Excellent short (55 mb) about BarCamp by Dorrian Porter. Really good film. Love it!

An anonymous commenter on my first BarCampUK post has created a wiki for us to use. Thank you, anonymouscommenterwhomIsuspectisMikeJonesconsideringthatheregisteredthedomain.

All we need now is a venue! And a date! Wifi! Logo! T-shirts! Sponsors! And pizza!!

BarCampUK

I spent much of my evenings and mornings this weekend watching the video feed from BarCamp, the impromptu open source alternative to FooCamp.

For those of you who don't know, FooCamp is a camp-out organised by publishing house O'Reilly. (In case you're wondering, 'foo' = 'Friends Of O'Reilly', but is also used in programming as an example variable name, e.g. $foo to mean $whatever_variable_goes_in_here. (Additionally, c.f. Foo Fighters and UFOs.)) It's an cosy little event (just 225 attendees, so terribly, terribly cosy. Specially as they all have to share a sleeping bag) which works on a strictly invite-only basis. Trouble is, you simply can't fit in all the people who want to go (which is always more than 225 people), so inevitably some get left off the list.

A couple of weeks ago, if that, Chris Messina, Andy Smith, Tantek Çelik, Matt Mullenweg, Ryan King and Eris Free thought that it'd be sort of cool to do a BarCamp for all the people who wanted to go to FooCamp but didn't get an invitation. No animosity, no competition, just an open source version. Only rule: If you come, you present (or help).

They got a venue from SocialText, and a whole bunch of really cool people to come and hang out and talk about geeky stuff. It was great fun watching the video stream, chatting in the #barcamp IRC channel, and generally wishing that I'd been able to be there. (Well, there and at FooCamp. I'm not too proud to say I would have loved to have been at both.)

Whilst I was talking to Chris, I rashly suggested that I start the ball rolling on BarCampUK. Not that I don't have enough on my plate already, but the guiding principle behind BarCamp is self-organisation. That is to say, there's no finding speakers or setting up a schedule - people just pitch up and present. Or hang out. Or hack code. Or whatever.

One of the things that I loved about San Francisco is just how often and how easily the geeks there seem to get together. Hacker parties where geeks sit around coding. Tag Tuesday were geeks sit around talking about the tagging. These get-togethers seem to happen so easily there. Why not here?

So, who's up for BarCampUK? We need a venue. A date. Wifi. Maybe some T-shirts. And a bunch of geeks who want to just get together and throw ideas around. (Of course, if there's anyone who wants to help me with the unavoidable logistics side of things, so much the better.)

Sign your name in the comments on the wiki if you want to come.

(PS Sorry for all the parentheses. (It's just a temporary affliction.))

BarCampUK

Technorati Tags: BarCampUK

Off again now, up to London in preparation for the New Media Knowledge seminar, Blogging: A Real Conversation. Starts at 2pm tomorrow, at 01zero-one, Peter Street, Soho, London W1F 0HS. I'll be giving a deeply subjective view of objectivity. Be there, or miss the chance to heckle me something awful.

I will likely be incommunicado for most of the next three days. If I owe you an email, and I probably do, I promise I'll get onto it as soon as I get back.

Sitting here in departures in JFK, after a ludicrously early start and a flight over from San Francisco, during which I watched Henman fuck up Wimbledon for another year. Can't believe I've missed the first week of tennis - what poor timing. Not much battery left on the laptop, so figure I had better use it whilst I am still awake enough to do so.

I have to say, I am sorry to be here. I really fell in love with San Francisco - it's such a great city. Not that I saw much of it, to be honest, because I spent most of my time in meetings rooms and offices and the conference. If you're wondering what happened to my 'holiday', Technorati Live 8 happened to it. As I was in San Francisco, and as Technorati needed a temporary geek wrangler, they asked me to help out. It was great fun to work with everyone at T'rati - they are not just cool people, but fun as well. They're doing good stuff behind the scenes there, and I hope I get the chance to work with them again.

If you have been following my Supernova posts over on Strange, then you'll know that I had a fantastic time at the conference. I have had really good feedback from the Business Blogging Workshop that I moderated, so that seems to have gone down well. I have an audio recording of the sessions and will post that as soon as I can. I don't think anyone recorded my second appearance with Ross Mayfield and Mary Hodder in the Backchannel Round-Up panel, which was about as chaotic and all-over-the-place a panel as I have been on.

Some of the sessions were really great - highlights included stuff about telecoms/VoIP and Linda Stone's session on attention. But, as usual, the best bits happened in between sessions in the hallway. I finally got to meet David Weinberger, who is just the loveliest man and with whom I wish I could have spent a bit more time talking about the future of blogging. Joho the Blog was one of the first blogs I ever read, along with Nic Dafis' Morfablog and Neil Gaiman's blog, so it was so cool to meet David at last. (Of course, this means that of the three biggest influences on my early blogging 'career', I have only Neil yet to meet. Anyone's guess if that every actually happens, of course.)

