Last friday, there was a bloggers dinner in Brussels, at the Residence Palace Press Center. The location was pretty awesome and impressive and despite the strike of the public transportation, a lot of bloggers showed up. Thanks to Eug, who picked me up on his way there, I made it to the meeting point. The trip to was filled with a lot of interesting stories from his part. – (I didn’t know Adam Curry used to live in Belgium, nor did I know Eug himself was into the internet for quite some time already) – I tried being a good co-pilot and we managed to get to Brussels without taking too many wrong turns. We parked in front of the big mosque and then walked for a few minutes to the Press Center where I gave my first real keynote presentation, about mobile marketing and the movil project.
Putting the presentation together wasn’t really a laugh, because I didn’t want to make it too boring by getting into the technical details of the things I wanted to talk about too much, so I tried to lightly touch a few subjects and point out the pros and cons of each technology. I really had to go through it over and over, dropping things until I arrived at something that still looked interesting enough, not too boring and as short as possible. I hope some people liked it. I can imagine not everybody was that pleased with a presentation on a topic like this, but hey, I figured I had some good things to tell about it. The hardest part was keeping it into the timeframe they had foreseen, but I was kind of nervous so I don’t really know how long I’ve been talking. There’s so much to tell about it, in such a short time…
I met a lot of interesting people from the central and southern part of the country, of whom I wasn’t aware of until then. Interesting conversations during dinner and in between presentations filled the few silences there were. I’ve added a lot of blogs in my favorites, and some in the sidebar of the blog. Good reads, even if some are in French and about topics I really don’t know that much about.
I felt a bit lost and honored at the same time for being able to give a short presentation in between Luc Van Braekel and Pascal Van Hecke, who were both talking about links. LVB talked about his Blogium Project and the ‘most popular linked link’ indicator of the Belgian blogospere, and PVH pointed out different approaches to del.icio.us and other social platforms alike, with the different visual outputs those tagged links could render. PVH also pointed out some benefits you might have when you try to do link-research, comparing categorized closed archives (linkblogs) with ‘living’ archives (tagged links).
The first presentation was from Peter Viellefont from Microsoft and was about the Community Server project, something he calls a nice open source bloggingtool that rapidly enables both small and large online communities. The current Community Server platform includes: a discussion system, blogging system, photo gallery system, user profile management, advanced permissions system, extensible theme engine, and much more.
I think what they’re trying to do is merge MSNSpaces with some sort of shared blogging platform, something that sounds logical to me, but is a bit too complicated. Probably because I don’t know that much about it, but I’ll discuss it with some of my scripting friends to see what they think of it.
As you can see, a youngster like me who talks about mobile marketing doesn’t quite fit in there, but I mainly wanted to see where it’d bring me, I’ve always been told you need guts to get glory… and I needed an introduction to arrive at the part of the presentation that talked about movil.be. The contacts I made after the presentation were pretty good, I’ll send out some invites to interested people and introduce them to the community so they can help build and help develop this idea. To most of the readers of this blog, movil isn’t new. With our 70 users, the community might not be that big to be a heavy player, the point is we have a decent international base to develop and test new possibilities with mobile features. I’m looking forward to work with these new members, including you, Frédéric :) Your input will be highly appreciated.
Thanks to Peter Forret & Bart Vanherreweghe for putting this night together. I really enjoyed the setting and food for such an affordable price. It kicked ass. You can count me in next time, just let me know.
Perhaps the next meeting should start somewhere in the afternoon on a saturday or sunday, so everyone has more time to talk with each other, because I for one would have loved to talk to some more people I didn’t really had a chance to talk to (again) – it was the same at the blog dinner in Ghent. I liked the idea of putting people ‘disorganized’ at the table, so you were kind of forced to meet new people. Without that, I’d probably never met the guys from Shoob or the digital Mich (eMich)… and that would’ve been a pity.
I like the concept of the ‘will attend wiki‘ very much, for it gives the blogger the right feeling when he/she subscribes, namely the freedom to put down your url yourself and to be able to edit or remove things. A good plan that certainly needs to be done again. Mucho gusto !
Update : pics pics pics…