Twiist.be

Friday I went to Twiist.be (The Way Internet Is Supposed To Be), a one-day Internet conference in Leuven organized by Filip Bunkens and Simon Schoeters.

There were a couple of really interesting sessions about microformats and the semantic web by Brian Suda, Glenn Jones and Chris Messina. The highlight of the conference was, without a doubt, Aral Balkan who reminded everybody not to forget the magic of using and programming computers. His presentation contained images of both a Commodore Amiga and a Commodore 64 which immediately made his point. (Unfortunately he showed the newer C64C model that looks like the C128, not the original C64.)

Other presentations were less interesting. I don't think Adobe Flash is "the way Internet is supposed to be" and promoting an obsolete development model is not the way to achieve cost effective web development.

On the fun side there was a gigantic twunch and a special DJ set bij @boskabout during the after party.

Overall the conference provided excellent value for money and it was nice to talk to a lot of familiar/new people. I'm look forward to next year's edition.