I also got to yap at everyone and anyone who would listen to me about business blogging and the like. You can see me in action on CNET, talking to David about how I think blogging will develop and how it will affect people's lives. I was also interviewed by Internet News about marketing and blogging, and did a podcast on PodTech.net about business blogging. I also did another video interview with Jonathan Marks about blogging, and as soon as I have know if/when that is available online, I will let you know.

[On the plane now, battery holding out.]

Shock of the trip, however, was the email I got telling me that I featured in the top 150 blogs, as published in/on AlwaysOn. Chocolate and Vodka is one of the 50 'Honourable Mentions' - i.e. blogs that didn't quite make the top 100 but which for some reason someone found fit to mention in the list anyway. It's kind of odd to think that this little blog, so aimless and rambling as it is, should make it on to anyone's list, so I'm chuffed. Welcome to anyone who came here via AlwaysOn.

Getting about a bit, eh?

Anyway, have acquired a new client whilst in SF too, which is great and if all goes well it might mean a few more trips to The City. More news on that as and when. It did mean, however, that I had to cancel my day in New York, so apologies to Dan, Andy and Michael for not being around when I had hoped I would. Next time, I promise.

Huge thanks to Adam Hertz and Maciej Stachowiak for being most gracious and lovely hosts and for providing me with unlimited wifi, and to Kevin Werbach and Jeanne Logozzo for inviting me to Supernova and for giving me both the opportunity to speak (twice at that!) and the damn fine excuse to go to San Francisco at last. And thank you to everyone I met - everyone was so friendly and charming. I feel like I finally found my peer group.

Session went ok, I think. Hard to tell from my vantage point, but it seemed ok. Too tired to blog now. Need sleep.

I'm hauling my ass over to San Francisco in June for the Supernova05 conference (20 - 22 June), at which I will be moderating a panel discussion on Business Blogging, with Robert Scoble, Charlene Li and someone from Six Apart. That'll be on Monday 20 June, 2.30 - 4.00pm, if you want to come along.

I am so looking forward to this trip. I love conferences, probably because I haven't been to all that many, but the opportunity to hang out with cool people who have brains so much bigger than mine is always welcome. I also relish the prospect of being a workshop moderator. Never done it before, so it will be an interesting challenge. It's always easier to be a panel member, but if that's all I ever do I won't ever improve my public speaking skills.

Also looking forward to hanging out with my friends in SF. I know loads people over there, many of whom I have never actually met. Will be way cool to be able to go for a pint or two - I really want to go to the Welsh pub I saw last time I was there - and get to know people in an offline setting.

If you're in SF and you want to meet up, drop me an email.

It's amazing what casually throwing someone's name around in the blogosphere can get you. Mentioned during an Etech presentation, for example:

Danny: One thing about 43 Folders is what crosses over from the first adopters to the world. Not everything makes it. Take text-editors: a blog entry on Corante by Suw talked about how in six months, hundreds of text editors have failed to organize her life. She blamed me, so I bought her a Starbucks.

And I have to say, what a great Starbucks that was.

Unfortunately, I've been doing actual work today, so arrived virtually at Etech later than usual, missing Cory and Larry's talk, Paula's talk, Danny's updated Life Hacks talk and a bunch of other stuff that I wished I'd seen (or had the opportunity to fail to see, considering the quality of iSights at distance). I pitched up into IRC just after Danny mentioned me, which was a strange bit of timing. Probably a good job that Kevin didn't have me online in Danny's talk at the time otherwise I could have been overcome with excitement at hearing my name echoing round the hallowed halls of O'Reilly.

Instead, I have relied on Cory's most excellent transcription skills to communicate the updated Life Hacks talk, although if anyone does have audio or video, I'd love to hear/see it. It's a real shame, though, that with all those Macs around, there was no SubEthaEdit collaborative note taking going on. Apparently Rendezvous was too flakey, and considering the quality of the video feed that I 'enjoyed', I can quite believe it. Such a shame. You would have through that by now they would have figured out the wifi problem.

Anyway, that's it for another twelve months. Maybe next year I'll submit a paper. Something about virtual presence and conference attendance, maybe. After all, blogs will be so passé by then.

etech etech05

I really like having this virtual presence at Etech. The wifi's been much more reliable today, so I've been able to have a pretty consistent vidchat with Kevin again, and have been in some sessions and am currently at lunch. The difficulty of clear audio at both ends of the video link remains, though - frequently I can only just hear what is being said, but the people on the other end can't hear what I'm saying at all.

