Open source essentially means more sharing and a more open web environment, to bring software developers together and push the boundaries of platforms like never before. Open Source week facilitates this with series of events.

We’re most excited for the Make Web Not war conference Saturday, May 7. Read more about the sold out event here.

But if you’ve missed out on tickets, be sure to save these events in your iCal:

Thursday, May 5: A full day of WordPress, with two concurrent tracks, UX and Technical. Attendees of this event will be invited to an awesome after-party with free drinks and appetizers, happening at Subeez.

Thursday, May 5: Discussion about Microsoft and Linux at the Linux User Group meeting.

Friday, May 6: An afternoon of Show & Tell: Storytelling for a Web Made World hosted by The Museum of Vancouver.

Friday, May 6: HTML Meetup hosted by Boris Mann.

Saturday, May 7: Make Web Not War is one of Canada’s first cross-platform conferences, showcasing the most cutting-edge techniques and technologies available to the ever-evolving web community. It is sponsored by Open Source communities from across Canada and Microsoft. We will see you there.

We asked Julia Stowell, open source community and marketing manager for Microsoft, to tell us a bit more about Open Source Week. Stowell has ten years of IT industry experience, specifically at Microsoft. She has experience in marketing and community management and business and market analysis.

How did the idea for Open Source Week come about?

… This is our (Microsoft’s) third time hosting Make Web Not War.  Last year we held the event in Montreal and as part of the lead up to our event we helped to organize an Open Source Week in Montreal.  When we were  visiting Vancouver last October for the Drupal Summit we asked the tech community if they’d be interested in having an Open Source Week. They were enthusiastic and supportive and so we continued the conversation.  And here we are.  The community in Vancouver is awesome and we’re thrilled to have been part of the creation of  the first Open Source Week in Vancouver.

Why are you passionate about Open Source Week?

I’m passionate about it because it helped me to get involved and get to know the local tech community.

What do you think specific events happening during Open Source Week will achieve?

This is a great opportunity to have people come together that don’t normally talk to each other.  There are many brilliant people that need to meet each other.

What impact do you think Open Source Week is going to have in the long and short term?

Both long and short term, I think it will trigger more mingling, learning, and networking between the various open source communities.

Which event and which speaker are you most looking forward to hearing from?

Well, I’m partial, but Make Web Not War — specifically my session (LOL),  which is a panel on Microsoft and Open Source.

Questions with CT Moore

CT Moore is  a senior strategist at NVI, where he handles client SEO, PPC, and social media. He is also a blogger, journalist, podcaster, and speaker and has more than five years of experience in SEO. He consulted on web strategy for brands, such asAmerican Apparel, Yellow Pages, and Microsoft, as well as a number of media start-ups.  He also sits as a staff editor at Revenews.com. Moore will be talking about technical SEO for enterprise level & dynamic websites at Make Web Not War, with Mohamed Hamad.

What do you love about WordPress?

Well, there are probably two things about WordPress that I love. The first is that it’s free. I first encountered WordPress back in 2006. I wanted a blog, but was too cheap and broke to higher someone to build it for me. So after some Googling around, I found Wordpress. At the time, I didn’t even know what an FTP client was, and it took me two weeks to figure out how to properly install and configure it. But I would’ve never started my web dev education it wasn’t for WordPress being free. Just goes to show that freedom is power

The other thing I love about WordPress is how versatile it is. I mean, you can use it to build a blog or static website, or you can use it build a small ecommerce store.

The open  source community behind WordPress has resulted in so many different plugins, add-ons and themes that you do just about anything with it. Come to think of it, WordPress’s versatility is owed to the WordPress community so I guess it’s the community I love.

What impact is do you think WordPress is going to have on open source platforms moving forward?

I think, if anything, WordPress has demonstrated the power of communities. Like I said, WordPress’s versatility is owed to the community behind it, so I think that open source developers will really be forced to invest in their community when developing platforms. It’s that kind of crowdsourcing that streamlines new releases and bug fixes, and it’s that kind of crowdsourcing that can take a platform to a level where it’s a viable and dependable business options.

