February 21, 2006

Fun at MashupCamp

I had a long, exhausting and fun day at MashupCamp. Highlights of the day included:

  • Running into Paul Martino, who I've only met once before, when he hosted a very fancy and very good steak dinner at ETech 2004. He is an extremely sharp guy, and I'm looking forward to checking out aggregate knowledge's product when it launches in a couple of weeks.
  • Learning about WS Finder, Strike Iron, and The Programmable Web, all of which will be personally and professionally useful to me.
  • Running into an old acquaintance whom I have known since before the 2004 election, and learning that we had something else besides politics and open source in common, a shared love for Costa Rica, and a desire to live there some day.
  • "Getting" Ning, after seeing Yoz Grahame demo Ning. I took some decent notes of the Rapid Application Development session and stuck them on the wiki.
  • Being blown away by CBForce, an enterprise Mashup by the unfortunately named Bungee Labs (doesn't go well with an enterprise play, IMHO). It is a little unnerving that their website has gone dark.
  • Enjoying a fun and mildly snarky discussion of why mashups fail, that unfortunately devolved into the "what is a mashup" conversation that is going to bedevil this space as much as the "what is blogging" question wasted lots of time and energy in that space.
  • Seeing a neat proof of concept mashup that could be turned into useful political tool, fundrace.
  • Running into lots of people I know only from the web, as well as some of the local Web 2.0 crowd.
A surprising highlight was wandering through the collection of the computer museum, and seeing lots of "friends" from my teens (Trash-80, Model 100, Kaypro II), college (Osbourne, IBM Mainframe), early career (original IBM PC), as well as pen-computing prototypes I slaved over for long hours at GO (GO PenPoint Lombard and Hyde). I took lots of photos of the computers, which I will not bore anyone with (yet).

All in all, a day well spent. I've posted my people MashupCamp pictures up the Geodog account at Flickr. They aren't nearly as good as Scott Beale's mashup photos, which I highly recommend, but on the other hand I have taken the trouble to label them, so you can tell who (some) of the people are.

Correction: I have removed a quote formerly part of this post. The speaker wrote to me and argued that his words were taken out of context, and as such the quote was a caricature of the complex idea he was trying to convey, and was quite misleading. I reviewed it and concluded that he was right, and that I was wrong to have quoted him without putting the quote in context. My apologies to the speaker.

Posted by Geodog at February 21, 2006 01:03 AM | TrackBack
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