Brief thoughts on BarCamp Dublin

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Dropped in on BarCamp Dublin for a few hours on Saturday, and caught talks by Darren, Sean and Cengal, as well as the plenary.

Darren is a slick presenter and gave some nice insights into running media/viral campaigns – but he was badly let down by wifi connectivity; in this scenario, am I the only one that thinks that the bandwidth should go to the the presenter?

As usual, Sean O’Sullivan gave an entertaining and informative overview into the development pangs for MySay, and Cegala talked on wooing the financial sector.

Chatted with Eamon Walshe of Exoftware and Sean McGrath at lunch break – did a project with Eamon a few years back, and first learned about Python with Propylon back in 2001 with Sean.

The plenary was useful, but a bit too disjointed for me – getting more traffic to your blog and dealing with comments seemed just a little, well, pedestrian to me for this event; Darren did offer some interesting analogies on comments though; in a recent blog survey that Capulet did – one respondent said that comments ‘were like crack[cocaine]‘.

On the whole blogger death-threat thing, he mentioned the long tail of fame – which sounds pretty plausible; if you have a community or audience to your blog, and that audience grows – chances are (nay, certainty is) you will get responses which are rude and nasty. being famous, even within a potentially small, long tail audience, might draw stalker types that traditionally follow the traditional targets. scary, but plausible…

note to self : don’t attempt to introduce yourself to some one before they are about to get on stage to speak. Tom – might chat to you again some time.

Well done to the organising team, and I look forward to the next one.

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Sligo to Frisco – Justin.tv with Infacta

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Jonathan and the guys from Infacta were on Justin.tv on sunday night/monday morning. The archive is here.

Of course, Steve Mann was doing this years ago.

Online communication tools and Academia

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Now that Jon Udell has moved to Microsoft, it appears that he is in a good position to arbitrate on behalf of ordinary computer users to the geek community. His weekly (or so) podcasts are one of the few places where you can hear the difficulties or potential difficulties of the majority being articulated and sounded out.

A recent podcast available on IT Conversations, was with Geoffrey Bilder of Crossref. Though the discussion was written up in the shownotes as focusing on the importance of link permanence and citation – all very noble things – it was actually much more interesting than those shownotes suggested.

In particular, “what’s new and cool” not fitting in with a sometimes traditional academic community is a reality check for any technology businesss building and designing online communication tools.

Welcome

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To blog or not to blog? Will we have the time? Will people find it interesting? Will we get tired of it?

We have been writing over at The Health Tech Blog for nearly two years at this stage. Output has been slow but steady – with moderate reader numbers (100+ subscribers).

Because it is such a narrow niche, it does not often prove to be a suitable vehicle for issues and topics that we could talk about. That’s why we’re going to do more of that here.

The current view is that we will discuss software technologies, trends and developments that be used by ordinary businesses and organisations, and not necessarily just by techie early adopters who “get it”.

So, on that note – Welcome!