Journal tags: barcamplondon2

After many hours of Werewolf and a bit of late-night semantic geekery, I grabbed an hour or two of fitful sleep in the BT Centre in London.

This morning the BarCamp shenanigans kicked off with Simon doing some cheerleading for OpenID. I don’t think many people needed convincing; there’s a real momentum behind OpenID right now and it shows no sign of slowing.

Simon’s talk was followed by a session on Embeddable RDF and microformats. I was roped into fighting the microformats corner along with Brian. Much mutual good-natured ribbing ensued.

Round two of the match was fought after lunch. I moderated a microformats panel discussion with Brian Suda, Ben Ward and Chris Messina. We spread the good word on microformats and threw in a few demos for ilustrative purposes. It was fun.

Before long, it was all over except for the clean-up. Many geeks make light work, it seems.

All in all, it’s been a great BarCamp. I’ve had a wonderful time meeting a heck of a lot of really smart and talented developers. I managed to make it back down to Brighton which is where I am now recuperating.

Roll on the next geek gathering… as soon as I’ve had some sleep.

It’s been a good day at BarCamp. I’ve seen some great presentations.

Gavin Bell gave a great presentation called History, Time and the Internet. He packed in a ton of ideas and I’d love to follow some of them up some time. Marvelous stuff!

Jim Purbrick from Linden Lab gave a good in-depth look at some of the neat things you can do in Second Life with a bit of code. There’s definitely some cool stuff to be done using Web Services to tie items in Second Life to things in the real world.

Oh, and Jim announced the official location of the next Linden Lab office: Brighton.

Tom compressed his talk from The Future of Web Apps in San Francisco into a whirlwind of ideas around social software.

I left Tom’s talk to hear Aral talk about how he’s hacked together some extensions to the API for Twitter. Of course I twittered that I was going to the presentation and that notification appeared on-screen so it was all very meta.

There was a whole bunch of other good stuff including a well-prepared presentation from Andy. But eventually the talks had to stop and the pizza and beer had to begin.

Right now the BT Centre has become Werewolf Central. There are two or three concurrent games running at any one time. It’s three in the morning now and the games show no sign of stopping.

I must go now. A game is starting.

I am not a werewolf.

Here’s the schedule for BarCamp in yummy hCalendar format.

Download the schedule in iCal and you can sync it up with your mobile phone, iPod, whatever.

Day one

1. 1. 13:00 – 13:30 : How To Scale , Informal 2
   2. 13:00 – 13:30 : Do we want to change the world? , The Level 1
   3. 13:00 – 13:30 : Blackhat SEO , The Basement
   4. 13:00 – 13:30 : The Next Web: Pipelines , Auditorium
   5. 13:00 – 13:00 : Paid Learning , The Bridge
2. 1. 13:30 – 14:00 : GeoRSS can save you from giant holes in the ground , Informal 1
   2. 13:00 – 14:00 : Sex and the investor , Informal 2
   3. 13:30 – 14:00 : Where the hell did the day go? , The Basement
   4. 13:00 – 14:00 : RDF, Sematic Web and microformats , Auditorium
   5. 13:00 – 14:00 : Arduino , The Bridge
   6. 14:00 – 14:30 : Open Source, Incremental Backup in Windows, yes it is possible! , Informal 1
   7. 14:00 – 14:30 : Socially Oriented Multipedia projects based on 3media , Informal 2
   8. 14:00 – 14:30 : A Jabber Wonderland , The Basement
   9. 14:00 – 14:30 : Neighbourhood Fix-it , Auditorium
3. 1. 14:40 – 15:10 : Curiosity Collective Techno Art , Informal 2
   2. 14:40 – 15:10 : Making Rails elastic , The Level 1
   3. 14:40 – 15:10 : Multi-disciplinary teams and agile , The Level 2
   4. 14:40 – 15:10 : Live travel information , The Basement
   5. 14:40 – 15:10 : Project management basics for busy geeks , Auditorium
   6. 14:40 – 15:10 : Interactive LEDs , The Bridge
4. 1. 15:10 – 15:40 : Design consequences , Informal 1
   2. 15:10 – 15:40 : Destroying walled gardens , Informal 2
   3. 15:10 – 15:40 : Usergroup 101 , The Level 1
   4. 15:10 – 15:40 : Profit maximisation , The Basement
   5. 15:10 – 15:40 : Ask us anything , Auditorium
5. 1. 16:00 – 16:30 : Virtual care team , Informal 1
   2. 16:00 – 16:30 : Flirting with APIs , Informal 2
   3. 16:00 – 16:30 : Phishing: conning the unwary , The Level 1
   4. 16:00 – 16:30 : Education 2.0 , The Level 2
   5. 16:00 – 16:30 : History, time and the internet , The Basement
   6. 16:00 – 16:30 : Over-engineering is fun , The Bridge
6. 1. 16:30 – 17:00 : Make web apps work offline , Informal 1
   2. 16:30 – 17:00 : Being understood , Informal 2
   3. 16:30 – 17:00 : Web application framework , The Level 1
   4. 16:30 – 17:00 : Livebus.org: screen-scraping and the dirty API , The Level 2
   5. 16:30 – 17:00 : Offshore outsourcing and the value of test-driven development , The Basement
   6. 16:30 – 17:00 : Improving online experiences , Auditorium
7. 1. 17:10 – 17:40 : Digital comics , Informal 1
   2. 17:10 – 17:40 : MyPages: Social BT , Informal 2
   3. 17:10 – 17:40 : Need for speed! , The Level 2
   4. 17:10 – 17:40 : Improvisation 101 workshop , The Basement
   5. 17:10 – 17:40 : Corporate communication and new media , Auditorium
8. 1. 17:40 – 18:00 : Always-on brainstorming , Informal 1
   2. 17:40 – 18:00 : Don’t be scared (of code reviews) , Informal 2
   3. 17:40 – 18:10 : Enhancing accessibility with JavaScript , The Basement
   4. 17:40 – 18:10 : Prototyping the future with Second Life , Auditorium
   5. 17:40 – 18:10 : Learning and teaching , The Bridge
9. 1. 18:30 – 19:00 : Taking better pictures , Informal 1
   2. 18:30 – 19:00 : Papervision 3D , Informal 2
   3. 18:30 – 19:00 : In ur DVDz catalogin ur moviz , The Level 2
   4. 18:30 – 19:00 : The perfect Ruby on Rails development with cheese , The Basement
   5. 18:30 – 19:00 : Lightning talks , Auditorium
   6. 18:30 – 19:00 : XSLT and ANT blogging , The Bridge
10. 1. 19:00 – 19:30 : Free schmee API , Informal 1
    2. 19:00 – 19:30 : Cool data visualisations I have found , Informal 2
    3. 19:00 – 19:30 : Extending the Twitter API , The Level 1
    4. 19:00 – 19:30 : Software development as a service , The Level 2
    5. 19:00 – 19:30 : Lightning demos , Auditorium
11. 1. 20:30 – 21:00 : Enterprise engineering communities , Informal 1
    2. 20:30 – 21:00 : Geeks on a train , The Level 2
    3. 20:30 – 21:00 : State of accessibility , The Basement
    4. 20:30 – 21:00 : Sauce for the goose: design for people who code , Auditorium

