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Barcamp Brisbane IV Report

With a rotating attendance of 40-50 at any one time I spent the day at Barcamp Brisbane IV at the East Brisbane Bowls Club yesterday. It was a leisurely start of 10 am to allow extra time for people to arrive. The organisers and early attendees soon had the open space of the club partitioned into 4 meeting spaces, 2 with projectors. The Twitter hashtag was #barcampbne but the tweeting activity was down on last time.

See the CoverItLive Replay for the full tweet capture and the mesmerising VisibleTweets for the animated version.

The main organisers Paul O’Keeffe and Steve Dalton did a great job as usual, and timekeeper/wrangler did excellent duty with his cowbell. The event attracted an impressive list of sponsors, all of which gave talks during the day. It was good to see a wide variety of sponsor products and services. Like many others I took advantage of the free portraits being shot by DJ Paine of Studio Promise and look forward to seeing the outcome. Had I known this was to be available I would have dressed more formally than in my Twitter t-shirt!

There were varied talks on SEO, Google Wave in which I was a live participant, legal structures for companies, startup incubation and advice, developments in image panoramas, driving CMS with XSLT (innovative but hard), real-world agile development, Linux install from USB drive, and a run through Amazon Web Services.

A big problem was what I dubbed the hacker’s corner where a group sat at their laptops all day. They rarely mixed with others, and chatted and guffawed non-stop during the event often drowning out the speaker giving the main talk, despite suggestions they desist. This stereotypical, antisocial nerd behaviour was sad to see even though it was a tiny minority.

I enjoyed the barcamp and made some useful contacts. Thanks again to Paul and Steve for their major efforts in staging another successful event. However significant changes at the bowls club or a different venue will be needed to entice me back.

Written by Michael Rees

18 October 2009 at 9:41

Posted in Microblogging, Software development, Web 2.0

Barcamp Brisbane III Report

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I spent a hyperactive day at the East Brisbane Bowls Club with about 60 others at Barcamp Brisbane III, a joint Barcamp Brisbane/Gold Coast meeting. Because I spent the last couple of nights at an apartment in Dockside just down river I had the honour of being first to arrive. It was good to see a strong signal for my 3 wireless broadband and was able to keep the CoverItLive live blog running through the day on the trusty Eee PC 1000 (photo courtesy of Steve Dalton).

I gave a talk about some of my favourite cloud applications to an audience of 30 or so just after the opening speed networking session where we spoke to about 6 people previously unknown to us switching every minute.

Past and present Bond students were there in Michael Battle, Ben Novakovic and Matt Carter. There were also some fellow past DSTC colleagues in Paul King and Bob Brown. I was kept extremely busy through the day reminiscing as well as discovering a considerable amount of new stuff.

It was good to see social media coming through strongly with talks from Des Walsh, Anthony Dever and Ben Grubb with detailed reporting by Hannah Suarez.

The day was most fascinating and extremely tiring. I can’t wait for the next one later in the year.

Written by Michael Rees

18 July 2009 at 23:24

Posted in Professional, Software development, Web 2.0

Twitter Power – Combining Name and Hashtag Semantics

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I have just finished listening to a podcast from Phil Windley and Scott Lemon which again illustrates the power of Twitter’s humble 140-character message stream. It also shows how in a Web 2.0 world a simple idea goes viral in a few days and then how that idea is leveraged over a similar timeframe to produce powerful, new services that empower individuals and enterprises alike.

Twitter users know the basic syntax of a use name, @mrees refers to my Twitter account for example. In many meetings and get-togethers I now give out my Twitter name only. This one word allows the recipient to visit http://twitter.com/mrees where they will instantly discover:

my full name
an email address
a 1-sentence bio
a web site that gives further, detailed contact information

Experienced Twitter users also know the hashtag syntax, the hashtag. #smcgc for example refers to Social Media Club Gold Coast when included in a tweet. Many Twitter applications and web applications that are part of the Twitterverse make use of hashtags, including the original http://hastags.org, for searching, filtering and analysing the tweet text.

The #followfridays hashtag was suggested by Micah Baldwin as a tweet:

I am starting Follow Fridays. Every Friday, suggest a person to follow, and everyone follow him/her. Today its @fancyjeffrey & @w1redone.
3:53 AM Jan 17th from TweetDeck

Note there was no hashtag but Mykl Roventine @myklroventine quickly responded:

@micah Great idea! You need a hashtag for that – #followfridays
3:57 AM Jan 17th from web in reply to micah

That was all it took for a Twitter reputation system to be born – the combination of Twitter names and a hashtag. Now we have the followfridays web site with the by-line ‘Follow friends that your friends recommend’ that shows the stream of tweets containing the #followfridays hashtag.

Back to the podcast. Scott Lemon on learning of the #followfridays hashtag, and having suitable web application code open on his machine, decided to record the recommendations in a database, do the analysis, and in a few hours produced the TopFollowFriday web site. This is a really impressive site which allows you to show the daily and all-time rankings of recommendations and the recommenders – a wonderful job. As some people have been known to recommend themselves (perish the thought), be warned, Scott’s site publishes this information too!

Thus the power of combining two Twitter syntaxes comes to the fore. It is not surprising that Scott is now looking at a further Twitter syntax extension to his powerful recommendation system. He proposes to use +sometag to add further information about an individual recommendation. So +programmer would recommend a Twitter account as a programmer, and so on. He also ponders what –programmer might mean.

The takeaway here is that if you wanting to exploit the Twitter message stream in this way you had better make a claim on the other special characters for your own idea and be quick about it.

Written by Michael Rees

28 March 2009 at 11:33

Posted in Microblogging, Software development

Barcamp Gold Coast Meeting 3

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The registration page for Barcamp Gold Coast meeting 3 gives details of those attendees who chose to include their contact details. We had a range of very interesting talks that were streamed live in a very professional manner by Glenn Goodman.

Thanks must go to Steve Dalton and the organising committee for a most interesting day. Only DW, DM and MR made it to The Grande for a very noisy follow-up drink.

CoverItLive interactive record

Barcamp Gold Coast 3

(03/15/2009)