JG etc.

Just got home from a great event in Southern California. First off, thanks to these people:

* Sean Bonner
* Kareem Mayan
* Jason Roberts
* Ian Rogers
* Little Radio
and everyone else that made it happen. I had to take off earlier then I thought due to travel reasons and was not able to say goodbye and thanks to everyone.

What I really enjoyed:

*The venue and the food, awesome place to have an event and the food was great.

*LA has a warm and friendly geek community

*Debi Jones talked about how MySpace has over 50 million users and those 50 million users potentially have 50 million blogs, which would also produce 50 million feeds. Quick math and looking at an index like Feedster shows you that we are not really indexing MySpace feeds. Debi wants to know why and I think the point is valid. Social networks, as was proven by many of the representatives at the camp, are increasingly becoming a larger part of blogs, podcasts, videos, etc. How do we categorize this? Are they blogs? Should they be in a seperate index? Do they want to be indexed? All very valid questions.
Side note: What frustrates me about the many of the current social networks is there inability to educate their users on the benefits of technologies like feeds. MySpace, for example, has the market penetration to really show a younger generation how to use feeds to their advantage. But it appears that MySpace is more concerned with growing page impressions along with keeping content on MySpace than providing options for their users in terms of how they want to consume their content. What will be interesting to see is how other social networks allow people to use their content and the content of their friends.(Comment and photo feeds for mobile usage?) There is an opportunity in this area for “MySpace-like” competitors to capitalize on some of the shortcomings of the current social network scene. It shouldn’t have to be about keeping eyeballs on one central repository for 4 hours a day.

*A very enthused Chris Holland spoke on “A More Interoperable World of Information.” He also did his presentation in an s5 slide show format that I really liked. (Interesting that Cisco has just announced the adoption of SIP for call control)

*Matthew Homann did the “un”conference and brought up some really good points about how to make conferences better for the vendors and everyone involved.

*Nicole Simon gave me some great feedback on some UI changes she would like to see at Feedster. Everything she said I definitely agree with, and if anyone else has feedback it is always welcome.

*Ian Rogers on Media 2.0 Physics

The physics of the Media world are changing
From a world where attention is abundant and distribution channels are scarce
To a world where distribution is unlimited and attention is scarce

As someone said early on, BarCamp is all about learning and sharing, and that is exactly what I got from it. Photos and other articles are all around.