Monday, March 06, 2006

BarCamp Los Angeles Wrap-Up

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Beyond getting my quick presentation out of the way, i got to meet a lot of cool people doing very interesting things, and missed a lot of good ones too.

Check out the BarCamp LA Wiki for what people presented, and hopefully they'll be updating the grid with links to their material.

Sean Bonner and Jillian Tate from Blogging.la have been thoroughly covering the event.

We were privy to some really cool demos of home-media-stuff that Yahoo is currently working on. Some sort of healthy, usable, alternative to Windows Media Center.

I got to chat with Travis from redswoosh.net. They were around way before dijjer, and are offering a very interesting framework for distributed content delivery, aka P2P CDN. Which is how i should have framed my dijjer review in the first place, versus pitting it straight against BitTorrent, which really fits different use cases. Travis mentioned they'll have a Linux and Mac OS X client available soon. Big name media companies are already leveraging them. They've built a business around turning the companies that used to sue them for billions, into rabid customers, by building a compelling framework that would cater to their needs, and to the needs of anybody who wishes to distribute content without footing high bandwidth bills.

Kent Nichols showed us all about AskANinja.com (AAN), and gave a very good presentation on various strategies to build podcasts with zero budget and focused ideas. AAN is insanely funny.

Matt Homann asked very pertinent questions on building effective conferences.

Chris Messina showed-off Flock. It's not a web browser. And that just may well be a very good thing. Its goal is to treat your online as an event stream, and Flock is meant to harness it, organize it.

Steve Myers showed-off a really cool Java-3D Peer-to-Peer application that leverages JXTA.

Debi Jones and Patrick Neeman led a very convivial discussion about myspace's popularity and some of its key drivers. One interesting thought i took away was that, for a certain younger demographic, being able to offer a highly personalized online representation of themselves matters more than just about anything else. No matter how unusable the page may be. See the report that sparked the discussion.

Eric, in his Things Left Incomplete presentation, showed us interesting work he's doing with RDF to model relationships from graphs, into an RDF store, managed and queried by custom-built perl tools, and presented thru XSLT transformations.

I caught some stuff on the Viral Marketing session, I need to go over the materials again, as soon as they put it online :)

I also caught a glimpse of Ilya's Web 2.0 without the web presentation. I really like his analysis, resonates spot-on by me. I'm also voting his presentation the coolest presentation format. I love it. Very effective.

Jason Calcanis wasn't there. With his really cool pooch. And he didn't call bullsh*t on a lot of companies and people out there doing bad stuff. None of this happened. In fact, i'm not even writing about this. ;)

Ian C. Rogers did a great presentation on physics of Media 2.0. I need to start reading-up on XIPF, XSPF.

I hope I can get my grubby paws on the material for most presentations I completely missed >:|

Additional shouts out to:

Nicole Simon, aus Deuthschland, for so-rightfuly pointing out that U.S. companies ought to be mindful of their international audiences when sponsoring podcasts, and brainstorming about some potentially nifty ways to help podcasters be in closer touch to their audience. Nicole didn't get to do her official presentation but has engaged many of her fellow geeks in thought-provoking discussions. Thanks Neezee :D

Jason Cosper, for showing me JabPhone, and showing a few lucky participants who hadn't gotten sucked into Jason Calcanis's rant (that didn't happen), how to get free sh*t for writing about stuff you like.

Ori Neidich for having attained UberGeekdom at Digital Domain, and for being The Curator of this guy's baby.

James Gross and the folks from Feedster.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Chris, thanks for joining us in the MySpace conversation. There's an article on my blog which was the impetus for the talk at Bar Camp called The Site that Ate the Blogosphere

Please feel free to link to me from your post, as well. Thanks, again.

Chris Holland said...

hehe yeap that's him :) and yeah that was a long time ago, so you likely have a totally different beast on your hands now :)

He couldn't make it to BarCamp, but he lives right up the street from me, and at times hosts fun geek dinners at his house. i'll drop you an email next time we do.