Wednesday, March 5. 2008
BarCampScotland2008 Roundup
Over a full month after the fact I present my summary of the BarcampScotland2008 event.
The event was split over two days. It kicked off on the Friday evening (1st Feb) in the main room of Alison House at the School of Architecture. It was just the one room with a decent communal feeling. I think most people were holding back with their presentations for the following day. Despite this two presentations did take place. James Littlejohn made the first presentation after the welcome session and talked about data portability.
It was a good summary of the current situation. I also happen to agree with most of his positions. He has taken the decision of making his homepage the hub of his social network. Although I think he has perhaps taken things a little too far my main criticism is the implementation. Looking at the site it took me about 20 seconds to figure out that aboyne is where he is based and not his surname. I couldn't find his surname anywhere on his homepage. After navigating around for a while I found it in the byline for his blog. It wasn't an easy process. I highly doubt that data was machine readable despite the importance he attached to this during his talk.
Ewan Spence was next up with an improvised talk he largely made up on the spot. This rapidly migrated to a conversation with some interesting points raised.
Following on from this Dave McClure set a small competition going. A excessive number of random words were gathered from the audience which then broke up into 5 groups to brainstorm company ideas around any pair of words. Somehow the team I was in won with sexydyslexia.com, a couple that takes standard prose and converts it into netspeak and vice-versa. I notice that the domain name is still available so although rated as the best apparently no one in the audience wanted to run with it.
All the details on the second day after the jump . . .
Continue reading "BarCampScotland2008 Roundup"
The event was split over two days. It kicked off on the Friday evening (1st Feb) in the main room of Alison House at the School of Architecture. It was just the one room with a decent communal feeling. I think most people were holding back with their presentations for the following day. Despite this two presentations did take place. James Littlejohn made the first presentation after the welcome session and talked about data portability.
It was a good summary of the current situation. I also happen to agree with most of his positions. He has taken the decision of making his homepage the hub of his social network. Although I think he has perhaps taken things a little too far my main criticism is the implementation. Looking at the site it took me about 20 seconds to figure out that aboyne is where he is based and not his surname. I couldn't find his surname anywhere on his homepage. After navigating around for a while I found it in the byline for his blog. It wasn't an easy process. I highly doubt that data was machine readable despite the importance he attached to this during his talk.
Ewan Spence was next up with an improvised talk he largely made up on the spot. This rapidly migrated to a conversation with some interesting points raised.
Following on from this Dave McClure set a small competition going. A excessive number of random words were gathered from the audience which then broke up into 5 groups to brainstorm company ideas around any pair of words. Somehow the team I was in won with sexydyslexia.com, a couple that takes standard prose and converts it into netspeak and vice-versa. I notice that the domain name is still available so although rated as the best apparently no one in the audience wanted to run with it.
All the details on the second day after the jump . . .
Continue reading "BarCampScotland2008 Roundup"