What do you think are some of the most relevant web technologies coming up for 2011/2012?

I guess pretty much anything mobile. Obviously, Android is huge, and is going to continue to influence what developers choose to develop.

I also think it’ll be interesting to watch the development of Window Phone 7 (disclosure: through NVI, I currently work with Microsoft Canada and worked on the Great Canadian Apportunity mobile dev contest with them). The deal between Nokia and Microsoft has a lot of potential. Nokia makes great hardware but needed a really strong OS, and Windows Phone 7 needs quick marketing penetration. If consumers buy into the Windows Phone 7 platform via Nokia, it’ll definitely have a significant impact on mobile developers.

Why are you passionate about open source platforms?

The freedom, versatility, and possibility they afford us. Open source technologies afford people the tools and experience that they couldn’t get if they had to pay for licenses. As I mentioned already, I learned about web dev because of WordPress.

But being free from licensing constraints and having access to the source code also allows people to take something that is only partially what they’re looking for, and customize it to their needs. That can save you countless hours in product development and make the impossible otherwise possible.

But “the possibilities” go so far beyond that. The idea of having a strong community of sharp minds collectively working on a platform means that the technology can evolve very quickly and in so many ways.

Just imagine where WordPress would be today if Matt Mullenweg had been trying to make money off of it as a licensed solutions. He’d only have a small team of developers working inside the box, and WordPress would’ve never evolved the way it had. Instead, you have thousands of developers finding bug fixes, developing plugins, and making themes so that WordPress can be used in so many different ways. And the result is that a lot of business get started or save a lot of money on what they otherwise might not have been able to do.

I honestly believed that open source is one of those paradoxes where everyone gets richer because something is free. It opens the door to so many possibilities and minds to so much inspiration.

Questions with Morten Rand-Hendriksen.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is creative director for Pink & Yellow Media. He is a web designer, developer and educator and specializes in remarkably customized and unusual WordPress themes. He is also an author for Pearson publishing and Lynda.com and has published three books and two video series on web design and WordPress. He enjoys writing about anything and everything web related on the his blog Design is Philosophy. He loves web standards, information design and making the web make sense for everyone. He recently launched  PhotoPivot.com with Chris Arnold. PhotoPivotcreate a digital lightboard for professional photographers by using the Microsoft Pivot application. His topic for the Make Web Not War conference is: open source in the cloud – PHP on Azure.

What do you think is the most misunderstood thing about SEO?

SEO as a service is a bit of a scam (cue flame war). In the past you could game the search engines to get a better ranking. That just doesn’t work any more. Today search engines are simply too smart. If you want good search engine ranking (SER?) what matters is well written and well formatted content. In my opinion you’re better off buying the services of a great copywriter than getting an “SEO expert” to look over your content.

If you could suggest one thing to improve someone’s SEO, what would it be?

Focus on proper markup (page title, description, headers etc.) and put some effort in attaching accurate and descriptive alt tags to your images. Images are largely overlooked and search engines – being text driven – don’t understand them. Simply tagging your images with a proper description will make a huge difference in your findability.

What do you think are some of the most relevant web technologies coming up for 2011/2012?

Cloud, pure and simple. As solutions become more advanced and people need more space, faster transfers and larger pipes the old world of static servers and shared hosting will quickly be supplanted for the new and more agile cloud system. Yes, it’s more complicated, but the payoff is immense both in lower cost-to-performance, better stability and the benefits of a properly distributed network.

Why are you passionate about open source platforms?

In Norwegian we have a word “dugnad”. Translated to English it would mean something like “work done voluntarily by the community for the common good.” Open source is that – dugnad on a massive scale. To me open source is what the internet is and should be about: people working together for a common good. Open source is crowd sourced innovation on a scale not possible when run by an organization or a corporation. The ability for everyone to pitch in and add the little details they think matter produces an organic evolutionary process that often ends up with things no one ever thought of before. Sure, open source also produces a lot of garbage, but it’s easily balanced out.

