BarCamp Boulder

I ran into Chris Messina and Tara Hunt just walking through San Francisco last month. (I was there for the AttentionTrust lunch with Goldhaber.) When they found out I was living in Boulder they asked if we had a BarCamp. “Nope. Only in Denver.”

The next week I get an email with a link to BarCampBoulder. I love how quickly things can come together on the web!

Anyways, BarCamp was this weekend and I had a great time. See David Cohen’s writeup for more detail.

For my part, I learned.

• Lots of folks in town are using Drupal. Lijit, Medium, and all the various blogs of Enthusiast Group. David Mandell summed up everyone’s attitudes with “It sucks less than the alternatives.” I must agree. Drupal is the best open source CMS out there and far better than rolling your own, but it has a long way to go. But as it gets more popular, perhaps we’ll see more improvements. (We also noted the difficulty of finding developers who know Drupal. If I was a developer right now, I’d be diving into Drupal right about now.)
• Me.dium is cool, even if it takes a while to fully get it. Their ambitions are very large, but then their team is very talented. Though Lijit is often compared to Me.dium, the more I look at it I see we are solving two sides of one problem. But that’s something for another post…
• Great talk about Attention and the future of attention management at the Laughing Goat Cafe. David Henderson knows his stuff. I proposed my idea of why we need to model our attention filtering systems after the existing systems already working in our brain. But that’s another post too.
• Boulder has a thriving little web & tech community and lots of very clever people. I’m glad we’re finding each other and I look forward to more interaction.