Day: August 25, 2006

So I thought, what can I do for a BarCamp session that would definitely overload my plate… A Mash Pit!

At BarCampMilwaukee, we will have a session on what a mashup is, just going over the basics, showing some examples, talking about APIs, and brainstorming ideas, but for those who aren’t into sleep, we’ll start at 11 PM and see what we can crank out before the sun rises.

We are prefixing with “Mini” because it may only be a few hours or so, depending on whatever else is going on at BarCampMilwaukee. I’m still hoping a bunch of code monkeys I’ve emailed plan to come, because while just me sitting at a table doing this alone would still be very cool, and result in some killer app, I’m sure I could use the input and assistance of others… :)

I’m a fan of the “just works” concept (I mean, I use Mac OS X instead of Windows, right?) but A warning for the bazaar nails it.

I’m seeing it from a different perspective though, one of a media creator. Just yesterday I had to deal with the fact that people don’t care about their rights or freedoms, as long as it will work. We’ve had this discussion in the videoblogging community, where most are advocates of creators rights. What does this mean? It means we encourage people to put their video (audio, text, etc.) online where they can maintain their rights over it as the creator. Some people just don’t care about that. They just want what they create to get online in the quickest and simplest fashion possible. YouTube and MySpace are often the conduits for this “I want it now and I want it to work” mentaility. Neither give enough control over the content to those who created it.

It’s also been noted that often times the attitude of “I want it now and I want it to work” is taken by younger people, the under 30 crowd, who haven’t yet got a long term view, or a sense of history with the things they create. This may be true, I see it in other things as well, and I often am not sure how much of my view is shaped by the length of time I’ve been involved in the things I care about, versus just my strong opinions on certain subjects.