Richard Shipman – one of the Open Source zealots at Aberystwyth University – hired a minibus in order to take 16 students along to FOSDEM. We left Aberystwyth at noon on Thursday, hopped on the ferry at Harwich and arrived at the Hoek van Holland early Friday morning. We were at ULB by about noon on Friday, eager and willing to help out – Richard had volunteered all of the students for a good 3-4 hours of slave labour at the hands of the FOSDEM organisers. I was a part of the networking team and helped lay many, many, many meters of cable around the university for the event. This year’s FOSDEM had the best network it had ever seen, with over 2500 users connected.

After checking in at the hotel, we wandered around Brussels a bit, ate some rather delicious Belgian waffles from a stand, and headed over to the Beer Event. I drank way too much, but I managed to do quite a bit of networking, and left with the contact details for a few new friends and also met up with a large number of old friends – all in all, a good night!

Woke up with a splitting headache (rather unsurprisingly), but still managed to attend all of the talks I wanted to on the Saturday – all of which were extremely interesting. We went to the Cheese Cake Cafe on Saturday evening, before settling in for an early night. We had to check out of the hotel on Sunday morning, and Richard had to be at ULB by 0930 at the latest. The FOSDEM staff very kindly reserved two parking spaces for the “Unspeakable University”, which was rather kind of them! I  managed to get some of the talk times mixed up, which resulted in me missing a couple of talks, but I was still able to attend a huge number of very interesting talks and met even more people!

After the final talk finished on Sunday at 1800, we all hopped in the mini-bus and drove to Hoek van Holland, where we got on the ferry back to Harwich, eventually arriving back in Aberystwyth at about 1430 on Monday, in a very sleepy state!

Can’t wait for next year! Although I will probably travel on the Eurostar rather than on a minibus… it was just a tad too cramped for my liking!

Although I have an account on most of the IM services, I’ve found myself being online less and less, and it doesn’t have such an important place in my mind. I’m not sure whether this is because many of my close friends have started using IRC, or because I’ve started to keep up with old friends more on Facebook, or because I’m keeping track of what aquaintences are up to using Twitter, but my use of Jabber and MSN is slowly decreasing, even though I have over 200-odd contacts. Having said this, I do find myself using Facebook Chat more and more often, even though I hate its guts. Why? Simply because various close friends and family members find it easier and simpler to use, and more accessible than any of the other technologies available at the moment. Don’t forget that we’re talking about (relatively) tech-illiterate folk here.

It might be due to Facebook Chat becoming more “mainstream” and easier to use. Or the fact that people don’t seem to equate their GMail account with IM functuality (i.e. GTalk). Or the amount of nonsense encountered on MSN. But as far as I can tell, the use of specialised IM technologies is decreasing on a regular basis, and the use of microblogging and social networking sites is increasing extremely quickly.

Many people are talking about the death of social networking sites such as Facebook due to microblogging technologies, however I refuse to believe that this is the case. But I do think that the use of IM technologies for communication between friends and family members is going down the drain. I cannot, however, speak for the use (or lack thereof) of IM technologies in the workplace – I know that within the sysadmin team(s) or programming team(s) in industries, IM is a great tool for communication, on the other hand, many companies are still using IRC and have private IRC servers for communcation within the workplace.