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I had a fantastic time at BarCampSheffield2, my first northern BarCamp.

It was great to return to Sheffield (where I did my electronic engineering degree) after an absence of more than 13 years. Far too long!

[Showroom Cafe/Bar/Cinema, the venue]

The venue was in a rather nice Art Deco cinema/cafe/conference centre called the Showroom, in the heart of the city. It worked well as a place to host the BarCamp, with most of the rooms we used very close to each other. And the food was excellent - right from Dinner on the Friday night through to lunch on Sunday.

The warmup party on Friday night was a lot of fun. We were encouraged to make thought bubbles with our tags/interests and contact details, as a bit of an ice breaker. I think we felt a little daft at first, but with the aid of a few beers, we generally got into the swing of things!

[Three loonies wearing thought bubbles: Jay, me, Alistair]

I really enjoyed some of the presentations and discussions which were run during the event. I got mine over with early on, A Newbies’ Guide to Geocaching, which you can download from Slideshare.

Next up was a discussion about Community, and what it meant to us, lead by Alistair MacDonald. Some interesting points were raised, and this also lead nicely into another discussion a couple of sessions later on Social Isolation, lead by Kian Ryan.

After lunch, I noticed the sun was out, so I skived out for half an hour to photograph some nearby sights with a bit of decent light. The sculpture Cutting Edge made it as picture of the day, but I also liked this [right] one of a little lad admiring the cascade fountain near the station:

Alistair & I also managed a geocaching session in the city centre, before it got too cold and dark! Then it was back to the venue to thaw out and watch a session on Self-Defence for Geeks run by Paul Stanton.

Before long it was time for dinner and moar beer and silliness. You can imagine what the evening ended up like. And you can imagine what state some folks were in the next morning. Thankfully, the reving properties of copious quantities of tea and bacon soon did the trick.

Some Sunday sessions which I enjoyed included Jay Cousins‘ talk on Language and how it can influence our perception of technology. He made up some pretty neat words too!

Emma Persky ran a discussion about the imbalance of women in positions of influence within the web, when there is more or less parity now with the ratio of male/females who use the web. Not sure that any concensus was reached, as we seemed to talk in circles for a bit!

Tom Scott ran an excellent quiz during the Sunday lunch slot - the team I was on won, so of course it was excellent! We also had an open discussion with the organisers about the way things had gone over the two days, chaired by Jag Gill. Certainly they did some things differently; some worked well, others not quite so well, but overall I think the team did an excellent job at organising their very first BarCamp! Bravo to Jag, Ibbo, Josie, Jay and all the others.

Jon Linklater-Johnson ran a session on 10 Top Tips To Stop You From Messing Up Your Website. There was also a session about Tea, which was quite appropriate since lots of geeks seem to be obsessed with the stuff. Later on, there was a special showing of Dr Horrible, something I’d heard much-Tweeted about. Quite funny in places, purely bonkers in others!

The after party saw a few hardy souls do more damage to their livers, play Semantopoly, do silly things with Alistair’s BathCamp duck, and then go out for a massive curry. Great way to wind up the event.

[Jay and his Pirate Duck]

But I really think the last word should go to Ruby & Perl, Gemma’s ferrets who made a guest appearance on Saturday. Now I’ve experienced a BarCamp with ferrets, things will never be the same again!

[Ferrets ahoy!]

So that’s it really. A great weekend of geeking out. Thanks to all the folks who organised, contributed and turned up. It was a pleasure to meet you all. You can see the rest of my photos from the weekend on Flickr.

Immediately after dConstruct was the latest BarCamp, held at the University of Sussex once more.

The usual suspects were in attendance, as were some new faces too. Good to see the BarCamp word spreading.

Here are some photos from some of the sillier bits:

[Tom and Leeky geeking out with their Macs]

[I'm sure this wasn't really on the Bayeaux Tapestry!]

And finally, just when you thought it was safe to leave the scissors lying around:

[An innocent BarCamper gets a crowd-sourced  haircut in Fish & Chips… courtesy of Fatty.

Mid-March saw BarCamp Brighton 2, held at the University of Sussex just outside Brigthon. I didn’t take many notes at the event as it happened, but I did enjoy the presentations. These included:

Tom Morris telling it straight [see right] about his thoughts on the Social Graph. He also did another talk on RDF on the Sunday, which was informative, as usual.

Leeky’s session was about hacking your own PBX phone system, another great talk with plenty of demos and the usual animated hand-waving

There was an impromptu drumming jam session in the main auditorium, which let out a bit of pent-up energy, and showed the rhythmic ones amongst us what fun it was.

Some folks were hardware hacking with arduino boards - not sure what got made in the end, but there were a few burned fingers from those getting too close to soldering irons!

This time around, my talk wasn’t terribly well attended - I had one appreciative audience! Never mind, at least I participated (and got it out of the way on Day 1 so I could enjoy the rest of the show!). I must admit, I hadn’t prepared a great deal, but decided to do a slide show from some of my Project366 images which I had taken up to today’s date.

Neil “workingwithme” Crosby held a session about TwitterBots, again great info and interesting graphics! Not sure I’m up to hacking a TwitterBot together, but it was good to know the sorts of things that can be achieved.

