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BarCampLA: Digital Brainstorming Downtown*****
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6485 Reads
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UPDATED SUNDAY BELOW
5 p.m.:
The geek quotient at the LittleRadio warehouse downtown has been building steadily since 4 p.m.
BarCampLosAngeles is in the house. Coders, designers, photographers, information architects, bloggers and all manner of internet types are socializing, taking photos and prepping presentations.
Tonight, a quick "Hi-my-name-is" followed by "lightning demos" which our inner 11-year-olds all hoped would be a Tesla coil demonstration, but will in fact be fast 5-minute show-off sessions on everything from games, podcasts and command-line RDF utility to viral marketing, project management and practical Microformats.
Watch this space - I'll be updating this post throughout, with newest info at the bottom ...
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8:50 p.m.
- It's a fascinating social/technological mashup - a good, open-source vibe lubricated by beer, high-speed wireless (partly courtesy of eecue) and lively, intimate discussions on mapping products, APIs, social networking and a ton of high-level geekstuff that spins my propeller beanie way too hard for actual comprehension.
While Fox Interactive has a recruiter actively working the room and Yahoo Publisher Network is well-represented, most people here are dyed-in-the-wool nerds with day jobs whose passion lies in their side projects, which they'll be showing off Sunday.
Earlier this evening, Kent Nichols showed a few AskaNinja.com podcasts that had the crowd in the loft roaring with laughter.
Downstairs, a few big-ticket demos:
- The guys from Flock just demo'd their versatile, powerful blog-browser/content-compsition application - an open-source toolset that I'm definitely going to try out as soon as the public beta comes out.
Based partly on Firefox, it lets you search and sort RSS feeds, images (via flickr and Photobucket, it synchs with Shadows and del.icio.us.
I found the most compelling bit of functionality the fact that you could use it to compose blog posts by click-and-drag from all these browsers rather than hand-coding image calls and web links.
They're partnering with Yahoo for search, which pays the bills and probably quite a bit more, but the app is open-source and very, very slick looking for just a developer's build.
Goowy - a Flash/ web-based "digital lifestyle" application that synchs your calendar, address book and bookmarks, lets you manage file storage and includes right clicks, keyboard shortcuts, drag and drop, skins, sound effects and 5GB free storage.
Yahoo! GO TV's developers showed off SearchCast - a database browser for video on the web that lays a search engine over the movie you're watching and lets you look up stars, filmmakers and integrates with e-commerce sources like Amazon and Buy.com.
Very handsome, as is the online photo album function and video search.
BTW, here's the flickr photostream from the event. I'm doing fisheye portraits, for probably no good reason, but if you're into it, here's my photostream.
11:15 p.m.
Things are winding down - no one's planning on camping here tonight, it appears - everyone's headed back to warm beds close by - or at least a good hotel room for the out-of-towners.
A few stragglers, myself included, are working on their presentations or socializing.
More in the morning.
Sunday, 9:23 a.m.
The warehouse is open, the coffee's on the brew and the cream cheese and bagels are thawing out, but it's still fucking cold in here as the first campers straggle in. Nobody slept here last night, but I'm glad I brought a sleeping bag, which I just pulled out of my trunk and spread across my lap to keep from freezing to death. The rollup door is open and Nina Simone is crooning from the PA.
The front table is crammed with obsolete electronics gear in preparation for the Iron Chef - Geek Edition, wherein a handful of BarCampers will try to Frankenstein together something cool out of a passel of unloved routers, webcams, power supplies and cables. I predict a small fire.
Meanwhile people are pecking away at their presentations, getting ready for the day.
10:30 a.m.:
Ewan Spence - blowing through BarCamp en route to eTech, SXSW and conferences beyond, takes 30 minutes from producing his daily podcast to talk about The Podcast Network's growing audience, business challenges and production demands.
11:00 a.m.
Amanda McConnell shows off TagWorld.com - a social network with playlists, bookmarks, blogspace, image-sorting app, classified ads and Google Maps integration that is approaching 1 million users. Nice drag-and-drop interface, pretty clean design. Side note: They're marketing it in an interesting way - I spotted a billboard at Western and Fountain yesterday that proclaimed, http://tagworld.com/band
On March 15, 2006, one band in Los Angeles will be on this billboard
11:25:
Michael Powers demos Slide - a desktop application that looks at the web as though it's a collection of nuggets (images, video, text) - anything you can suck into an RSS feed and delivers it to your screen as a streaming graphical ticker. It gets smarter over time and filters content down to your specific interests.
11:30
Ilya talks about Web 2.0 - some thought-provoking ideas about the rise of social networking, P2P apps and web-based applications and the way they're converging with the current (somewhat primitive) state of the Web.
