David Emery OnlineScenester
18 October 2006
As pointed out by Ian there’s an article on the recent BarCamp London in this months .net magazine.
Yes, that is me taking up most of the page.
Yes, I do look quite a lot like a chipmunk.
Yes, they do use the picture three times.
It’s certainly nice to be in the pages of a magazine, but they could have used a nicer picture. Oh well. For some context, it was taken during my talk on Digital Music, and left to right that’s Matt Patterson, Ben Ward, Steve Marshall and me (the chipmunk).
Photography aside, it’s really nice to see BarCamp London being featured in the pages of a magazine – it was a really great event and deserves more publicity. If you go and check out Ian’s blog you’ll see that at the moment there’s a huge amount of activity in the UK “geek” scene – this week I think there’s an event every evening, and looming on the horizon is another BarCamp and and Christmas Geek Party.
I think all this activity is indicative of a very interesting “movement” happening here in the UK. Recently it’s often been pointed out that London – and the UK in general – doesn’t seem to have many startups, and the “scene” in general is (or has been) a lot quieter then places like San Francisco. The large proliferation of social events happening over here at the moment is quite possibly the tip of a much larger iceberg – I think the startup and “tech” culture may have finally caught root.
Certainly, the chances of UK-based geeks hooking up at one of these events and starting the “next big thing” are so much higher now then they ever have been. Obviously, we’ll have to wait and see, but I think something really exciting may be happening here.
Move over Silicon Valley.