BarCamp 2005

You knew it was going to be geeky when Anthony Lineberry, the naked guy from BoingBoing, posed for a picture with his moment in the internet sun being projected behind him. Everybody seemed to have a PowerBook cracked open. Informal discussions about SSL encryption, business models and, of course, gossip were being held all over the offices of SocialText, which were nearly empty anyway as they'd just moved in.

We grabbed a beer and wandered into a presentation on Microformats because, well, we didn't really know what Microformats are. Thankfully, we had Ryan King and Kevin Marks to explain them to us -- a set of standards for small bits of information that can be used to define information structures on the web, like calendar listings, contacts, and the relationship between a linker and a linkee. To show that there were no hard a feelings, we were linked to the FooCampers in Sebastopol via video, audio and IRC chat.

After that it was time to drink beer and chat about tech. We bugged Matt Mullenweg for a Wordpress.com invite. We chatted about the Coldplay concert. We met the famed Fyodor. Andy was a tad anxious that folks would show up the next day. And some were disappointed that Robert Scoble and Dave Winer hadn't dropped by, since Plazes indicated they were at a coffee shop around the corner. We made ourselves busy setting up our tent in one of the conference rooms -- after all, it's not a camp without a tent -- and went to bed late.

We were woken up on Saturday morning by the sound of eighty folks chatting excitedly. We grabbed a danish and a cup of coffee and had breakfast outside under a cloudless Palo Alto sky. By 11, more panels were already underway. More and more people began to arrive. A run was made for more coffee. The postman arrived with a box of BarCamp t-shirts. Folks were busy checking their email, blogging, chatting over IRC and posting photos to Flickr. The crowd ranged from youngsters under ten to old pros.

The tent was moved outside to make room for discussion. There were four rooms -- approriately named var, bin, temp and dev -- and they were getting booked up with proposed topics quickly. Our first prezzo of the day was a demonstration of the new Flock browser by Chris Messina. First, Chris took a moment to check the status of FooCamp versus BarCamp with a friendly Flickr Tag Fight, and the audience broke out in cheers when BarCamp came out on top with 299 tagged photos to 245 (BarCamp is still winning -- we did our part).

If you're a blogger, then Flock is going to make your life a hell of a lot easier. Want to quote another blog? Just copy the quote, drag and drop it into Flock's native editor, and it's automagically formatted as a blockquote with a permalink citation. And there's loads of other cool features like native support for social bookmarking (Chris assured us that we could keep using del.icio.us, which will be seemlessly integrated). When he was done, another round of sincere applause broke out.

Over in another room, we dropped in on Ka-Ping Yee (AKA Ping), who was giving a presentation on Web security, and doing it in style -- wearing silk pajamas. He had pretty harsh words for major banking and other financial sites, who could make user's lives a whole lot easier, and safer, if they took the time to make secure data transfers via https and SSL the default.

After lunch and a stroll around Palo Alto (which, compared to our neighborhood, was like wandering around the world of Logan's Run it was so clean), it was back to the business at hand. Eris Stassi organized a session for women (sadly, a distinct minority, as per the usual in tech), and over an hour was spent discussing topics like "generic reputation based framework" for social information sharing -- the ability to rank how much you trust the information behind a link. We suggested to Chris that it could be integrated into Flock.

SFist Ted, AKA Dogster Ted (sporting his tres chic WikiShirt) led us through some of the issues surrounding Dogster/Catster and its community of users. He pointed out that since most folks write from their pet's perspective, they've actually begun to write customer service emails addressed to the pet instead of the user. And he's constantly surprised by what users really love -- for instance, the new ability to give other pets 'rosettes,' which are essentially little GIF trinkets for their homepages (and will cost you), has become incredibly popular.

Our head was beginning to swim with information, and it was a little after beer thirty, so we spent some time relaxing on the patio, taking a catnap and checking our email in the tent. Scoble and Winer showed up in the afternoon. Eddie Codel and Ryan Junell from WebZine arrived on their bikes. Ryan Singel was busy collecting quotes and photographs for Wired News. The office was packed with around a hundred people having dozens of conversations.

At seven o'clock it was time to head around the corner to Gordon Biersch for free booze and snacks provided by Technorati. The crowd was expected to top out at sixty, but ended up being over a hundred (participants are asked to pitch in to cover the bill). Afterwards it was time to just relax and chat. Ajay Juneja showed off his pimped-out ride that featured a voice-controlled computer to manage the sound system and navigation. Look for it in your car in 2007. Mike Rowehl came prepared with a bottle of Makers, which we shared late into the night while discussing the future of the Web.

We snored late into the morning on Sunday, but were happy to find that there were still some egg bagels left. The rooms were already booked solid through the afternoon. We packed up the tent and went over our notes. Min Jung slept off her hangover under a desk. We did our best to clean up a bit, and were beginning to crave a shower more than anything we'd craved in our whole life.

At two, Chris brought everyone outside for the wrap-up speech -- we were amazed when more than forty die-hards emerged from what we thought was a sparsly populated office. The sponsors were thanked, the attendees (around three hundred over the course of the weekend) were thanked, everyone was invited to stick around for more informal discussions, and a mixer with the FooCampers -- the FooBarCrawl -- was planned for that evening at 111 Minna. We were too exhausted (and dehydrated) to keep going, and left for The City, but not without about 1,000 new ideas, dozens of new faces and lots of promises to follow up on topics and projects. In other words, a happy camper.

We'd like to name everyone we'd like to thank, but the list would be far too long, so special thanks to the BarCamp organizers and sponsors, and thanks to everyone else for being so damn cool.