The knowledge sharing society where everyone admits they don’t know everything and want to tell others what they do know.

The aim of a barcamp is to hack something together while attending talks on a variety of subjects. The events usually last from 10am on the Saturday till 6pm on the Sunday. The aim is for everyone to give a talk or something. The agenda is made up on the day using post it notes.

The whole event is free with sleeping space being provide if required on the upstairs floor.

I feel the first thing I have to tell you is the building.
I swear my first impression was to question the safety of the building. The old Brighton Music Library was hosting the event and I was informed that there had been multiple conversion projects run on it but none of them had been completed. This gave the event a perfect hacking atmosphere in my opinion.

The event covered a wide range of talks, from is the Android Source really open to /dev/fort (devfort.com) to to being taught the hand actions for “I want to know what love is” by Foreigner.

My personal favorites were how to run a StarWars Weddings on a Budget and Blogging for fun and profit.

It was a really friendly atmosphere with anyone and everyone happy to answer questions.

I hope to attend BarCamp London 7 in October, for more details please look at http://www.barcamplondon.org/

For more general information on barcamps please take a look at http://www.barcamp.org

Thanks to Alex Hutter for the photographs

   link

I first read about this game 40minutes before the launch and so 38 minutes later I was sitting there hitting the F5 button to see nothing was happening…. Now if any of the readers have heard about Monopoly City Streets they will probably be aware their servers fell over for the first few days (ref). I spent many a time looking at a CentOs screen saying the server was down for maintenance. When the game came back up it was too slow to play, their appeared to be a lot of hype all around the world and I was not certain it could live up to it.

However when the game was finally running live and able to cope with the demand I was pretty impressed.

The aim of the game is simple, become a property tycoon. Easier said then done, however with all the worlds roads up for grabs there are always places for new players to start.

Using the Google Map API the to generate the map data the player can select the road they wish to buy and then double click on it. After the road has been bought the player can choose to build houses or expand the number of streets he controls. The houses increase the rent from each street by the road can only contain so many houses. You begin with 3 000 000 Monopoly dollars and at the start or each day you receive your rent from the properties you own. You also occasionally get Chance Cards after completing a transaction. These can allow you to place hazards on your opponents streets or remove hazards from your own. When a street has a hazard on it no rent can be collected.

There is always a helpful little Monopoly Man there to lend you advice. However I found him far too much like the PaperClip from MS Office.

If you have a spare few minutes give the game a go. Its one of the more innovative web based games I’ve seen for a while and its fairly simple to play.
http://www.monopolycitystreets.com/game.html#en

Who are we all really? Have you always wanted to know how you are seen by the Internet World?

An art installation displayed in the MIT Museum produced by the MIT social media group aims to answer that very question.

I came across the website for the piece while randomly surfing the web. http://personas.media.mit.edu/

Its own description best describes how it works taken from their front page.

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

So I tried to search cminion as its the name I go by online.

Below is my first set of results.

Now I don’t feel I’m that interested in art, or that my name would ever be associated with art but obviously i am an online art connoisseur. I do admit though this entry is about a piece of art.

Out of curiosity I decided to try again, with the same name.

Now suddenly my largest section is Illegal…. Well I wasn’t sure what to say, maybe I am an art thief secretly…. Maybe in the previous two minutes minutes my rapidly changing interests has gone from famous art works to laundering the money from my sales of stolen art.

I decided to try one last time to see if there would be any similarity with it and the previous two.

Now I know this is all a bit of fun, but I would expect some sort of coloration between the three searches that happened within a ten minute period.

If you are on the west of the pond and fancy seeing this curious piece of art it is on display until the end of this month at the MIT Museum.

Please post a link to your own person below…

Is anyone else finding twitter is suffering more and more. At least twice today I found myself staring at a error page..

Not a big deal, but it is a shame.

Sorry its taken me so long to get round to finishing this post.

However I come to face this with two problems.
1) I haven’t got my notes as i lost them
2) I have a terrible memory.

I took sunday very calmly, tried to sort some problems out with my MacBook and in the end admitting defeat and installing Snow Leopard (see a future blog post for my opinions).

This is in the order I remember the talks now in the order I attended.

Star Wars Wedding – On a Budget
This guy had so much energy and was so proud of his achievement. I arrived her cautiously, unsure if i was showing a side of me that was too geeky. I was mainly attending to see what he was going to say (note to my fiance dont worry I don’t intend on putting you through all of this). He explained how he managed to afford the wedding on such a slim budget and how much easier it was. For for everything that he mentioned it had practical advice that could be used for any wedding.

His reason for doing this was to make a memorable wedding. He and his fiance were having trouble trying to remember which wedding was which. So they wanted to do something that everyone would remember.

Cloning TwitPic in 10mins. Using a selection of online tools this guy managed to produce a utility where he could take a photo and email ti an address. This would get processed and place a link on twitter. It required no actual code to be written by the author. Impressive stuff

How to Run a BarCamp- This is the traditional last talk of the day. I think i was the only none bar camp organiser at it. I found it very useful as I would one day like to run my own.

So there is my ever so brief summary of the last day. If I wasn’t installing SnowLeopard I probably would have written it as I went along again.