Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

I spent the weekend at O'Reilly's amazing "Foo Camp", a weekend get-together of about 200 people, all of whom seemed to be smarter than me. (Though apparently that was a common sentiment.) It's hard to describe what the event was like: some have equated it to Burning Man, though I don't think it was as weird as that. It was much like any other conference that I've been to, except that the attendees came from all kinds of fields, not just one area of interest like you might find at Apple's Developer Conference, so I think everybody had the opportunity to learn about stuff that wasn't on their radar before. Oh, and the lawn outside the campus and the empty offices indoors were filled with tents and sleeping bags.

A few old friends were there; and a few "famous" people that it was amazing to get to chat with; but for me, the most interesting experience was encountering the people behind so many of the cool companies and projects out there, like Meetup, the spreadsheet, the original Adventure game, BitTorrent, CVS, Wired Magazine, Syndic8, EFF, SixApart... you get the idea. The synergy was crackling in the air around us.

I saw some cool demos and technology. Bernie Krause, former member of the Weavers and now a PhD in BioAcoustics, showed us the work he has been doing, analyzing the "symphony" of sounds in undisturbed habitats, many of which have been since wiped out by human development. (His book/CD, Wild Soundscapes, sounds like an interesting read/listen.) He also demonstrated a speaker that projected audio around the room on a tight beam, the same way that somebody might shine a flashlight around. I could tell that it was a babbling brook when it was pointed elsewhere, but when the "beam" landed on me, the effect was astounding. (I'm worried that this technology will become the bane of our existence when it's used for advertising.) Jaron Lanier showed off some software that analyzed your face from a webcam image feed, then mapped it to an animated avatar "reflecting" your expressions. I missed the presentation by Scott McCloud on comic storytelling an micropayments, but only because I was working with group that was quite productively building a new XML format that will be very handy for news syndication. Stuart Cheshire gave not one but two presentations on Rendezvous that kept most people up until 1 AM -- but not everybody. (I have to apologize to Doc for waking him up -- I think it was something that I typed into a SubEthaEdit document that made everybody laugh.)