JonMountjoy.com

I’ve just returned from my first BarCamp Scotland. It was great fun, and I met some interesting local folk. This included:

• the kilt-wearing Ewan Spence who demoed Qik and seesmic. Live streaming from his phone was pretty cool.
• hypernumbers, whose Erlang-implemented system allows you to assign a URL to each cell in a spreadsheet, which you can then surface wherever you like (such as on a web page). Think “spreadsheet cells as a service.” Their website provides a little more details, but rather curiously doesn’t have a blog.
• Dave McClure, who gave a great talk on Startup Metrics and Business Models for [Scottish] Pirates, filled with solid advice. For example, don’t build features for features sake - think conversion - does that feature increase conversion?; and build a trust relationship before you push for referrals. Lots more in the linked presentation.
• Skyskanner, who were not only interesting because they did a splendid job sponsoring the drinks. Their website actually solves a problem I have: find me a flight leaving this city on this day across all airlines. Most travel sites can’t solve that problem - they always demand a destination, which doesn’t allow for much spontaneity now does it! And you’ve got to love their price isobar graph.

I also gave a talk on online communities and some of the ways in which to grow them. All in all, a good two days - thanks to the sponsors and organisers.

Technorati Tags:
barcamp, barcampscotland, erlang

I’ve just spent 5 days in Barcelona and I loved every minute of it. How I regret not including a weekend in my trip. The city was clean, the transport network efficient, the weather superb, the food sublime, and the city had a wonderful buzz; it felt alive, lived in, enjoyable.

My hotel wasn’t particularly good, but I found a number of great patisserias nearby that supplied an alternative breakfast. The first time I walked past one of these I saw a number of Barcelona natives standing around a bar table, eating a pastry and sipping an espresso. I joined them the next morning and every morning after that.

I had a number of memorable meals: a ham dish (obligatory in Spain) at els quatre gats (photo coming), and a superb array of dishes at the Windsor (rather english sounding!) and tapas of course, at various restaurants. Lots of seafood (I generally only eat fish, though I did have another taste of Arròs negre) and I avoided the goats cheese (learned that after visiting Toledo a few years back).

I had a half day to myself the first day I arrived, and so visited Casa Batlló, one of Gaudi’s buildings. It was quite something, and you can see why it’s called the house of bones.

On the final evening, at around 2am, Victoria and Simone decided that we needed to visit the Sagrada Familia, which we duly did. Luckily it’s well lit for the batty tourists. Wow. Describing it, I could only come up with “organic gothic.” It felt a little like a mixture between the architecture and feel of the alien structures in Alien, and some of the cruisers in Babylon 5. Seriously!

Conferences are really about meeting people, and Barcelona’s cafes and tapas bars provided many opportunities. Patrick, Arunabh,Victoria, Quinton, Dain, Simone, Eddie, Pieter, Marcus x 2, Scott, Gary, Catarina, Hussein, Linda, Martin and many more made it even more worthwhile.

The ETech’05 Keynote was pretty interesting. I enjoyed the patterns that Tim and Rael present, and I repeat a few of the them here, drawing a lesson at the end:

• “Design for Participation” - success lies in small pieces loosely joined
• “User-centered development” - great benefit to sharing efforts and processes with users
• “Syndicate e-commerce” - glue together small pieces of others
• “Users add value to shared data”
• “Network effects by default” - make participation the default
• “The long tail” - many of the limiting factors from the physical world are absent on the internet
• “Software above the level of a single device” - design to integrate services across disparate devices
• “Packets and shipping containers” - understand the packet size of the application domain, the most effective way to ship

Though I didn’t attend the conference, it appears to have been a great success and well presented - with a novel combination of information sources: Good speakers, great weblog coverage, articles, wikis, tags galore, flickr feeds, the Attention Stream and more. To me, all of these ways of presenting the conference follow on from the patterns. The conference itself seems to have been designed for participation, it’s obviously user-centered and devices like the Attention Stream syndicate other applications. The attendees added value to the conference, and almost all information sources were public and immediately available. Remixing was happening at almost all levels too: direct quotes from the speakers were blogged, thoughts, articles and interviews too. Awesome.I live many thousands of miles away, but could participate at some level. That’s phenomenal. I’d like to be even more involved next time, which makes me think back to some of the other patterns:

• Above the level of a single device - at a conference, the device is the speaker’s voice and the attendee’s ears. So, how about making everything available to non-attendee’s ears too.
• Packets and shipping containers - sounds suspiciously like “MP3 and podcasts” to me
• The long tail - well that’s all the other folk that couldn’t physically attend the conference

Although there are now a few podcasts available, having them available after each speaker would benefit not only those present, but those abroad too. I hope that more conferences move towards the standards set by ETech’05, and beyond. Afterall, permitting the long tail to participate has been shown to deliver unprecedented rewards.