Barcamp Tee

Despite my late arrival, difficulty locating the venue and frustrating wireless connection issues, BarCamp Houston was a lot of fun. It’s like a one-day summer camp for geeks where everyone says “Show me what you’re up to.” and “How do I do this?”

I arrived just before the start of the Spresent demo by Sasha Kouznetsov. Spresent looks like a wonderfully simple, yet full-featured tool to create presentations for your website. Sasha’s enthusiasm for the project showed in his demo.

Unfortunately, most of my attention during the OpenTeams demo was spent trying to figure out why my wireless suddenly stopped working. Not a good thing when using Google docs to take notes. I don’t think it had anything to do with Dwight Silverman taking off with his powerstrip, which was powering the WiFi in that room. I’m going to take the easy way out and blame Vista since it didn’t work the rest of the day.

I ate lunch with the programming group and shared a table with a few barcampers who were looking for the entrepreneur lunch and ended up at the programmer location. The mixture of entrepreneurs and coders worked out well and led to some interesting conversations. We discussed everything from starting a training company, various content management systems, camera gear to recommendations on how to best learn programming. I really enjoyed hearing about what others are working on and interested in technology-wise.

After lunch I caught some of Robert Nagle’s presentation, “Optimizing for Reading: the Art and Science of Presenting Content.” His ideas regarding multimedia attention span and literacy depth were intriguing. I found many of his comments dead on, especially about how websites are bad about breaking a reader’s focus with intrusive advertising and page layouts. I feel the same way about newspapers. Having to interrupt my train of thought and find page D17 to finish an article is a big reason I’ve never enjoyed reading the paper. Interesting factoid from Nagle’s talk: 27% read no books last year. Of those who did, men read five and women read nine books. Good to know I read more than some people - just not anyone I know.

When Nagle finished I went down the hall to catch “Training Noobs in Web 2.0″ by Michelle Boule. Unfortunately I arrived just as she was wrapping up. Then it was back to Room 1 for Building Scalable Websites and Building Great Web Teams by the Hush Labs crew. I also caught the end of “Design Is __” by fellow RefreshBCS’er Roby Fitzhenry.

BarCamp Houston has me jazzed for BarCampBCS, which I think is slated for November. If you have the opportunity to attend a local BarCamp, do it. It is a great way to meet the people behind the websites and projects you follow online and discover new ones.

Events like BarCamp Houston prove that not all innovation comes out of Silicon Valley.

More photos in my Flickr set.

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