BarCamp Block was extraordinary — I spent Saturday morning and afternoon there. (Family commitments kept me from the Saturday evening and Sunday events or I’d have stayed all the way through.) This “unconference” was a free event, with “programming” supplied ad hoc by the attendees themselves, and a schedule devised on the fly at the start of the weekend.

Sounds like chaos? “Cult of the Amateur” mediocrity? No way. Think instead of the energy, ideas and conviviality that can flow from a crowd of smart people when they’re given a chance to make things up as they go along.

The event was huge — hundreds of people gathered primarily around one block in downtown Palo Alto centered on the SocialText offices. No one could possibly have attended more than a fraction of the sessions. Three highlights for me were:

• A discussion among about a dozen people at the Institute for the Future office about coping with RSS overload. This was started by someone who works at a company that’s producing a sort of personal (or collaborative) filter for your RSS feeds (so you can train your feed reader to only show you posts on a set of topics that you’re interested in). I have no use for such a product; when I subscribe to a feed I’m happy if the blogger surprises me with interesting stuff that I didn’t know I was interested in (and that I’d never see with a feed filtered by preset criteria). But the idea led to a good exchange in the room, and helped crystallize my thinking on a feed-reader feature that would make a big difference (for me, anyway!). I’ll post separately on that.

• Tantek Celik led an open discussion about the state of microformats, a subject I’m increasingly interested in. This is one of those Web-technology phenomena that at the moment is intelligible almost exclusively to geeks, but I think that — like blogs or RSS — it will become much more widely useful and adopted in the next few years. I’ll also be writing more on the subject later.

• Finally, Brad Fitzpatrick, David Recordon and Joseph Smarr led a session on “Opening the Social Graph.” They were talking about a pragmatic, we-could-build-it-now solution to the much-discussed problem on the “social web” of proliferating networks. Who wants to join another social networking site when, each time you do that, you have to painstakingly rebuild your list of “friends” or relationships? Isn’t there a way to make this information portable? LiveJournal founder Fitzpatrick’s recent paper on this subject proposed one approach. At BarCamp Fitzpatrick and his collaborators talked about setting up a nonprofit organization that would serve as the hub for the backend data services his solution would require. Another fascinating subject worth more future in-depth posting. (No one seems to have posted notes on the session, so I’ll try to add mine to the conference wiki soon.)

So there you have it: I spent less than a full day and came away with my head buzzing and three major areas of material to pursue more deeply. I don’t think any of the old-fashioned, CEOs-on-stage conferences I’ve been to match that record.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Events, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.