Category: web

As you may have guessed from my other postings over the past few days, I spent the weekend at BarcampLondon3, at Google’s offices in Victoria, London.

This was the second Barcamp I’ve participated in (‘attended’ is probably too passive a word for a Barcamp), and was even better than BarcampBrighton in September. This was, of course, largely thanks to all the efforts of Ian and the other organisers, and to the wonderful hospitality shown by Google. From my own point of view, I think I also benefited from not going with a group of colleagues, which forced me to overcome my natural reticence and speak to people I didn’t know (it helps that the Barcamp crowd are a friendly bunch!)

If you have any geek tendencies and have never been to a Barcamp, I highly recommend it.

Oh, and as a footnote, I experimented with blogging some of the talks more-or-less as they happened. That’s why the posts were a bit rough, but at least they’re there – I still have notes from Agile2007 back in August that I haven’t got round to writing up.

My photos from the weekend are on flickr.

[tags]barcamp, barcamplondon3, google[/tags]

Many pages on bbc.co.uk allow comments, but they tend to be trivial (“Mylene’s dress was a bit short”), are heavily moderated (which costs a lot of time), and are tied into the BBC site. Many of the comments people make are actually direct contacts regarding participation in the programmes, which end up going to the production team rather than on the page.

Mark is experimenting with allowing/forcing people to post their comments to their own blogs, and linking them back (like how the real Web works ;-) ). As well as solving some of the issues mentioned above, this would help the BBC fulfil its remit of encouraging participation in the Web (as opposed to treating the BBC site as a walled garden.

Apparently the message sinks in when people are shown Technorati results for their pages, when they realise how many people are commenting on them without them being aware of it.

In the Q&A afterwards, someone mentioned disemvowellment, which is an interesting technique I haven’t heard of before.

[tags]barcamplondon3, bbc, comments[/tags]