I missed the first virtual BarCamp

May 20, 2006 By

Wow, I missed the first Virtual BARcamp, hosted by Eric Rice. Luckily Scott Beale was there with his virtual camera. Inside joke, Scott can always be seen at Silicon Valley geek events with his very cool Canon camera.

Trivia? What does "BAR" stand for? Bay Area Rejects. The whole BARcamp movement started after a few geeks in the Bay Area didn't get invites to Tim O'Reilly's FOOcamp (FOO stands for "Friends Of O'Reilly").

Me? I'm having an AFD-BBQ on July 2 after Gnomedex. What does that stand for? Alimony Freedom Day. :-) I can't get everyone in, but if you wanna come, drop me an email.

Update: there's even a Flickr feed for the virtual BARcamp.

One thing I notice? Way too clean. The real BARcamps have sleeping bags, pizza boxes, T-Shirt boxes, and lots of other geek detritous lying around.

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  • http://ericrice.com/ Eric Rice

    Heh well, can’t apologize for cleanliness, but I am fascinated that the issue of schwag was handled by my wife, whose presentation was ‘how to make your own schwag’ using the tools available in SL. Dang, even in the virtual space we want schwag! Okay, so shall it be done— by the participants (and btw, I don’t think she’d ever go to a real barcamp, but I talked her into presenting, heh)

    Here’s the quick re-cap and list of sessions that happened.
    http://blog.ericrice.com/blog/_archives/2006/5/18/1967728.html

    I was most fascinated by Second411.com… You go to the Second411 store in a virtual space, grab a box, and put that box in your store. It then acts as a conduit to a web search engine…allow your mind to transcend secondlife for a minute.

    In some weird API thing, we are making calls to check inventory inside of a virtual place. Now think of the XBOX team, XBOX live, and hmmm, can I bust out my mobile phone to quickly see how my team is doing on my 360? Can I get a short clip of what conquests have happened? Is this a WoW thing? Is this a democratization of gaming worlds?

    I don’t have the answers. But phase one was about: the spirit and workflow of Second Life resembles that of blogging/podcasting/vlogging. Phase two: the disruption of video gaming in a few years; exploratory interactive entertainment in a space we comfortably exist (yes you can be a master gamer and not computer literate)

    There’s a pattern here.

    And oh, one more thing. Our virtual record label might become a real one. Splain how that happens? :-)

  • http://ericrice.com Eric Rice

    Heh well, can’t apologize for cleanliness, but I am fascinated that the issue of schwag was handled by my wife, whose presentation was ‘how to make your own schwag’ using the tools available in SL. Dang, even in the virtual space we want schwag! Okay, so shall it be done— by the participants (and btw, I don’t think she’d ever go to a real barcamp, but I talked her into presenting, heh)

    Here’s the quick re-cap and list of sessions that happened.
    http://blog.ericrice.com/blog/_archives/2006/5/18/1967728.html

    I was most fascinated by Second411.com… You go to the Second411 store in a virtual space, grab a box, and put that box in your store. It then acts as a conduit to a web search engine…allow your mind to transcend secondlife for a minute.

    In some weird API thing, we are making calls to check inventory inside of a virtual place. Now think of the XBOX team, XBOX live, and hmmm, can I bust out my mobile phone to quickly see how my team is doing on my 360? Can I get a short clip of what conquests have happened? Is this a WoW thing? Is this a democratization of gaming worlds?

    I don’t have the answers. But phase one was about: the spirit and workflow of Second Life resembles that of blogging/podcasting/vlogging. Phase two: the disruption of video gaming in a few years; exploratory interactive entertainment in a space we comfortably exist (yes you can be a master gamer and not computer literate)

    There’s a pattern here.

    And oh, one more thing. Our virtual record label might become a real one. Splain how that happens? :-)

  • http://taotakashi.wordpress.com/ taotakashi

    For the next barcamp I will make sure to bring Pizza boxes and the like with me, so everybody feels home ;-)
    (unfortunately I missed this one but I am planning to attend the next one).

    And indeed, much cool stuff happening there at the moment which not only affects Second Life itself.

  • http://taotakashi.wordpress.com/ taotakashi

    For the next barcamp I will make sure to bring Pizza boxes and the like with me, so everybody feels home ;-)
    (unfortunately I missed this one but I am planning to attend the next one).

    And indeed, much cool stuff happening there at the moment which not only affects Second Life itself.