I may have missed Mesh and BarCamp, but I did manage to drag my sorry butt out to DemoCamp6 last night. Forgot my camera, though…
The contenders
First up, we had Joey and Ross showing off TuCows’ new Start service (codename: skydasher) and their publicly-accessible FeedCache service. Start was fun,
if you’re into web portals and whatnot, and I’ll probably take a closer look at it for some upcoming music-related projects. FeedCache is something I really should get into, possibly not for work projects (we have our own RSS caching mechanism), but I’ve got one or two external projects floating in my head that might be able to make use of this.
Also, I was near the back of the room and my eyes were still misty from the smog outside, but I think I saw Ross’ computer close enough to identify it as a ThinkPad with an Apple sticker on the back. We’re twins! My excuse is that my girlfriend is like a two year old when it comes to stickers (I used that line in a meeting and actually got some more stickers out of it). No idea about Ross’ motivations or hauls during meetings.
Ross also mentioned Dave Winer’s share your OPML project, which I have just tried. Apparently my list is similar to Om Malik’s. Perhaps he can tell me what I’ve missed each day; I know I can’t keep up.
Second up, Blogscope, a U of T project that collects blogspot entries and spews out a bunch of stats. It’s got a nifty zoomable bar graph and can find correlations among the entries with other search terms. When I tried it, it kind of highlighted the splog problem, but presenter Nilesh Bansal said that they’re working on some algorithms for that. If anything, that was the one problem with the presentation - he said he wanted feedback, but the response to just about every question was “we’re working on that.” Maybe our questions just sucked.
There was a bit of a gap between the second and third presenter due to some problems with the projector. I amused myself by watching someone play with some kind of imaging-related app on a laptop a few tables over. At one point the picture was of a naked lady.
Joshua Wehner ended up being third, with his Rails-based convention scheduling utility. It was a pretty domain-specific app, but I could see it being useful for other conferences.
Finally, Anand Agarawala presented BumpTop, an alternative desktop metaphor proof of concept with physics from the Unreal Tournament engine. While I don;t know if anyone wanted to use it as their desktop, everybody smiled at some point in the presentation (watch the video to find out why). I think the main lesson from this demo was that applications should be enjoyable to use. If you can find a way to make people smile while working with, say, a spreadsheet app, why wouldn’t you?
The After Party was good clean fun - we got there first and ended up sitting with a group on the main floor of Molly Brown’s, which was fine, since one table full of people is all I can really talk to at a given time, but later I went upstairs and ended up being one of the last to leave. I met a lot of great people, which is really the point of the whole evening, innit?
Oh, and I also traded for this business card:
The only thing scarier is that the printer was listed on the back - they’re free cards that you just pay shipping on. At $7.90 for 250, it’s cheaper than a domain registration, and probably more fun at parties. I’m finally going to get my professional hand model cards!
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