That said, it was a pleasure to sort-of-meet David Weinberger, Sean Bonner, James Seng, Robert Kaye from MusicBrainz, and a whole bunch of other really cool people, not to mention having a chat again with Ewan Spence and Crow, who are a wee bit like Rod Hull and Emu on acid.

Some nice pics of it though, first from James Seng:



And also from Sean Bonner:



Sean also took a great pic of the row Kevin and I were sitting in yesterday:


(Kevin Marks, John Battelle, Xeni Jardin, Doc Searls)

I took a few snaps too, which are up on Flickr:



etech etech05

I had really hoped to get over to Etech this year, but circumstances conspired against me and instead I am stuck here in Dorset, bemoaning my fate. Well, not completely... Thanks to iChat, a webcam, Kevin Marks and the very flakey network at the Etech venue, I've been Etech Camgirl, as Cory put it, smiling out at everyone from Kevin's laptop.


The view from here

I've caught snatches of various presentations, although never enough to say for certain what they were about, and have mingled with attendees in the hallways and lobby. I have smiled and waved at a number of very pixelated faces, and attempted to say hello to some people who probably couldn't hear what I was saying - I certainly had a hard time making out what they were saying - but it was fun anyway.

If you were amongst that number and asked me what the weather was like in England, I was trying to say that it's been dull and grey here.

Virtual attendance it is not - no need for O'Reilly to get worried about people 'getting in' for free. But it gives me a feel for the conference, for what I'm missing out on, and it's the best we can do under the circumstances. I just wish that the networks were a little more robust, and that webcams were better, and then maybe, just maybe, it would I would have spent the majority of the last few hours actually watching and listening, instead of restarting iChat, attempting to get a video link going, and cursing the connection when it craps out.

Fingers crossed that next year I get to be there in person.

I'm leaving this afternoon to go up to London, and will be flying out to Vancouver via San Francisco tomorrow. It's going to be a long journey, but I have books, copies of the New Scientist, my iPod and my laptop, so no real excuse for getting bored. If you're going to be at Northern Voice on Saturday, please do feel free to pop over and say hello.

In the meantime, blogging will be light to non-existent, with a 50% chance of Flickr activity, especially now that I've remembered my camera cable.

I am going to have a few hours to kill in San Francisco on 21 Feb, so I thought it would be nice to have lunch with whomever's around. My good friend Maciej is going to pick me up from the airport and we'll be meeting up with Kevin as well, so if anyone else wants to turn up, you're welcome.

As for where, Maciej has suggested Blowfish, a sushi place where I can get my fix of edamame. It's on Bryant Street, and not too far from the airport. I'll have to leave around 2pm in order to go and check in, so I suggest an early start, around 12noon. Please leave a comment here if you are interested.

We are likely to be having coffee somewhere beforehand too, so ping me if you've got time to kill before lunch.

The London School of Economics has invited me to take part in a panel debate called The Fall and Fall of Journalism on Monday 28 February, at 6.30pm (tickets £8):

A panel of speakers will debate whether the traditional role of journalists is being usurped by simply anyone who has access to a digital camera, camcorder and the internet. This debate will explore the new phenomena of citizen reporting, blogging and other new technology/new media-enabled reporting.

I will be discussing the impact of blogging on journalism with Leslie Bunder, Editor, journalistic.co.uk; John Lloyd, Editor, Financial Times Magazine; and Professor Robin Mansell, Dixons Chair in New Media and the Internet, LSE.

This should be an interesting debate, which I am very much looking forward to. I've been keeping my eye on the discussions that have happened in the States, not least because I am both blogger and, occasionally, journalist so I can see things from both sides of the fence. Of course, the situation here in the UK is slightly different, because the nature of our media is slightly different, but I think the main premises stand.

So, if you're in the London area, do drop in and feel free to say hello afterwards!

Saturday 22 Jan, from around 8pm I think, at Clery's, 113 Dartmouth St, Boston. Be there or be, er, somewhere else. I'll be the one with the British accent.

In seven days time I shall be sitting on another plane making my way to Boston for a few days. Gonna meet up with my belovéd, and spend some time hanging out with The Redhead, Joey and Itamar. Specifically, on Saturday 22nd we will be at Clery's so if you are in the area please do come out and play! (Just don't ask me where Clery's is, as I have no idea. I'm just going to follow Red when I get there.)

I have also located a sixpence for Red to wear in her matrimonial shoe. I had never heard the additional line to the traditional mnemonic for the items a bride is supposed to have on her personage at the time of marriage:

Something old, something new
Something borrowed, something blue
And a sixpence in her shoe

I'm honoured to have been asked to supply the sixpence, and delighted that I am able to.

Right now, however, I have just arrived in London for a couple of meetings tomorrow and an intimate little Duran Duran gig at the Hammersmith Palais.

The next few days will go quickly, the weekend will just fly by and before I know it I will be where I most want to be.