Brief thoughts on BarCamp Dublin

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.

Tags: barcampdublin, capulet, sayme, cengal, longtail