It has been three many weeks since BarCamp Scotland, but I wanted to write a small entry about it. After a low key but enjoyable opening evening, Saturday morning brought a full day of BarCamp. I met a few really nice folks during the day, and watched some really interesting presentations:
The opening remarks were streamed live on Qik by Ewan Spence. Ewan has some more videos which were streamed live from the event on his Qik profile.
Hypernumbers allows users to link to specific cells in a spreadsheet. For example, a web page could be coded to display the contents of a cell from a spreadsheet. When the content in that cell changes, the info on the webpage changes too. At least, that’s one of the basic uses of the technology.
Paul Farnell of Litmus talked about unconventional ways to boost your site traffic. He talked about building ’satellites’–extra apps and services–around your core business, joining in with social networks, (without spamming), creating communities, and being human.
Gavin Brogan presented some rules for effective user experience design. He used real world examples from around Edinburgh (and beyond).
Cole Henley talked about his interesting new project, Dumago. Dumago is a an idea for a social network which revolves around stuff. People add stuff to their wishlist, and other people can see what stuff you want, and so on.
After some chatting in the hallway, I caught the last 15 mins of Dave McClure’s talk about grass roots internet campaigns, with Ron Paul as the example. To be honest, I head was somewhere else that this point, and while Ron Paul has some great policies, he also has some pretty awful ones, so I didn’t really connect with the topic.
Next up was Data Visualization in Web 2.0, by someone who’s name I forgot to write down (sorry). This was a bad choice for me, as it was way over my head. I’m sure it was a good talk though.
A.nnotate.com were next up, showing off their product, which allows users to upload visual files and share them with others, who can annotate them. I spoke to them briefly afterward, and they said that soon they will have the ability to annotate all sorts of visual documents, with notes placed anywhere on the document (currently you can only upload text documents and web pages and only annotate sections of text). This looks like it could be a really useful tool in the future, and the kind of thing I could see myself using with my remote clients for proofing, etc.
Dave McClure presented a talk called Startup Metrics & Business Models for [Scottish] Pirates (AARRR v1.3). His write up says it much better than mine could.
Tim Howgego showed how you can make a modest but worthwhile amount of money from using advertising on your niche website. (slides)
And finally, Ewan Spence showed us all how to play a game called 1000 Blank White Cards.
After all this, we headed across to the Library Bar at Teviot for some kindly-sponsored drinks, where I chatted to some great people, until I had to leave around 11pm, which in hindsight was a good thing. It looked like it was about to get messy.
Not quite the in depth write-up I was hoping for, but a write-up all the same.
Finally, thanks to the organisers and sponsors of the event.
