WebWriting.com

One of the interesting talks at BarCamp was on visualizations. Matt McKeon talked about a service they’ve developed at IBM Research called Many-Eyes. He recently put together a tag cloud of the BarCamp registration page. If there was any doubt as to the preferred e-mail provider for BarCamp attendees, this visualization makes it obvious.

Twitter’s Down Again

I spent this past weekend suffering from allergies and probably something else that the kid gave me. I was also at Barcamp (trooper that I am) sniffling my way through two very exciting days. By far most surprising was the number of entrepreneurs, especially given the geeky nature of the crowd.

Sessions ranged from gaming to hardware hacking to rails, django, twitter and semantic web. If you’re not familiar with Barcamp it is an unconference. Registration is via wiki and donations are optional. There are corporate sponsors who help pay for breakfasts, lunches and snacks. Conference topics are self selected and each 30min session is as much a presentation as discussion. Some of the best discussions are in the hallway or ad-hoc groups assembling in the cafeteria. You can see the final schedule as well as links and presentations at barcampboston.org. There were also some links and thoughts twittered at #bcb3.

One of the cool new tools I discovered was snaplogic, a 100% python pluggable transformation tool. It’s more yahoo pipes than talend or kettle. Totally hackable. There was a distributed twitter talk that consisted of people discussing the need for distributed twitter. The google appengine discussion was mostly Q&A about appengine and a guy from google taking notes on feature requests. I’m going to have to look into wpbook - a wordpress facebook app theme - when I get some free time (when’s that?). The semantic web discussion turned up some interesting pointers (calais and opencyc). There was a great discussion about connectivity between platforms (the internet being a platform, mobile devices, real world, etc). And consensus among those who showed up was that the final cylon is either some random person we have yet to see or the ship. All in all a good weekend - save the allergies.