Ho John Lee's Weblog

I spent the whole day this past Saturday at Barcamp, arriving at 10am and not making it all the way out the door until almost 1:30am. I didn’t know any of the organizers beforehand, so it was nice to be met by someone (who turned out to be Andy Smith) keeping an eye out for new arrivals.

I’ve been working with so many either geographically dispersed or very buttoned down corporate teams lately that it’s been a long time since I’d spent this much time in non-stop, face-to-face, somewhat random yet unpredictably creative conversations with a bunch of just-do-it tech hackers. Spent the entire time there going from one interesting presentation to another, with several interesting discussions thrown in along the way.

All the talks were informal and held in very close quarters, scheduled by signing up on the scheduling wall. In many ways, the strength and weakness of the Barcamp presentations was the short lead time for the event and the relative intimacy of the discussion spaces. This format put an emphasis on less structured presentations, by people who were comfortable enough with their topic that the slides weren’t the primary content. At the same time, having everyone literally elbow-to-elbow, sitting on the floor, an armslength or two away from the speakers, tends to eliminate random anonymous verbal potshots, and encourages actual conversational questions. Some of the presentations rapidly turned into something like topical roundtable discussions, which would have been hard to set up as such. (The Industry Darlings talk is a good example.)

Among my notes:

• Tom Conrad’s demo of the Pandora (formerly Savage Beast) music discovery and streaming service, which is based on the Music Genome Project. I’ve signed up for a trial account, which I’m listening to right now. It’s coming up with pretty good selections so far. More on this at TechCrunch. Looks like Scoble likes it too.
• Chris Messina gave a demo of the Flock browser, which extends the Mozilla platform to provide a lot of blogger- and social-software-friendly hooks. (review by Roland Tanglao here)
• Demo of Mobido, by Mike Prince. It’s a social photo sharing service for mobile camera phones, as well as e-mailed images. Among other things, it’s could be used for people to other people who attended an event during or after the fact if they’re using the service. The service also includes provisions for anonymizing contact info.
• Demo of a personal phone management system (forgot the name) by Brad Templeton. The general idea is to allow people to advertise their availability for making or receiving calls, and having the system set up calls when both parties are actually available, rather than having them play phone tag. The system is built on Asterisk, and uses Caller ID to invoke its rules, which may have some future problems based on…
• Jake Appelbaum’s demo of phone insecurity and other security hacking, in which he walked us through the social engineering and general weaknesses in most cell phone systems, Paris Hilton’s Sidekick, and US airline security, and also demonstrated the Asterisk hack for Caller ID spoofing, which makes your calls appear to come from anyone you choose.
• Nicholas Chim demoed The Personal Bee, an aggregator for building your own version of something like Google News. It appears to scan a collection of feeds to assign weights to “interesting” keywords, which it uses to build the page. More on this at TechCrunch.
• Riana Pfeffercorn’s on buying and writing ads for search engine, and Google Adsense specifically, with a few bonus tips on Yahoo Paid Inclusion by Beau Lebens
• Caught pieces of discussions on making AJAX-y applications faster, KaPing Yee’s presentation on improving web security (anti-phishing), a discussion on how to visualize the effects of social behavior to help save the world (resource consumption)
• Other conversations with Bill Lazar, Ross Mayfield, Kevin Burton, Brendon Wilson, Rashmi Sinha, Wolfgang Zeglovitz, and many others.
• Ran into a couple of other Koreans there: Eugene Eric Kim, and Min Jung Kim. Pleased to meet you.

Although there’s a constant background question of “how do you make money doing this”, the basic feel of the weekend was about sharing interesting ideas and work in progress with other people interested in making something new and better. These days, that attitude may be a bit old school, but it could be the cure for what ails Silicon Valley. And there’s apparently interest in organizing similar events elsewhere.

Lots of appreciation goes to Andy, Chris, Eris, Ryan, Ross, and all the Barcamp organizers, sponsors, and other contributors!

Update 08-27-2005 00:05 – Barcamp – The Video