BarCampBlock 2007

I attended BarCampBlock this week. BarCampBlock is the anniversary of the first BarCamp, originally held at SocialText, and for BarCampBlock, it was held not only at SocialText, but spread out among several other buildings (IDEO, Edgeio, ...).

I arrived after the end of most tracks on the first day. I talked with many developers and technologists after the last track ended. One man wrote a flash application that would allow people to "leave" their voice mark on their friends social network page. Another, from Restaurant Breeze, revealed CrazyMenu, a web-2.0 interface for collaborating on dining and places to eat.

I stayed overnight, an unexpected occurrence to the SocialText people, and prepared for the next day. On Sunday, I attended the Video Compression talk, from DigitalMove, a CDN, and learned about some of the pitfalls of certain codecs. The proprietary codec DigitalMove uses for Quicktime appears to be useful, but for our company, CoolClip, it is not useful as we focus on Flash videos, not the Quicktime media player.

E-Governance was a discussion on integrating modern web-2.x technology with government. I was, and still am, that the basic idea would function, as I feel that governments, being slow moving behemoths, would loathe to lose their beloved paper and grounded processes. The idea was to merge the power of the wiki, blogs, and podcasts with polls, voting, and departments. One thing I found most unbecoming about the E-Governance idea is that it only considers the majority and raw numbers, ignoring the minority and holding the potential to misrepresent others. I am also skeptical that technologists would ever be accepted in the American government due to the oft-remarked upon streak of anti-intellectualism in the US.

I attended the talk on OpenVZ. It was very interesting, and I found it similar to Solaris' Zones and FreeBSD's jails. Xen is a definite competitor to OpenVZ, and has recently been acquired by Citrix. This poses a definite risk to OpenVZ, so I will sit back and watch.

In the meantime, I would discuss and pitch CoolClip to other people, ranging from the representatives of a local ISP to those from DigitalMove CDN. BarCampBlock was a most fascinating experience.