12:30:
Cody and Molly Simms lead a "First-Grade Art Class," using a video about Simon Rodia's luminous Watts Towers as a kickoff point for encouraging campers to exercise their raw creativity by building mini-sculptures of popsicle sticks, feathers, florist's foam, sequins, wire and googly doll eyes. There's something intoxicating about seeing high-level programmers whose combined skillset could either build the next Google or take down the IRS hunkering down on their knees, collaborating on funky little bits of art.
12:45
I presented GridHead (PDF, 2.45 MB) a concept I put together about 48 hours ago for a social network designed for finding collaborators. It got a much better reception than I anticipated, including suggestions that I go ahead and build it as a plug-in for LinkedIn or another social network, so if you're interested in learning more - or better yet, doing the coding necessary to help develop it, email me.
2:30
Carmen Leilani deJesus, Greg Cohn, Heathervescent - all proselytizing on behalf of the GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology as a way of "organizing your shit and getting shit done." Easily one of the most-packed demos at BarCamp, which is heavily populated by what Carmen calls "hyphenates" - people who are juggling multiple projects and identities simultaneously.
It involves categorizing all your tasks by the context you're in - whether you're at your computer, out in the field, home in bed, checking your PDA, making calls - and then executing them in an orderly fashion, and - as Carmen in her alter-ego of Mistress Chi Chi (Organizational Dominatrix) says, Closing Open Loops Feels Good. Worth checking out - I already do an unofficial version of it myself but perhaps I need to get more religious about handling my shit on a more formalized basis, as with this method.
Greg Cohn demos a Microsoft Outlook plugin available at the GTD that lets you set up a system for categorizing your tasks. Heather demos the analog version - a Staples notebook marked with tabs for computer tasks, phone tasks, email tasks, etc.
Carmen speaks up again: "I want you to look at this hand that I'm holding up (her right), and project something onto it the image of something that just completely turns you on, something that really gets you excited. Imagine it like an HDTV, like an iMax screen, in full, vivid color. Okay, now over this hand (her left), I want you to superimpose the image of a task that you just hate, something that's so onerous that you'll never get it done. Now make that picture black and white. Now make it small like a postage stamp - every time I put this hand up (her right) - imagine this hand is an HDTV and it overrides it. "
It's as much of a mindset as anything - tasks are small and doable if you believe they are. Once you believe they're doable, you do them. Yes, it sounds simple-minded, but what it really is is simple. The trick is using the system full-time, and if this is any indication of its success, Greg says he's improved his productivity by 40%.
3:00
Dave Bullock is showing off some eye-burstingly gorgeous macro photographs he's taken, and demoing the complex macro camera rig that makes it all possible. Here's his flickr stream.
3:30
Greg Cohn, (of Yahoo Publisher Network by day) spun some of his altruistic work with Concerts for Change and Auctions for Change into a new project called Blogging for Good. There's a wiki set up there now, collecting ideas and commitment from people who want to help philanthropic causes begin leveraging the blogosphere to increase their power to do good work.
The session spent some time brainstorming a "small wins" approach - ideas such as creating Technorati tags to help drive philanthropic interest toward charities; building a banner-flighting application that lets charities set up banner campaigns, and lets users quickly download code snippets to put those banners on their own sites; acting as liaison between charities and the blogosphere; building a "blogging for dummies - Charity edition" site that offers primers on setting up WordPress sites, getting prominent bloggers to post about your mission, etc.
The goal of the ongoing project is to give charities the tools they need to leverage the viral nature of blog inter-communication in a way that lets them publish their message in creative, varied ways to increase the broadest possible amount of public awareness and boost donations without burning it out.
4:00
Jason McCabe Calcanis commandeers virtually the entire camp audience for a raucously profane session in which he calls bullshit on Ajax for having no business model, Verizon for restricting how you download data, mainstream media web sites for not linking out to other sites, Web 2.0 for being so open-source yet a magnet for VCs - and VC entrepreneurs themselves, who think that their equity in web companies are worth more than the companies' own interest.
Everyone in the room serves as the Greek chorus, shouting "BULLSHIT" at all the right moments.
Finally, he bites hard the hand that feeds him - on AOL (which recently paid millions for his Weblogs, Inc.), for putting ads on members' blogs, for its bad, perpetually bloating software client. Interesting session, though I wound up having trouble parsing his defense of AOL's much-loathed email tax).
5:00
Ian Rogers expounds at great length in great depth on the future of the digital media business, dissecting (among other things) the damage that DRM is doing to progress for users and the music industry.
Wish I'd caught more of his talk than the last 10 minutes, but that's what the event has been like: Dense, with three simultaneous tracks of demos, each packed with high-level philosophy, methodology and technology. Plenty to chew on, no time to digest.
Sean Bonner, one of the organizers, says it there will be another BarCamp in the not-too-distant future - whatever form it might take. That's good news for the developers and unvarnished geeks I've talked to throughout the past 36 hours - they're overjoyed to have found and perhaps begun building a community of their L.A. peers where one never really existed.
(Technorati: barcampLA barcamp barcamplosangeles)
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Saturday, March 04, 2006 - 06:18 PM
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