Wednesday, October 10, 2007

 

Second Life at Cafe Caffeine on Monday

The American Cancer Society raised $117,985.03 in their 2007 Second Life Relay for Life event. David Neff, the Director of Online Communications, and Jerry Markham, Manager of eCommerce-High Plains Division, American Cancer Society, Austin Corporate Office will be bringing Second Life to Cafe Caffeine Monday evening at 7pm. I caught this presentation at 501 Tech Club last month and it is definitely worth checking out. Today's New York Times article Free the Avatars mentions plans for interoperable virtual worlds lead by Linden Labs and IBM.



Check out this sweet ride that fetched $2000 in an auction. Worldchanging covered Second Life Relay for Life when they were just getting started.

Sunday, October 07, 2007

 

Barcamp BFE


Scott Gregson & Crew

This was going to be one of those "planting seeds" events although the venue had barcamp written all over it (I won't mention that ten miles after missing the exit, I wondered out loud "Have we already passed San Marcos?" and required the help line to guide us to Gordo's) For the next barcampsanmarcos, those of us in Austin and San Antonio need to remember to make a carpool section on the wiki so that, for instance, Silona and I don't have to ask around (thanks Rich).

In the morning, Jennifer had mentioned that her San Antonio neighbor Michael Verdi wanted to make it later (he was in flight) but since we had to be out of the building at 5pm, it wasn't practical. In between sessions at Barcamp Texas, Michael shared his impressive video blogging-fu and showed off his cool Sanyo Xacti. (Update: Giovanni just posted Michael's talk at Barcamp Texas.)

During lunch at the Root Cellar, I expressed how backwards Facebook is to Shaine Mata only to discover later in the day that he had blogged "How To Kill Facebook" two months ago. I guess some things go without saying. (Update 10/9: the facebook honeymoon is over) As a result of Shaine's blogging during an election, he became a legislative aide for Texas state representative Aaron Peña (I'm linking directly to his post of a Bollywood meets Texas ghost town meets Thriller video). The main theme our end of the table during lunch seemed to be carving out was how the constructive part of blogging (evolving, organizing, etc.) and its momentum can suffer from self-imposed censorship due to job obligations or disruptions due to having to blog through personal problems.

Erica described some kind of startup camp she went to in Toronto where the organizers demanded NDAs to be signed at the door. As you can imagine, hilarity ensued. More interesting were Erica's experiences with Startup Weekend in Boulder and Houston. Although the idea of cranking out a software application over a weekend is cliche (but when it's open source, it's genius), I haven't heard of people coming together to create a company over a weekend. In a way it makes barcamp look like a booger, but in another, it looks like more chest beating.

Speaking of chest beating, "Identity: OpenID, oauth and community currency" was the talk I did. Since everybody seemed to be using twitter, I used giving twitterfeed.com access to my twitter account to automate notification of new blog posts as an example of how oauth will be used in the future so that you don't need to give total access to one application when it only needs access to one resource from another ("valet key for the web").

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