Day two

1. 1. 11:00 – 11:30 : Open ID explained , Informal 1
   2. 11:00 – 11:30 : JavaScript framework deathmatch , Informal 2
   3. 11:00 – 11:30 : P2P 4 Middle East , The Level 1
   4. 11:00 – 11:30 : Multipart forms in Django , The Level 2
   5. 11:00 – 11:30 : Skillcard: recruitment 2.0 and the death of the CV , The Basement
   6. 11:00 – 11:30 : E-voting: world domination is ours! , Auditorium
   7. 11:00 – 11:30 : Web hosting , The Bridge
2. 1. 11:30 – 12:00 : Good design through mocking , Informal 1
   2. 11:30 – 12:00 : Future of music , Informal 2
   3. 11:30 – 12:00 : Nothing to 1st client + angel + funding , The Level 1
   4. 11:30 – 12:00 : Optimise the everday , The Level 2
   5. 11:30 – 12:00 : Metaprogramming JavaScript , The Basement
   6. 11:30 – 12:00 : ORG: The British EFF , Auditorium
   7. 11:30 – 12:00 : Flashr: Flash + Flickr , The Bridge
3. 1. 13:30 – 14:00 : How do we deliver web standards in the classroom? , Informal 1
   2. 13:30 – 14:00 : Web apps for photographers , Informal 2
   3. 13:30 – 14:00 : More than copyright , The Level 2
   4. 13:30 – 14:00 : Integrating mobile messaging with your web app , The Basement
   5. 13:30 – 14:00 : Microformats panel , Auditorium
   6. 13:30 – 14:00 : Talk is cheap (with Python) , The Bridge
4. 1. 14:00 – 14:30 : Cake PHP , Informal 1
   2. 14:00 – 14:30 : Beef it up: scaling your app , Informal 2
   3. 14:00 – 14:30 : Just plain DOM: assorted parsing oddities in IE , The Level 1
   4. 14:00 – 14:30 : Django panel , The Level 2
   5. 14:00 – 14:30 : ASP.NET Active Standards Pages , The Basement
   6. 14:00 – 14:30 : AI: Syntax of emotion , Auditorium
5. 1. 14:40 – 15:15 : End talk , Auditorium

I’m in the BT Centre for the second ever BarCamp in London. The last BarCamp was superb so if this one is anything like that, it’s going to be a fun weekend.

Ian opened up proceedings this morning and everyone introduced themselves. There’s quite a diverse and surprisingly international crowd of geeks here.

The presentation line-up seems to have self-organised nicely. If all goes to plan, I’ll be doing two talks today. I haven’t prepared much. Well, to be honest, I haven’t prepared anything but that won’t stop me blabbing on and on (it’s never stopped me before).

The talks are about to get started so I’d better go and decide what I want to check out. I’m looking forward to a good day of geekery followed by a long night of Werewolf.

Oh, microformateers: we’ve scheduled a panel for 17:10 local time (update: rescheduled to tommorrow at 13:30 so that Chris can make it) so pop into the IRC channel if you want to participate remotely.