TagCamp was great, with pictures!

Posted on Categories Personal

I spent Friday night and all day yesterday at another of these semi-spontaneous geek raves, this time it was TagCamp. I decided not to bother trying to blog it in the moment as the conversations were for the most part more interesting than the sessions and others seemed to do a good enough job. A lot of good material and conversations. Nice free t-shirts from Odeo and SimplyFired (irreverent self-abusing humor from the SimplyHired crew) too.

You can see photos at, of course, Flickr too. So far there are only a few with a clear shot of me (at Ofer’s session, looking up at the speaker, hands in front of face, clapping, and way too early in the morning, getting rice, with Ofer, at the wrap session). Of course in several I’m blocked by Mike Prince of Mobido, an otherwise very cool guy, have the back of my head visible (1 2 3 4 5) or just show my blurry face ;). If this paragraph seems a bit big ego oriented of me, you just don’t know me well enough. LOL.

Sessions:

  • Ofer, our CEO, gave a great session on the guiding principles behind RawSugar Friday night and through the rest of the camp I had a number of very positive discussions about our service.
  • The most interesting session for me was probably Rashmi Sinha’s talk on Findability with Tags (she has a short version of her thesis in her blog).
  • Learned that the open source Cocoalicious has a cool UI for working with your del.icio.us collection but is sadly Mac-only.
  • Bill Humphries took notes on the Teaching Tagging session led by Marshall Kirkpatrick
  • Bill and Holly Ward discussed ToeTag, but I don’t really see this project gaining serious traction. Nice idea but since most (all?) tagging services are free to taggers because the value to the service is in having the largest database it’s antithetical for them to participate.
  • TagCamp official hottie Tara Hunt previewed Riya and showed it’s facial recognition abilities. Has possibility but doesn’t really grab me as is.

Conversations I want to remember:

  • Kimbro Staken really knows his shit and has been with, and done more, startups than you can shake a stick at, plus he agrees with me on the inevitability that outsourcing will continue to hoover jobs out of America
  • Mike Rowel gave me some insight into Ning and we compared our early beta experiences.
  • Wes Maldonaldo (who came down from Seattle) and Parker Thompson (one of the principals of PlaceSite) gave me some hope for the younger crowd 😉
  • Eran Globen has a very dark sense of humor.
  • Buzz Anderson, Micheal Tanne (from Wink) and I chatted about playing guitar and how cool it is that Buzz gets to have his guitar in the office to help him develop Soundtrack Pro.
  • Scott Golder, Thor Muller and I compared notes about being Beatles fans and how age makes for a difference–I’m 44, Mike Thor’s 34 and Scott’s 24 and apparently the further away from the time when they were actually making the music you are the more likely you are to have learned their trivia from a book. I’m not 100% sure that Mike was the ‘man in the middle’ of this part of the conversation Thor just dropped an email correcting my Swiss cheese-like memory.
  • Thor Muller, one of the Ruby Red Labs crew, was there with Michael Bean to demo their just-launched neighborhood-oriented project Urbantic.
  • Mainly listened as Tony Chang and Lee Iverson debated the impact a specific language has in program quality. I wish I’d known at the time that Tony is responsible for WebNote. Lee and Philip Jeffrey came down for the camp from Vancouver, where they are respectively a professor and master’s candidate at the University of British Columbia.
  • Justin Kistner of The Portland Internet Company told me about an upcoming addition to his firms’ business model, productizing consulting projects through spinoff ventures, the first of which will be a standards-compliant shopping cart.

Mad props to Susie Wyshak, who did an awesome job of managing the logistics, and Rohit Kare for lending us the brand new CommerceNet office for the event; the turnout was much bigger than BarCamp, well over 100 people, and this space was more than ample for the crowd though we sure made a big mess. Next Friday night I get to geek out again, and Ts1 gets more me time, since I plan to invade the fifth SuperHappyDevHouse. Heeheehee!