Matthew Bull

IWMW 2008 - day 2

So, we’re into day 2 of the IWMW 2008 conference at Aberdeen. Day 1 passed with much alcohol, dancing, Aberdonian ‘furry boots’, oh and some web stuff too.

I think the highlight was an excellent opening talk by Derrick McClure from the Centre for Linguistic Research at Aberdeen. It was a novel idea to have an opening talk by a linguist about the Aberdonian dialect (doric). But it worked, and to be honest this talk was more engaging than any of the other web-related talks that followed yesterday. I can’t even really remember any of the other talks, in fact.

Another highlight was a parallel session by Michael Nolan of Edge Hill University. They seem to be doing a lot of good healthy web 2.0 stuff there, and seem to have been given a lot of freedom in what they do. Edge Hill is a very new university, where student recruitment is king, and the website is viewed as a crucial tool in achieving that goal.

Edge Hill are using the symfony framework as a kind of php glue to bind together tools such as wordpress mu for blogging and bbpress for forums. They also developed their own google-style portal with php and jquery.

So now it’s day 2, I’m sitting in a boring talk feeling a little hungover. Oh well, it’s going to be a long day…