David Emery OnlineThat was the weekend that was
4 September 2006
Over the weekend I had the fortune to attend the first BarCamp London which was one of the interesting and well organised events I’ve been to in a long time. Much kudos to Ben Ian and Yahoo for organising it and providing the location.
I’m not sure where to start with a summation of the event – there was so much going on, and so much of it was interesting. My talk went quite well, I think – I chaired a discussion on Digital Music, which rambled around such topics as DRM, iTunes’ market monopoly, what’s next after the iPod (mobile phones, which I think everyone was sure of) and the potential impact of the MySpace records announcement (they’re letting anybody sell mp3s on MySpace).
Of the presentations I saw, the highlights were quite a varied bunch, which I think shows the strengths of the un-conference format (making everybody talk brings some interesting people out of the woodwork).
Simon Willison’s talk on OpenID was very interesting – OpenID solves one problem, that of having multiple usernames and passwords on multiple sites, but it does it in a way that seems well thought out and highly useful. I also caught some of the many and varied Microformats talks, and Microformats in a similar vain use non-intrusive technology to enhance the web experience. As Frances points out, a combination of OpenID, which handles the central point authentication, and Microformats which handle your personal metadata (such as Name, avatar image, web site etc) would be really powerful. Rest assured, I plan to start liberally adding Microformats to every site I can…
Chris Heilmann’s pair of talks relating to CSS and Javascript were also very interesting; I completely agree with the concept of using javascript when it’s appropriate – for behaviour – even when CSS might be able to do it (such as drop down menus), as with Javascript you have so much more flexibility for creating a more useable interface. He also showed off an interesting new Javascript technique, which is hush-hush at the moment, but has quite a few interesting possibilities.
A pair of talks on Sunday were both interesting as they weren’t the traditional geek talk, present-a-new-bit-of-tech style presentation. First up was Matt Patterson talk; “Everything I know about programming I learnt from typography”. It was very interesting firstly learning a bit more about typography, of which I have a layman’s interest in, and also thinking about such ideas as “Craft” and “Education”, and how these concepts relate back to software engineering and web design.
The second was by Sofia Kallin (who’s Ben’s long suffering wife) which really highlighted how blinkered the tech world is. Most people don’t know what RSS is, or are aware of any of the sites that most “geeks” visit on a daily basis. For example, Sofia had a list of problems with Flickr all of which to the geek outsider were fairly trivial, minor problems that would probably take non more then an hour of someone’s time to fix. That, of course, is not the point though – the point is that while geeks will just work around any problems they encounter, most people simple won’t.
Personally, at every step of the way I try and take a step back and look at things as best as I can from a less experienced users point of view. I had almost got to a point where I took it for granted that this is what everybody did, but the reaction to Sofia’s points was very telling – instantly people started going “oh, but if you do this” and “if you just download a different uploader program and do that”, which was fundamentally missing the point. That’s simply not what most people would do – they don’t see using software (or a web site) as a problem solving exercise.
I’ve missed out a whole load of interesting talks, as there’s almost too much to go into, but they were universally interesting and I’ve learnt heaps – there’s lots of new ideas going round in my head so expect to see some of them over the next few blog posts.
Here’s to the next one!