Better markup - more meaningful markup allowing more semantic info to be added, enhancing quality of your site.

Saves time - Microformats are standardized ways of adding markup to a specific kinds of informations (events, contact information, blog posts) and therefore remove the need of coming up with own markup thus saving time.

Staying ahead of competition - the whole Semantic Web thing just gains momentum so using Microformats is the new cool thing to do (look at BBC or Yahoo or even last.fm).

Provide value - easy to use as changes are only done in the presentation layer (read: HTML markup) but benefits go beyond adding enhanced markup.

I will also add that Microformats and Web Semantic help you build future proof websites, which is for any company with already an aging website a concern.

Hope we can raise the bar to a 20% worldwide browser share for Firefox soon!

Here’s my little recap of the entire keynote

Silverlight is a RIA brought by Microsoft. Its a plugin, like Flash that users can install in their browser. However it’s still a beta, version 2 will be release in 2008 and a mobile version is under development. The current beta, version 2 beta came out in April 2008.

How Silverlight work

Silverlight use the .Net framework ACL directly inside the browser client. This way .Net programmers can use the languages they are already use to, #C, VB, Ruby, etc. The user on his side just receive Html/Javascript the same way JSP technology works.

Silverlight use the XAML a declarative XML based language by Microsoft.
About the accessibility, Silverlight can tell screen readers the site architecture. For SEO purposes, Silverlight follow the same rules as Flash and use progressive enhancement for the end users. We can think that somehow Google can crawl the XML content underneath the Silverlight application. Like Flash, Silverlight can offer an alternate HTML version for screen readers and search engines.

Many features already in Flash

• browser plug-in
• cross browser and cross platform

Useful features of Silverlight 2

• complete DOM access
• all the code managed with the CLR .Net
• networking : SOAP, REST, RSS
• built-in controls, textbox, calendar, date picker, etc
• light plug-in of 4.3 MB

Silverlight or Ajax

• ajax is and will be valid
• ajax offer less rich user experience than silverlight
• silverlight can be integrated in curent ajax applications

Silverlight or Flex

• silverlight and flex are both using a virtual machine
• actionScript versus .Net code
• flex builder the IDE built on Eclipse and Visual Studio for silverlight

Open-source Implementation

There’s an upcoming Open-source implementation of the Microsoft Silverlight runtime under development, Moonlight by the Mono team.

Personal thought

Microsoft seem to have done a pretty good job with silverlight, a few years late on Adobe tho. For me it can be useful for .Net programmers to do web application. For sure, its not perfect, it wont replace Html, especially with the Html 5 version comming in the next few years. However Silverlight can gain major ground for intranet applications where you have a complete control over the end users.

improvements :

• faster, blazing fast
• javascript 1.8 and faster javascript rendering
• better DOM management
• new UI, improved and so much more

Download Firefox 3 RC1

extensions working for me :
seo quake
web developer
rank cheker
search status
flagfox
stumble upon
del.icio.us 3
customize google
user agent switcher
firebug 1.1

edit : Firefox 3 final version is finally out, and for the event, the Mozilla fundation is trying do beat a world record.

• Announcement of a more integrated Facebook feature, integrated friends.
• They are currently working on a new comment system. What? another redesign, I found the current one really usable.
• Digg may implement a new system to manage micro communities inside the digg website, to more reflect the digg diversity. Thats the feature I’m personally looking too, I’m eager to see any Mixx community functionality.
• They say that they are not working on word or url specific that user may filter, but they are working on a NSFW filter.
• The upcoming section will have major improvements to boost the usability in the next few months, right now there’s too much submissions to go through. It will display more targeted submissions based on your and your friends activity. Again this kind of feature can boost micro community.
• They are testing a new version for the anti dupe detector. Will detect dupes before you even fill the form for the title and description. Great feature. So they will crawl your url .. can be extend to some anti spam features too maybe with DOM inspection…
  
• They are working for podcast and videos sections integration. Great! podcast are just dying right now, sadly.

