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I am still feeling the warmth of my weekend at Barcamp Vancouver (Aug 17th -18th) . I had been excited to attend this un-conference since Northern Voice back in February. There are really alot of interesting and creative people in this city and attending meetups and -camp events here provide an informal opportunity to chat and discuss our common interests regarding the Internet and digital technologies.

As this was my first Barcamp, there were a number of highlights for me. As I had for some unknown reason woken up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep, I spent the morning drinking lattes on the couch to stay awake. The benefit of this is that I had some really interesting conversations, although I did miss some cool sessions (sorry Todd). I chatted with Darren Barefoot whom I hadn’t seen since Barcamp and was able to learn about life in Malta, a fascinating European country.

It was very cool to meet Todd Sieling from ma.gnolia and be able to tell him what I love about this social bookmarking service. I have been using ma.gnolia from early summer and I like that I can give someone thanks that shares a bookmark that I like. I also trust Tara Hunt and Chris Messina and like being kept up-to-date on relevant content that they bookmark. I also feel that the community is tighter and I have more friends in Vancouver and San Francisco that use it. Thomas Vander Wal sums up his appreciation for ma.gnolia quite nicely.

In the afternoon I attended Todd’s session about ma.gnolia and twitter which was informative in helping me understand how ma.gnolia uses twitter to keep users informed about status updates. I didn’t even know ma.gnolia was on twitter until his talk. I also attended Kris Krüg’s photography session although I could only stay for half of it since it overlapped with Todd’s talk.

The day ended with 2 sessions on Facebook. First, I had planned to spend 30 minutes talking about Facebook applications from a socio-cultural perspective and then spend 30 minutes answering questions. However, I was bumped to 30 minutes total, so I decided to forgo the talk and to post the powerpoint slides and talk online as I believed people would rather get questions answers about Facebook that see slides. The slides still aren’t up yet, but I will post then along with the talk I was going to give sometime in September. Following my session, Greg gave a cool talk on Facebook applications from the perspective of a developer.

I will be putting my slides and the text of the talk I was going to give later in the month.

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I enjoyed attending -camp events because I can meet interesting people and I can improve on my public speaking skills.

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