We’re really pleased to be hosting a stellar group of design, development and management thinkers (and do’ers) at meshU, the one-day Web tools conference that occurs just before the main mesh ’09 conference this year (meshU is April 6 and the main mesh conference is April 7th and 8th). We had a great response to some of the design and development speakers we had last year — including people like Daniel Burka from Digg, Leah Culver from Pownce, John Resig of jQuery and Alistair Croll of Rednod — and we think we’ve got some that are just as great this year.

The design stream includes people like:

– Ryan Singer from 37signals, whose presentation is “Value Judgements in Interface Design”

– Bruce Philp from GWP Brand Engineering, talking about “Ten Keys to a Branded User Experience”

– Luke Andrews from Dabble DB on “Responsiveness: the Perception of Speed in Web Applications”

– Joshua Porter from Bokardo looking at “Design for Virality”

When it comes to the development side, we think we’ve put together a group of speakers that can help you think about and meet the challenges you have to when it comes to rapid development and prototyping of Web apps and services. They include:

– Chris Wanstrath, GitHub, who will talk about “Building a Business with Open Source”

– Ilya Grigorik, AideRSS, on “Event-Driven Architectures”

– Pete Forde, Unspace. on “Is that an iPhone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

– Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Engine Yard, on “Building Scalable/Decoupled Web Architecture”

Tickets for meshU tend to disappear pretty quickly, so you would be wise to get in there before they are all gone :-) The ticket window is open. Thanks again to our sponsors — Microsoft, Edelman and the SMG Group — for their support.

An update for anyone who might be thinking about heading to mesh ’08 or meshU (the one-day workshop event just before mesh): to help you make up your mind and plan your day, we now have the schedules up for each event. There are still some panels that have to be firmed up with our speakers, but we will be filling those in soon. The sched for mesh ’08 is here, and the one for meshU is here.

On the first day of mesh, we have panels like the Future of Music panel with musician and social-media fan David Usher, as well as Jeff Remedios of the Arts & Crafts label and Graham Henderson of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, moderated by David Gratton of Project Opus. Then there’s the panel on the New Front Page, with Pema Hagen of GigPark, Daniel Burka of Digg and Candice Faktor of OurFaves (moderated by yours truly).

We’ve also got a panel on the idea of Private vs. Public with Nancy Baym from the University of Kansas and the Online Fandom blog, University of Toronto philosopher and author Mark Kingwell and Elizabeth Denham of the federal privacy commissioner’s office. That one is moderated by the lovely and talented Rachel Sklar, who writes the Eat The Press feature for Huffington Post. We also have a panel on Video and the Web with Dana Kaplan of Bliptv, Andre Gaulin of CTV and Guinevere Ortis of the CBC, moderated by video-blogger extraordinaire Amber MacArthur.

Michael Geist will also be doing a presentation about how to use Facebook and other Web tools to build grassroots campaigns. And of course we have two stellar keynotes by Ethan Kaplan of Warner Brothers Records and Matt Mason, author of the book The Pirate’s Dilemma.

On the second day at mesh, we have panels like the Measuring Social Media panel with Alan Chumley, Sylvain Perron and Katie Delahaye Paine (moderated by mesh founder and Tripharbor CEO Stuart MacDonald); a panel about Cultivating Community with George Tsiolis of Agoracom, Derek Szeto of Red Flag Deals and Christopher Jackson, moderated by Jen Evans; a look at Building a Brand Online with Rohit Bhargava, Maggie Fox of Social Media Group and Michael Garrity of CommunityLend (moderated by mesh founder Mark Evans); and a look at some Founder’s Stories with Julia Johnston of mEgo, Leah Culver of Pownce and Ryan Carson of Carsonified, moderated by Paul Kedrosky of Infectious Greed.

We also have a presentation by Mike Masnick of Techdirt about the “economics of abundance,” and two excellent keynotes from Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon and Lane Merrifield of Club Penguin.

meshU has some outstanding speakers as well, including John Resig of jQuery, Avi Bryant of Dabble DB, Kevin Hale of Wufoo, Reuven Cohen of Enomaly, Alistair Croll of BitCurrent and the excellent tag team of David Crow from Microsoft (and DemoCamp) and Leila Boujnane of Idee Inc. You can book your ticket for mesh here, and your meshU tickets here.

One quick reminder and one update on meshU:

The quick reminder is that we’re having a mesh meetup at the Irish Embassy tonight (April 21) starting at about 7:30, so swing on by if you’re in town and get some pre-mesh socializing in — the snacks are on us.

The update about meshU is that we’re releasing a batch of 25 discount-priced ($30) student tickets for the day-long workshop event (more info at the meshU site), so if you’re studying Web design or development or programming or anything along those lines — or know someone who is — be sure to book a ticket soon, because they will probably go quickly.

To be honest, offering student tickets was something we meant to do from the beginning, but it kind of slipped through the cracks during all the planning of mesh and meshU — thanks to a number of our friends and fans for calling us on it. We think it’s a great way of giving back to the community, and helping the young Web developers and designers of tomorrow. mesh on!

As my fellow mesh 2008 organizer Mark Evans notes in his blog post on the topic, one of the things that we got asked to do after the last mesh conference was to come up with ways of providing more in-depth content for developers, programmers, designers and other hard-core Web and product types. We thought about trying to build more of that kind of content into the main mesh conference, but it felt as though it needed its own thing: hence, the creation of meshU.

meshU — which takes place on May 20th, the day before the main mesh conference — is designed to be a one-day, intensive series of workshops and discussions about issues that developers, designers and even managers (yes, even managers) need to know about, whether it’s using Amazon’s S3 distributed servers system or interface design or AJAX tools. And we’ve got some megawatt speakers to lead some of those discussions, including Dabble DB co-founder Avi Bryant, Pownce co-founder Leah Culver, John Resig of jQuery and Carsonified’s Ryan Carson.

We also want to hear from you what kind of workshops you’re interested in, or if you think you’re the one to present something or lead a tutorial or discussion. Just fill out this form and let us know a bit more about what you have in mind. You can read more about meshU here, and if you want to book a ticket you can do that for just $239.