It’s inevitable!
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The Robot You See…
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MadCamp ReCap
MadCamp (BarCampMadison the 4th) happened on August 27th, 2011 and this is my review…
First off, I will shout out a big thanks to Greg Tracy, Phillip Crawford, Steve Faulkner, and anyone else who helped organize the event and made it happen.
The Name:
Now, you’ll see me using things like “MadCamp” and “BarCampMadison the 4th” but they are the same thing. At some point there was talk about changing the name from the nerdy “BarCamp” to the less-nerdy “MadCamp” but I don’t think the transition was ever 100% complete. barcampmadison.org is the domain, and that’s what the logo says, but MadCamp is what it was called. (I wouldn’t even bring this up, except to avoid confusion, and the fact that I work in the branding industry. But what’s in a name, eh?)
The Venue:
Urban Land Interests provided space in the US Bank Building right on the Capitol Square in Madison. It’s easy to get to, you can park around the corner all day for $3, and there’s an amazing view of the Capital. That’s the good stuff… the not as good stuff is that the sessions were spread out among 3 floors. The ground floor lobby served as the common area, with 2 session rooms, and there were 2 more session rooms on the 8th floor (in the Murfie office) and 2 more on the 9th floor (which was the main area for BarCampMadison3.) But hey, thanks to Twilio and Greg’s MadCamp Notifier, there was a bit of assistance with session notification.
My Junk:
As usual, I brought too much crap, including The Photo Booth (photos are here) and the latest revision of the Time Lapse Bot (video to come) and I brought A/V equipment, much of which failed during the event. Still, I managed to record a few sessions.
The Intros:
For each BarCampMilwaukee, we’ve always had Introductions, where each person says who they are, what they are interested in, etc. Last year we gave people about 20 seconds to do their intro, and timed it. (You can watch it here, btw.) For MadCamp, there were no intros. but instead they created a Camper Wall, which worked like this: When you registered, you got your photo taken, which was then printed on a photo printer, and then attached to a printout on the wall with your info. It was cool to be able to browse the wall and see the people there, and be able to find them easily. Using a photo from that day was brilliant. I love avatars and 5 year old head-shots as much as the next geek, but seeing a recent (that day!) photo on the wall made it easy to identify people. Still, I really am a fan of having everyone introduce themselves.
In Part 2 you can read about the sessions I attended: MadCamp ReCap: Sessions.
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Reclaim Blogging
It’s great to see posts like this one from Hugh MacLeod: “Reclaim Blogging”: Why I’m giving up Twitter and Facebook, mainly because he highlights a few key points that freedom loving people everywhere should identify with:
…Over on Twitter and Facebook, it’s not your content, it’s their content.
The content on your blog, however, belongs to you, and you alone. People come to your online home, to hear what you have to say, not to hear what everybody else has to say. This sense of personal sovereignty is important.
I’m fine with people using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr, etc… I use them all too, but much of what I do on those services involves driving people here to my blog. And it’s not about eyeballs and revenue as much as it’s about sovereignty, longevity, freedom, and identity. Since starting in 1997, things like Friendster, and Vox, and even Myspace, have risen and fallen. I didn’t get locked into any of them. I didn’t choose LiveJournal, or Pitas, or any of the other hosted services out there, but chose to have my own domain, and put my stake in the ground here. And today I can still link to a post I wrote 14 years ago, and it’s there. It hasn’t disappeared due to some third party shutting down a service, or a startup running out of funding. It’s there because I kept it there, and I kept it safe.
I think now is a good time to remind people why we all got into blogging in the first place, all those years ago. I think now is a great time to “reclaim” blogging, so that is exactly what I’m doing. Here and now. Rock on.
And why did I get into blogging? I started in the personal publishing world in the mid-1980s when zines printed on paper was the best you could do… Once the web came along, I saw the potential, and jumped on it. The Internet is a world-wide publishing platform where the distribution costs are close enough to zero to make it available to anyone. Think about it. Think about it in terms of publishing in the 19th or early 20th century…That’s pretty damn powerful.
So remember kids, if you’ve got a blog, keep it up… if you abandoned it, reclaim it… and if you don’t have one, start one now.
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Functional Programming
This is a session by Dan from MadCamp (aka BarCampMadison the 4th) titled “Functional Programming: Why Should You Care?”
You can also download an MP3 file if you’d like. (And for our freedom loving friends, enjoy an Ogg file.)
Also, if you want to get all of the audio automagically downloaded podcasting style, subscribe to the feed.
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How to Hustle
This is Steve Faulkner’s session from MadCamp (aka BarCampMadison the 4th) titled “How to Hustle.” I missed this session when Steve did it, but he also did a really short version during the Lightning Talks. It’s worth a listen.
You can also download an MP3 file if you’d like. (And for our freedom loving friends, enjoy an Ogg file.)
Also, if you want to get all of the audio automagically downloaded podcasting style, subscribe to the feed.