I spent Saturday day and night at BarCamp, an open-invite 48 hour internet geek gathering in Palo Alto yesterday and it was the best sunny Saturday I’ve spent in an office ever. 70 or so coder/hacker types came together to share what they’ve been working on, understand what others are doing and thinking about, and then talk, question, riff on all of the above. Ages spanned form 18 to 65 or so and skill-levels, backgrounds and interests seemed to be as different as everyone’s names. The was ample wifi, projectors, white boards, power strips, donated food, caffinated beverages (then beer) and the best friendly, interested, engaging, helpful web geeks everywhere.

When I was a pre-teen I remember such weekends working on a TRS-80 or Apple II-e the way 50’s kids would spend around a car. Computer club back then was even better that playing D&D. Then I became enamored with beer, music, and girls, and by college, though I took some computer classes, anything that smelled like academic spirit seemed like a waste of possible socio-mental devlopment time and I shunned it like middle-school band. So I rather missed out on Jolt-fueled all-nighter coding sessions even though deep down it fits so natually to my make-up. It’s amazing that it took me almost 10 straight years of being a web engineer, it took me 9 to finally meet enough people who like doing this beyond the bare minimum required by their employment.

The best presentations/experiences for me were:

1. Watching a demo of the Flock browser, a private release of the open-source Mozilla browser that will allow for many time-saving functions for web-related tasks for anyone.
2. Reviewing /the/ most current understanding and perceived future of textual topic clouds. It’s changing Dogster by allowing for completely different exploration and search. My summation in short is that tagging will never supersede goolge-like keyword search, but tags and their inherent metadata will allow for facetive clustering that would allow for computer-built associations that are not possible without them. Flickr has deployed tag cluster searching, such as on the word ‘urban’.
3. Thinking about the feasibility of making a core set web tools (a long list of common desires like blogging, photo-sharing, notes) that non-technical users could use like lego to build into there own desired permutations. I used to scoff at the idea, but if deployed right it’s ready to be done right now.
4. Hearing and seeing how flawed cell provider security systems are. Default passwords are not even considered company secrets and spoofing caller ID (even to a cellco tech operator) is easily done by a knowing geek.
5. Being motivated to make a blogging tool plugin that will allow any blog reader to give the author a gold star in the same way that we let users of Dogster and Catster give bones and treats as a way of saying I was on your page and I liked it. Wish me luck.

   There is Barcamp a wiki site with copious notes, bios and infos and endless photos on Flickr.

   People had a lot of fun with me WikiShirt.

   Hat tip to my SFist editor and BarCamper JacksonWest for new fav term ‘nerdtacular’ and to Min Jung Kim who is, in fact, nerdtacular!