barcamp london 2

Barcamp London 2 is this weekend - annoyingly I am no longer able to attend but having attended the first one it is definitely worth trying to get to.

Amazingly there are still tickets available last I heard! Was this the wrong time of year to hold the event or was the extra space, space too far? Either way I am disappointed not to be going. It is sponsored by BT and a short walk from my flat so I think I can only hope for such ideal conditions next time!!!

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Attensa released a new version of its rss reader for outlook/attention management software. Those who saw my presentation on attention data at barcamp london will have heard me talk about Attensa. It prioritises your feeds in a “river of news” view so that in theory at least you see the posts you want to first whilst still retaining the ability to jump easily to feeds you want to check less often.

The new version improved 2 key things for me - one was an error on startup of outlook (which when I ignored seemed not to interfere with the running of the software) and the other was the inability to use the scroll mouse with any accuracy. Both these have been fixed so I am now a very happy user of the Attensa reader

A desktop alert system was introduced in this release which I am hoping that it is just the first step along the way as all it does right now is tell you that a post has arrived from feed X. I’d much prefer it to tell me what the post is so that I can decide then and there whether I want to read it.

There are a few other major improvements i would like to see:

• The first is to the river of news view - it still prioritises by feed rather than post - so even if some of the posts do not interest me at all they are prioritised along with the rest of them
• The second is similar to the search boxes found all over Vista - the ability to type in a tag/keyword and immediately see the posts referring to it. I wonder if I would actually use this often but it certainly makes finding those posts easier and quicker

Overall though it is a very good RSS reader in itself (having the flexibility of both the river of news view, folders and integrated into the outlook application). It will be interesting to see how the attention management side of the application progresses over time as there is still plenty of room for improvement - not least by adding support for email.

How many times have you gone to a conference and heard anything much said about the sponsors? Sure they are present and you see them - so there is a brand impact. But there isnt much in the way of real interaction.

At Barcamp London last weekend, there was definite interaction with the sponsors. From people saying “My view of Yahoo has completely changed” (they hosted the event and provided some of the food) to just the general gratitude towards the sponsors for providing things like food, drink, free t-shirts (I never saw so many in one place before!) and networking cables!

Here is the full list of sponsors:

Yahoo! UK, venue and connectivity!
eBay, Saturday lunch
Yahoo! UK, Saturday dinner + beers!
BBC.co.uk and backstage.bbc.co.uk, Sunday breakfast and Sunday lunch!
TechCrunch, drinks and snacks for the event!
Chinwag, sponsoring event t-shirts!
Belkin, power and network equipment

It’s 8:30am. I woke up at 7am. i tried denying myself the pain of getting up till 9am. I got up and washed at 7:45am

Some of us went to bed at just after 5am. We spent (I think- its a bit vague) from 11pm playing Werewolf (aka Mafia) till the end. Somehow we kept making the numbers for another game (the smallest number we had was 13!)!

Some others managed to go on till around 6 doing some mashup stuff

I discovered the tech geek penchant fo rmarketers - voted out the first game straight off.. and voted out the second time for being a marketer. thanks guys

well its been a hectic day - not helped by my ipod failing at midnight and then spending till the early hours attempting to fix it

on top of that - trying to attend all the sessions proved a step too far and i ended up missing one after my presentation

topics have ranged from the obvious social networking tools.. ajax.. ruby on rails to implosion of companies and thingomies.. more to come

Implosion of companies was done by Adriana - she is a great speaker and her talk was very thought provoking - talking about companies adopting “web 2.0″.

Tomorrow i am definitely going to pick the randomly named sessions as they have proved to be the most thought provoking.

anyhow back to the discussions

(for those of you here - what have you found the most interesting?)