MWI Team Blog

Last week, I was participating to WWW2009 in Madrid - each year, the World Wide Conference, the mother of all Web conferences, hosts a track organized and animated by W3C.

I think it was the first time that the Mobile Web got so much visibility in this conference: most (if not all) of the rather prestigious participants to the Web 20th anniversary panel mentioned the potential of the mobile web in their thoughts for the future of the Web, and more generally, the mobile web was a recurrent theme in most of the keynotes of the conference.

The other big theme was clearly around social networks, a topic close to my heart due to my involvement in the Workshop on the Future of Social Networking that led to the recent creation of the Social Web Incubator Group in W3C.

And both of these topics were at the very heart of the W3C Track in the conference - this year, the track was run as a couple of camps: one on Mobile Widgets, the other on Social Web, with clearly some overlap of interests between the two sessions.

I thought that both sessions were quite a lot of fun - I got to write my first widget in the first camp -, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to interact with all of the participants that chose to take part to that exercice! Hopefully, I'll find some time to gather and formats the notes that were taken during the various discussions groups.

Overall, I enjoyed the conference very much, and I was glad to see that the number of people that look at you like you're a madman when mentioning the usage of Web on mobile devices as important is declining very quickly...

During the European Accessibility Forum in Frankfort last Friday, I took part to a panel dedicated to the relationships between making a Web page accessible and making it mobile-friendly, along with Henny Swan, Tomas Caspers, and moderated by Beate Firlinger.

The video records of the panel are now available, and if you really must, you can listen to my lovely French accent on the record of my presentation, along with my slides.

The event overall was great, and it felt really good to see all the energy surrounding the deployment of a more accessible Web.

Last year I wrote about my experience at the Mobile Bar Camp Boston, where (despite the snow and rain) we had a great turn out. It was a great day, everyone learned a lot, had fun, and now it's happening again!

So, gather up your great ideas, favorite topics, demos, and all things mobile and come on out for a whole day with Boston's mobile enthusiasts, hobbyists, entrepreneurs and experts.

All of the details are available on the Mobile Bar Camp Boston site. The event is free, but space may be limited, so register early.

See you there!

-Matt