What impact do you think open source is going to have on the web in the long term?

If we jump back in time we see open source as this fringe element written off as a joke by the people in power. Now we see open source leading the way and taking over for proprietary solutions. This organic collaborative environment can easily be the way forward for both the web and society as a whole as long as we, the people who work in it, keep our bearings and focus on innovation and betterment.

Make sure to register sooner rather than later and before April 20 — it’s already 70 per cent sold out!

MWNW explores new web standards, mixed web environments, interoperable applications, and PHP on Windows and Azure. The conference is all about bridging the gap between different platforms, communities, and developers no matter trade or background.

At MWNW you’ll be able to schmooze and hob nob with some of the best web developers in the Canada and other leaders in the Canadian web community.  It’s a gathering of visionary industry experts and leaders who build on open source platforms including WordPress, mobile, cloud and commercial software. Listen to what they have to say and ask your own questions. You never know what you might learn.

The conference offers hands-on workshops for those interested in becoming more web savvy. Feel like challenging yourself? Take part in the Code  Your Art Out competition, which started March 1 and runs to June 1, and win up to $15,000, not to mention top notch peer recognition. If that’s not enough fun and excitement for you then head right over to the interactive lounge where you can play with new, cutting edge and innovative toys for as long as you want.

Code Your Art Out

Best of all: you’ll have access to the hottest VIP after party, held at Raw Canvas. Did we mention the free drinks?

If you need further enticement to join the conference (and the party) here are some impressive stats from the 2010 MWNW that might sway you: #webnotwar was the number one trending topic in Canada May 27 2010 with 100 per cent positive social mentions. There were 2,443 event related tweets, 2.4 million followers reach and 859 re-tweets on Twitter (report by Radian6).

image from Mashable.com

This is Part 2 of a two part series focusing on Facebook’s API and using it to create Facebook applications for brands.

With Invoke’s latest application, we were able to develop a highly customized application that maintained the client’s branding and integrated nicely into Facebook’s framework.  The client Invoke was working with already had a Facebook Fan page with a large number of fans but they needed to give their campaign a boost and make the fan page more dynamic and engaging for their loyal fan base.  Invoke saw this challenge and suggested the solution – add an completely customized app seamlessly through a new tab on the fan page.

How did we do it?  By utilizing FBML (Facebook Markup Language), our team created a user experience that made it apparent this application reflected the clients brand within Facebook.  A major challenge was determining what data was available from the API.  For example, we created an interactive Flash Map that allows users to post events on a map that feed into the Facebook database.  On paper it was a simple task, but the solution proved to be much more complex as the format of the API data was not as expected.  Other aspects of development went smoother than expected.  The application uses Flash to load videos and display a counter for donations.  Because Facebook’s API provides strong support for Flash, these flash pieces were easily reusable as “widgets” that could be posted onto Walls and News Streams.

All of these small details enhanced the user experience for both primary users of the application, and passive users who see the news stream postings.  It’s these “small details” that can lead to big results for the client as passive users “like” a posting, visit the page, become “fans”, and hopefully become primary users.  These metrics are used when determining a marketers ROI.  Within a few days of launching, the application we developed experienced this Facebook effect as the application received more than 1000 signups in just a few days.

In the end, our primary focus with Facebook development is agile development, which requires many iterations with wireframing, design, API research, and programming.  Put all of these together, and it’s a fine balance to launch an application that uses the latest offerings from the API and can be maintained for future revisions down the road.   A well conceived and executed Facebook application is a fun and engaging way to deliver a marketing message or organizational facts. The interactive factor (which is demonstrably important for Facebook users) mobilizes existing fans and turns them into active promoters of your message, which in turn builds the fanbase.  These brand ambassadors will then share and interact via the application and the messaging spreads.