JoshSweeney

BarCamp Atlanta 2 – Morning of Day Two

Day Two started off a little slow mainly because people that didn’t camp had to drive in to join the crowd. Those who did camp, including myself, stayed up until 4am discussing various topics of interests. Thankfully we have good sponsors in Atlanta who have provided food for the entire event. Breakfast from Flying Biscuit assisted in getting everyone moving and prepared for another day of talks and demonstrations.

The first presentation that I attended on day two was RSS tips, tricks and discussion with Will Powell. One trend that many people at the table were seeing was that they spent less time reading blog posts and more time watching Twitter since it is a real time update and less time consuming from a dedicated reading perspective. Some other take aways were that nobody in the room pays for a RSS readers and from a user level nobody really cares if you are using Atom or RSS for feeds.

After the RSS discussion I sat in on Rachel K’s presentation of Squidoo. From her presentation I would describe Squidoo as a web page building platform that has built in widgets for functionality and also provides monetization. Squidoo uses a shared revenue system and distributes the cash based on the popularity of your lens ( page ).

Sanjay Parekh gave the next presentation on How I built StartupGossip.com in a weekend ( using Yahoo Pipes ). For those of you that aren’t familiar with Sanjays site, it compiles startup blog posts, news, and tweets that are focused on the Atlanta startup scene. Unbeknown to me there is the capability to get Tweets that are geolocation based. Users of the Twitter API can also set a range and get tweets from people within the vicinity. This is what Sanjay used for the Twitter section of StartupGossip.com. The other sections use a compilation of data that is gathered and filtered using Yahoo Pipes. Then the new Pipes streams is fed into StartupGossip.

After Sanjays presentation I visited Greg Tuve which was presenting on memory fractals. Since I had never heard of memory fractals I thought that I should find out just what he was talking about. what the presentation ultimately boiled down to was a highly efficient study technique. By giving the brain three different words or images it would instantly trigger a forth word or piece of information. One example was as follows. Here are three words: lime, salt, Mexico. Now say the forth word that is linked to all three. For most the answer is tequila. Greg uses a program called Memory Weaver which allows people to quickly create study grids. During the presentation Greg also provided explainations down to the neuron level. To get more in depth information you can visit Gregs website: Memory Genesis.

For Lance Weatherby’s second act of the weekend he presented Everything Twitter. Below I have listed some information that Lance gathered and presented.

Reasons to use Twitter:

• Stay in the loop.
• Learning
• Connections
• You are bored in board meetings.

Top Twitter Tools:

• TweetDeck
• Thwirl
• Twitteriffic
• Twitterfom
• Twittercelerator

Useful Twitter Sites:

• Summize
• Favrd

What makes you unfollow people?

• Bad Signal to noise ratio

Tips for Newbs:

• Follow people in your industry
• Do not automatically reciprocate people who follow you
• Find a good client

Another interesting thought was to follow your competitor. I have seen people who follow the Twitter accounts of their competitors but the extra step which was mentioned here was to actually follow individual people in the competitors company. It would be interesting to do a study of this and determine what kind of insights that one could gain.

Next, Brad Gilbreath presented on Location Based Services. Being a Dash user Brad has created addons that allow a new level of interaction with your GPS. One of his examples was a site that integrated with your GPS to list all of the haunted houses in the area that was updated real time. So if you wanted to go out for Holloween and hit every haunted house you could quickly and easily pull this into your GPS. The discussion also went over some potential abuses for a GPS that gets real time data from web services. For example: if you wanted the closest gourmet coffee shop, a service could provide a coffee shop that they were being paid to direct people to.

The last speech of the morning was from our sponsor representative. Glen Gordon is a locally based Microsoft evangelist that always knows the latest happenings coming out of Redmond. He went over the various pieces of recent Microsoft news which is listed below.

• The release of ASP.NET MVC
• Silverlight 2
• Microsofts adoption of JQuery
• IE8
• XNA Framework for Zune and Xbox 360

After asking about the innovations in IE8 it quickly turned into an IE8 Q and A session. One of the cool new features in IE8 is web slicing. You can pick out a portion of a website, create a slice, and every time that particular portion of the website is updated you get an indicator in the browser. From the description it is almost and instant RSS feed for a specific section of a website. Glen also told us that IE8 is packaged in a VM for anyone that wants to try it out. To top of the final meeting of the morning Glen offered free one year subscriptions to anyone interested in joining the XNA Dev Network.

After Glens speech we went off to have pizza and drinks provided by the sponsors. This would be out last meal at BarCamp until next year.

Tags: atlanta, barcamp, ie8, microsoft