Went to BarCampRDUthis Saturday. It went pretty well for an “unconference”.
Some good talks were seen, and Greg presented some of our ideas in the “Destroy The Music Industry” talk. It seemed to have been well accepted.
Talked to some of the folks from Raleighing and mugshot. The place seemed to be filled with ibiblio and lulu folks as well.
I skipped the ever present agile/extreme talks. For some reason it seems like every time I go to one of those talks it is someone trying to sell a book. I always get a very snake oil vibe that consistently turns me off from the concept.
The “wetware” talk was pretty good, though it hit upon alot of well tread territory (a touch of GTD, mindmaps, personal wiki’s, etc).
The “Future Of Social Browsing” talk was interesting. It was mostly centered around claimid, flock, and mugshot. I like the general idea of openid/claimid alot, but some of the ideas associated with it seem a bit useless (XFN, etc) and seemed to focus mostly on ways geeks can keep up with other geeks.
The “Future of Publishing” talk was pretty lame. More of a sales pitch for a computer book publisher than any real insight. Maybe 10 minutes into the future of publishing, instead of 10 years into the future I was hoping for.
But for a free “unconference”, it was quite interesting. Mostly because of the people there. Which is of course, more or less the point.