Mashup Camp 3 wrapped up a couple hours ago, and as far as I’m concerned, it was a gigantic success. I’ve had more fun at this “unconference” than at any conference since SxSW. Everyone was really into what they were doing, and there was a minimum of people there purely hawking their own stuff and not participating (which was my main problem with the last one in Mountain View). There were great sessions, and I was so geeked about everything, I ended up spending all of Tuesday building a mashup so I could share it at Speed Geeking. I ended up building a mashup of a feed reader and your buddy list that I unfortunately called Buddy Stalker, even though there’s very little “stalking” involved. It’s just a way to get a feed reader filled with things you’re likely to care about (the content your buddies create) without the initial setup cost of finding feeds, adding them, pruning them, etc. I ended up in the bunch of third place winners, which was great, when I consider that I did it in one day and that it was the first thing I’ve ever launched using Ruby on Rails.\
I met some great people, and had some great discussions. Here are just some of my favorite people from this week: John Gerken from IBM, David Janes, the Herrens, Nate Ritter and Chris Radcliff from Eventful, Kaliya, Raj Bala, Frank (if you’re out there, I never got your last name… we’ll find you a Ruby Users Group in Little Rock, I promise) and Shimmy from Angelwish, just to name a few.\
I think I ended up overdoing it a little… I ended up proposing and/or running four sessions, doing one presentation at Mashup University, and speed geeking for two days. My poor throat is shot – between talking too much and the cold dry air, it’s a raw mess. But, it was totally worth it. I got to talk about microformats, standards, the semantic web (both lower and uppercase), and in the last session, ruby on rails. It’s been a full week to say the least.\
There are pictures to go look at, and lots and lots of stuff to think about and work on going forward. There are several more posts in me to discuss all the stuff we talked about this week, but they’ll have to wait. I need to pack and get some sleep.
Mashup Camp Three Recap
Yay, we like you too! 🙂
Seriously, though, it was yet another fantastic get-together. Each time I’m afraid that it’ll get stale somehow, and each time I’m surprised by how many smart people and crazy-wonderful ideas we can pack into it.
Nate already has a list of mashup ideas for the next one, and my head is still full of sites and ideas and names and faces and side comments that might turn into something… but now I have to sleep so I can get up at 4am. Wheee!
Sleep is for people who don’t like beer. Beer is for thirsty. And, I am for beer. If you mash that algo up with Google Maps you’ll find me at Boston pubs drinking Guinness with some awesome people from Mashup Camp. Throw in an events database and some music and you’d have a hit.
Honestly, I don’t think I’ll sleep for the next week because of all the Mashups and chatting with cool peeps I am amped to do.
Thanks for the great chit chat, Kevin. I look forward to seeing you at Mashup 4, if you’re planning on heading west.
Oh, I’ll be there. I loooove Mashup Camp. I might even make the trek to the European one!
I really liked MashupCamp as well, although this was my first one. I saw several of your presentations and your mashup. Thanks for contributing! I hope to see you at future conferences.
Hey Kevin (+ all), great seeing you also.