(This is a cross-post from my personal blog)
Shack here. A BarCamp is a day of intentionally free-flowing, intense, themed presentations and discussion, but Wikipedia probably does a better job explaining the ideas behind it than I do. I met up with 94 other internet otaku, nerds, teachers, bloggers, and podcasters to talk about where the Web came from, what it is, and where it's headed.
Highlights from the event:
Fumi's talk on Japanese geek culture
Mitcho presenting Ubiquity (didn't actually make the talk, but saw the slideshare presentation)
Karamoon on Security
The above are a small sampling of what was going on. Check out our space in Vimeo for videos of the talks, or Slideshare for the presentations.I led a talk on "The Transient Web." We talked about the
implications of relying on third-party services to host embedded
content, and the deceptive permanence of the web institutions we take
for granted. What happens when Flickr or YouTube don't have the money
to run their servers any more? Suddenly all the blogs linking or
embedding that content, and all the blogs that link to them, are dead
trails of broken hypertext. What happens when TinyURL goes down, and
no one knows where all the shortened URLs in our tweets are supposed
to point?
I guess we could maintain our own backups of all our content, keep it
on the same server as our blogs, and do regular exports, but the
economist in me says that's inefficient, and I'm just too damn lazy.
Is there a way we can collectively work on web permanence, or are we
expecting everything we create to rot away into a network of dead
links and broken scripts? We didn't really reach a conclusion, but it
was still a good discussion to have.
Barcamp was about spontaneity, about leaving marketing at the door,
about sharing and learning. It had its ups and downs, but I think it
generally went off really well, and was a good base for future Japan
barcamps. Big ups to Karamoon, Jim, lhupa, and all the other staff for
putting the event together, as well as all our sponsors. Unsubsidized,
I'm sure an all-day conference with food would be outside my student
budget.
Oh, and my pictures:
Want to get involved in the next BarCamp? Run over to the already-formed planning site for BarCamp Tokyo Fall 2009.
Leave a comment