

The Hackday Concept

The idea of a London Hackday was taken from the Open Hack Day held at the Yahoo! offices in California in 2006. The basic concept is much like a BarCamp, where developers are invited to stay and camp at the premises for a 2 day experience. Where BarCamp focuses on presentations, Hackday is a concept that tends to lean towards “hacking stuff together” using the organizers API’s.

In 2006, the organizer was Yahoo!, but in London we also had the BBC as an organizer. The BBC has a backstage department that focuses on making their data (schedules, history, casts, etc) available to developers under a “do-no-evil/non-commercial”-license. The existence of this department should be a great example to other (read: Dutch) broadcasters.

A Lightning Experience

When I arrived at the venue (Alexandra Palace) I decided to hang out with the regulars like Dan W., Thomas Scott, and Guy West. After defeating Tom in a game of Halo2 on the big screen we were in for a surprise as we heard a bang the size of a bomb. The roof vents opened soon after this and everyone was surprised. What happened? We got struck by lightning!

Unfortunately, the roof vents had opened and couldn’t be closed for a while as no-one seemed to know how. And with thunder comes rain, so we all had to leave the hall before being washed away by rain. We spent a couple of hours in a smaller area of the building before we could move back, but the rest of the day was filled with jokes about the lightning strike. Later on I found out that Alexandra Palace wasn’t hit by lightning since 1920, and last weekend we were hit twice!

Hacking Away

Once we claimed the main area back, we started hacking away. Originally half the first day was filled with presentations about various Yahoo and BBC API’s but I kind of missed these in the lightning debacle. Strangely I also missed what FireEagle was (can anyone tell me?).

I started off a bit slow, discussing ideas with Dan and Tom while the WiFi remained extremely unstable. The WiFi has become very unstable since the lightning strike, but somehow it took 15 people of BT and Cisco running around to get it fixed. Somehow this didn’t prove to me that these are skilled companies. After a couple of hours the WiFi was finally up and running and we could start making our hacks for real. (Un)fortunately this was right about the time that someone managed to get a copy of the episode of Doctor Who of that evening, which we then all went to watch on the big screen. I must say that Doctor Who works pretty well on the big screen!
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(This post got stuck somewhere in the queue. Tomorrow my longer post about Portable Social Networks.)

Willem Velthoven was scheduled to speak about anyMeta on the second day. I was already familiar with Mediamatic and their work and Willem had already contacted me about their social networking offering but his talk provided a lot of insight anyway.

Willem on the left (picture by Julian Bleeckr)

I did not know that Mediamatic is significantly in the social networking business. They seem to implement a great number of them on top of their standard anyMeta platform. Having done this a number of times, they began to wonder if they could abstract away the commonalities to reduce the duplication of effort. Willem talked about how his personal information is duplicated on a great number of websites and how this gets tiring.

AnyMeta is also the system as it has been used for the Reboot.dk website for before, during and after the event itself. It is a structured wiki which takes some getting used to but I think is quite rich in functionality. The only thing I am missing right now is a fine grained setting to receive notifications from the system.

Willem also talked about the API which any anyMeta site exposes at a standardized URL and which provides hooks to do pretty much anything you would want to with the site.

OpenID support both ways —by which I think he means both being an OpenID, accepting OpenID logon and being an OpenID provider— is supposed to be forthcoming.

In his talk Willem outlined the use cases he envisioned a networked social networks should accommodate and what the problems would be that come up with that. He was also very curious if other people had already started doing the same so that no effort would be duplicated.

I had registered myself on the Reboot site to host a conversation about the technical aspects of implementing social networks using OpenID. I mentioned that this could be a great follow-up to Willem’s talk to first talk about the need and the use cases for an open social networking system and then talk about the technical means we already have to our disposal to realise such.

See the following post on my talk.