That’s it : )

edit : the new comment system is up since few days and its blazing fast, great improvements in speed. All the highlights on the Digg Blog.

Here is a little recap of my day

First of all, I didn’t went to the Benoit Piette’s presentation, I already saw it the day before, in the bus on our way to Quebec City. You can find the slides about the Web 2.0 Browsers battle on his website. So I went to the Aaron Marcus presentation.

Aaron Marcus on Cross-Cultural User-Experience Design for the Web

Culture make a difference in how people interact, make purchase, communicate, etc.

How you research, design and analyze must be done with cultural input from the end users you’re targeting. Aaron show us some example on how it can end up if you’re not paying attention to cultural specifications, funny to see some old Netscape 4 screenshots here.

An gold rule that is often forbidden in website development; culture should impact the design, the User experience of a website.

Which cultural specificities to look for :

• power distance, the power distribution between low and high social classes
• collectivism vs individualism societies
• masculine vs feminine cultures
• uncertainty avoidance, where the unknown from dangers vs the know is more acceptable
• long term vs short-term orientation

E-transformation

Next one was Lionel Pardin’s presentation. I Was at there with Jean Francois Renaud from Adviso, here a link to his comments on Branchez-vous and my comment too.

Web semantic

This presentation was in my point of view the most interesting one, maybe a too much technical approach for the crowd, but I really enjoy this one. So basically Yan Bodain talked about the four stages of the web and the coming web 3.0, a more semantic web, where machines will be able to do Ontology. The OWL language using the RDF syntax is one of the fundamental technology underneath the Semantic web, which is not a new web but a new way of doing it. This is very interesting and I’ll keep looking at those things, it may unleash a very new way how human can search informations and interact with machines.

Improve web development projects

So this was finally my turn after a little lunch where I met Julien Sarradet, an old colleague at VDL2. I was on a hour and half panel with five others specialist talking about how to improve the quality of your web projects.

My part of the panel, the Seo point of view of the quality in web development:

SEO for better web projects (pdf, not locked) in French

So Intracom 2008 in old Quebec City wasn’t the perfect conference you can expect, maybe too few people (around 100, not that bad tho), but was really nice for a first time doing a presentation especially being on a panel with helpful colleagues.

If you upgrade you Wordpress version to 2.5 and forget to disable this plugin, it’ll give you something intesresting in the SE’s results…

friends : Sam wheres your blog !?

me : huh ?

friends : Get a blog !

First post, I’m giving some reasons why I start blogging (beside the fact that I’ll be able to answer back to that question) and why I’m blogging in english either than french.

English for Cool aid

Why I have decided to write this website in english and not in french ? It take me months to finaly make the decision to go with the english for my blog posts.

First off, english is not and won’t be ever my mother tongue, can’t deny my french canadian roots and you may find sometimes a few post in french. Although my writing skills are way better in french (some people may say not that much better than my english skills…) with this blog I want to improve my english writing skills, thats one of the reasons why I’m blogging.

Personal branding aka Marketing

With this blog I also want to push further my personal branding, I know that sounds selfish, but its true, I can reach a much bigger crowd using the Shakespeare language.

Learning and sharing knowledge

Since a few years, I’m reading blogs, and before that was a board addict, I realized now that’s really the way I learned the most. Maybe except sharing with a few friends face to face. So I finally face it, I need to go to the next step, I’m already writing comments on others blogs about web development, seo, emarketing guerrilla, etc. so why I don’t have a blog… I have been micro blogging since more than 6 months now with Twitter at twitter.com/sammyQc. Micro blogging is nice, easy and one of the greatest way to share new things and start conversations. But now I want more! And I really think I can handle it, of course I wont stop twittering anytime soon.

So this blog is here to stay and I’m thinking of a weekly update, going to see about that.

Hope you’ll enjoy.