It all started on Thursday night when Andy Smith, celebrating his birthday at the Beauty Bar and wearing a bathrobe, asked if we were going to BarCamp. "Uh, sure," was the reply, not really knowing what we were signing up for. By Friday afternoon we had completely forgotten about it when we got an IM from Min Jung Kim telling us to get ready, as she was leaving for Palo Alto in an hour. So we checked out the Wiki, grabbed our tent, and prepared ourselves for, you know, whatever. Heck, it's not every day you get to pitch a tent in downtown Palo Alto.

MJ was headed to the Coldplay concert, so it was our job to get the car to the brand new offices of SocialText, where the confab was to take place. We managed to get turned around, and drove to Sunnyvale before realizing that we'd gone the wrong direction. By the time we got there, the first panel was already getting started -- Jake Applebaum was busy pointing out that he pwned our internet traffic thanks to unencrypted WiFi -- and the pizza that Niall Kennedy had wrangled was almost gone.

"What's BarCamp," you ask. Well, about a month ago it was just an inside joke. Tim O'Reilly has his invite-only FooCamp, why not do a BarCamp? But a few weeks later, the jokesters -- Andy Smith, Eris Stassi, Chris Messina, Matt Mullenweg, Ryan King and Tantek Celik -- decided to go ahead with the idea. And in the course of just one week they managed to arrange a location, sponsoship and a few hundred interested folks who promised to drop by.