RasterWeb!

At the June Milwaukee Web Design Meetup I did a presentation on Microformats, and I ended it asking who would be willing to present next time. Well, Jordan Arentsen stepped up, but due to problems with the meetup in July, and his missing the August meetup, we finally got to see it in September.

You can find his presentation on his site if you’re interested. (I believe he will also present it at a BarCampMilwaukee session.)

He also showed a lot of code from an application he wrote. Yes, he wrote his own blog software. It’s running at blissdev.net. We followed up with a lot of good talk about the good/bad of Rails and other frameworks. RoR seems a little young, but it’s growing, and there are definitely a lot of large sites making it work.

(Speaking of the Web Design Meetup, I’m contemplating taking over as organizer if the need arises, because, you know, I don’t have enough projects going on…)

The Bay View Bash is Saturday, September 16th, 2006. If you happen to be there, look for me. (Or just call me… or locate me via Bluetooth…)

Last year I took this photo, which I titled Old guys, Kid drummer…

I can’t wait to see who will be rocking this year’s Bay View Bash…

What exactly qualifies someone as an “expert?”

Here are a few definitions I found:

• A person with special knowledge or ability who performs skillfully…
• An expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of knowledge…
• One who knows no more than you about a given subject, but has their information arranged more neatly and uses slides…

Personally I like that last one. ;)

The question comes up due to BarCampMilwaukee. As I’ve been trying to get people to pick something they are passionate about, people often get excited, mention something, and then say something like “Well, I’m not the expert on that!”

But the whole point is, you are an expert at your own experiences! At one of our meetings, someone talked about learning Linux, but thought that since others knew more about Linux, that someone else should lead session. This is somewhat backwards. If this person had 1 month of experience using Linux, then that 1 month of experience is their expertise. Sure, they may not have installed Linux 100 times, but maybe someone else in the session has, and has forgotten what it is like to be a newbie, and can share what they know, and hear the frustrations of a newbie. That’s my idea anyway…

I see this happen again and again. People think they aren’t experts, but I think that’s just because of how people define what an “expert” is. The whole idea of BarCamp is that you don’t go to see some “expert” lecture for an hour, you come to share what you know, learn from others, and all walk away knowing a bit more that we did when we got there.

I found an unopened Farallon iPrint in a junkbox at the office… (It’s a LocalTalk-ethernet bridge.) I’m thinking I’ll be able to do something wacky, like put a really old Mac online. Now I just need to dig through the basement junkpile and find a pre-ethernet PowerBook and see what I can come up with.

See? I knew saving almost every Mac part I’ve come across in the last 10 years would pay off!

(Hmmm, come to think of it, I used to have a LocalTalk-ethernet bridge somewhere… I think it might be in the garage…)

Bob said something like this in an email:

At or after BarCampMilwaukee, we should plot the number of Campers registered vs time to see what the signup curve looks like.

As soon as I read this I thought – we got people coming from various parts of Wisconsin, probably some folks from Illinois, and even a bunch of hardcore geeks from Iowa – we should map this stuff out using the Yahoo! or Google maps API, and see what it looks like. But wait, we also have Scott from Iowa proposing a session called “Online Maps, Mapping Tools & Geohacking” and a Mini-Mash Pit planned. Maybe we can even combine what we learn in the Microformats and Online Photo Sharing sessions…

Revolutionary idea? Not really, just a neat idea, but it’s one of those things where you take the bits and pieces and see what a group of creative people can come up with. Bob’s comment helps illustrate what we hope to have happen at BarCampMilwaukee, smart people thrown together, and neat things happening as a result.