Barcamp Klagenfurt 2008

As I mentioned in my introductionary post, I was getting high on Web 2.0 hype in Klagenfurt at the user-lead unconference Barcamp. When I took a train to Klagenfurt I never expected to be such a positive experience - after seeing a video from San Francisco's Barcamp (I'm including it below), I didn't realy expected that something organized almost in my neighbourhood could bring together so many interesting people with equaly interesting lectures.

The first lecture that I attended and obviously one that had some influance on me was the lecture from Monika Meurer titled "Time & ideas for blogging". Her idea of getting yourself a routine and following it as much as possible made me brave enough to start rethinking about blogging. The sheer amount of effort and work that she and her husband put into their blogs was almost jaw-dropping - it turns out that she prepars material for a month or so in advance and then uses Timestamp feature of Wordpress so that posts are evenly distributed. One could write enough posts to accommodate his holidays, use Timestamp and his readers would never even notice that he was out of town! :)

Following that I got myself some reality check with Stefan Jäger's presentation of his trip to North Korea. When you constantly annoy yourself with everyday troubles, a lecture like this does show you the other perspective of your life and how life goes on in some other, less fortunate parts of the world. When you get stripped of your mobile phone when you land at the airport you know the situation has to be bad, but then things just get worse in NK. I'm still waiting if Stefan will publish his slides on the net so that you can take a look by yourself. I know that most of it's people don't care about internet access and mobile phones due to North Korea's economic position, but it's just unbelivable to hear that goverment officals have access to both of these, while ordinary citizens have to get permits just to travel accross country.

After seeing "Blogs and their connectivity network" and "BIG Weblog Projects" (I'll write a follow up on them tomorrow), I slowly got to the part when you could see me before the board. I attended lightning talks (5 minutes, everybody, everything :)) and had a quick speech about Cross-site XMLHttpRequests. 

Me giving a speech (yes, my hair does look a bit weird :)

I'll be publishing my keynote and some code samples tomorrow or the day after it in a follow-up - I would like to do some code clean-up and make it as concise as possible.