There was the usual geekery taking place too, here are some more photos to prove it:

[Spot the difference: Alistair (right) pretends to be a Nabaztag bunny (left)]

[A view from on high, looking down from one of the conference rooms to the Common Room, where most of the inbetween geeking took place]

While I was in Brighton, I was also able to visit a couple of Flickr mates who are also doing the Photo-A-Day project. It was nice to finally put names to places. My photos from the weekend included A Fallen Star, Faded Grandeur, Enigma V and Verdant Shades. All in all, a most enjoyable trip to the south coast.

Semantic Camp Session 6 - Parsing Microformats
Gareth Rushgrove

Gareth gave us a quick rundown of the various parsers which are available.

Language Specific - most available apart from Java.
Language agnostic - web services

hKit - open source PHP stuff.
Mofo - for Ruby
Sumo Javascript (from Dan Webb) - generic parser for JS.
XSLT - at Brian Suda’s site
Optimus - is down at the moment
Google’s Social Graph API - parses XFN relationships

Semantic Camp Session 7 - WTF is RDF?
Tom Morris

Always worth hearing, Tom did an idiots’ guide to RDF, just the thing for a bear of very little brain such as myself.

RDF = Resource Description Framework! 1999 originally, 2004 updated into 6 docs:

• Primer
• Schema
• Syntax Spec
• Concepts & Abstract Syntax
• Semantics
• Test Cases

RDF files at their simplest form:

3 things - subject, predicate, object (see above). The simplest form is - Triples (N3)
Subject and Predicate are Resources - Not literals; Object - Literal sting of text
foo.n3 - text file containing triples.

Tools to parse are available in - Java, C, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby

He then talked some more about RDF validation and FOAF - which seems like the most friendly and usable aspect of RDF from this bear’s perspective. If you want to make your own FOAF file, why not use the foaf-o-matic

The Rest of the Afternoon

There were other talks going on, but I got distracted by a rather fab game, made by John Linklater-Johnson called Semantopoly. A fab idea [not in the least based on Monopoly] which had us all amused for some hours:

[Matt, Gareth and Isabelle get to grips with the rules of Semantopoly]

There have been general BarCamps aplenty, but this one, arranged by Semantic evangelist Tom Morris, was geared specifically towards the Semantic (and semantic) Web.

It had a slightly different feel to it, in that we didn’t stay overnight. But it was good to see some different faces in the crowd than the usual BarCamp suspects - there seemed to be a good few academics in the mix this time.

Session 1 - Accessibility
Jonathan Chetwynd

Current UK research tells us that 20-25% of the population suffer from “functional illiteracy”! The tools available for making sites all require significant literacy skills. So it is difficult for low-literacy people to access/make sites themselves.

JobCentre Plus - low literacy is strongly correlated with unemployment. The site for searching for jobs isn’t friendly for low literacy users - they encounter lots of check boxes and job titles.

GUI with graphics can be a better way of presenting things to low-literacy users. Currently, SVG not very supported by browsers at present and there is no easy accessible SVG authoring tool.

Another friend of mine, Antonia Hyde, is heavily involved with producing websites for people with learning disabilities over at United Response, and so this would have been a great session for her to attend.

Session 2 - Bringing Semantic Web to Bloggers
Jure Čuhalev

Jure demonstrated a product from Zemanta, a startup from Slovenia.  It empowers bloggers to write better posts. Plugin to Blogger etc - which gives you extra media content relevent to stuff as you write. Point and click on relevent article from list - gets added to bottom of code. Quick links for Technorati etc.

Focus is not on readers with widgets but authors with tools - via Firefox extensions or IE plugins (if Blogger etc does not support plugins). Free. Basic functions are free, upgraded functions for a small fee.

3rd party developers - get full API docs, support, promotion, it’s all open sourced stuff. Should be available from mid-March 2008.

Session 3 - hAvatar
Cristiano Betta

hAvatar - what is it? Instead of using 3rd party to host avatar, use a photo from your own site’s hCard. Made by Alper.nl as a plugin for WordPress. Goes and fetches the photo from your own site’s hCard to show as humbnails on comments etc.

Problems - if there’s multiple hCards on the provided URL, which to use? Can hack to see if any of the hCards have the URL specified which you’ve just looked at. Web service available at

http://alper.nl/cgi-bin/OpenAvatar.py?openid=http://yoursite.com/pictureurl

More info in Cristiano’s blog post, or download the plugin here.

Session 4 - Microformats “State of the Nation”
Ben Ward and Frances Berrmian.

A quick session from Ben and Frances about the current state of play with Microformats:

• Google - maps has hCard in the info bubble and sidebar stuff.
• The common formats have been widely adopted. Newer ones are being tested in the wild.
• hRecipes - marking up food!
• hAudio - development for over a year. Means of marking up music references. Could be used by last.fm and Songbird.
• Google Social Graph API - indexes XFN and hCards - give them a URL and it brings back a list of your XFN contacts

Then we decided to head for a curry before I eventually ended up in an extremely orange room at the easyHotel Kensington for the night.