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April 29, 2006
Seattle Mind Camp notes
I’m at Seattle Mind Camp 2 this weekend. It’s ok, though I left early Saturday to go out with a co-worker who showed up there. I’m really interested in the unconference format, though it doesn’t really seem to improve the signal-to-noise ratio over other conferences. As usual, maybe 25% of the stuff I’ve seen has been pretty interesting, and the rest hasn’t been. But it’s great to be at a local event and have so many people who are so involved in net technology! (Though there’s naturally a sizable group from Microsoft, and a bunch of people from Amazon.) There’s no way this many people would turn up in Austin, or at least not this many who’re working on web-related stuff.
And I got to see Dave Winer for the first time, in a group session on “tagging in the enterprise” or something. From his writing, I’ve assumed Winer’s sort of a jerk, and he sort of is, but he’s a jerk with 30 years of experience, and he’s right. He’s right when he says: “…it’s hopeless to ‘try to get the users’ to use social bookmarking software unless they’re already using it. Here’s why: I don’t know. But I do know it never works.” He spent a good part of his own session this morning trying to tell an audience of geeks: look, if your plan depends on “make the users do x” (or if it depends on “get all the banks and financial data-keepers and financial software companies to do y”), it won’t work.
(An aside: I met at the enterprise tagging session a very smart and soft-spoken guy from Amazon. The room seemed to be full of people who’d drunk the sweet, sweet Kool-aid of “tagging should be everywhere, for everything”. He tried very patiently to say, look, we’ve got 70 million products in the database; tagging doesn’t scale that far. He was pretty much shouted down, which sucked. I’m going to track him down this week at work.)
Totally geeky thing I discovered via Mind Camp: Grazr, which you can see in action at Alex Barnett’s blog. Scroll down, it’s in the left-hand collumn, click on “Alex Barnett OPML.” Kind of cool, a little newsreader embedded in a page, curated by Alex.
Posted by Andrew at April 29, 2006 09:39 PM
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