B. Mann Consulting

I was a bit late to BarCamp Brussels due to the wrap up of DrupalCon Brussels 2006 the night before, but I was immediately energized by the people there.

I jumped straight into an in depth conversation with Ton Zijlstra, a long time "blog buddy" who I met for the first time in person last year at BarCamp Amsterdam.

Somehow, we quickly dived into feed reading strategies. Ton uses essentially the "Blink" strategy (my words, not his) to capture hilights of the content that he reads. And that was our first point of interest. He doesn't read via content or by information/topic slice, but rather primarily reads via people. Ton uses Lektora, and tends to read in disconnected mode on the train.

Aside: I need to write up some thoughts on the use of media by "commuters"...I have a virtually non-existent commute, so my media usage is very different than those that do commute. Silicon Valley/the Bay Area has very long commutes...does this have an effect on innovation?

I've just gotten back from a whirlwind conferennnce tour -- Euro OSCON, GovCamp, DrupalCon Brussels, and BarCamp Brussels, all packed into a little less than a week in Belgium.

I acknowlege that I'm pretty much hopeless when it comes to conference blogging: my mind is spinning with all the talks and face to face meetups with people, and I can't seem to slow down to get something useful posted.

I did manage to write up two lengthy posts relating to discussions with Ton Zijlstra at BarCamp Brussels, which I'll be posting later today, and I uploaded a handful of pictures to my Flickr account. Now to dive back into work...talk soon!

So I kind of stealth launched the concept of BarCamp Brussels in some posts wrapping up FOSDEM 2006, slated for around September 2006 to coincide with EuroOSCON.

I just found out about BarCamp Brussels ForTheImpatient -- for April/May! Boy, those Europeans sure are impatient :P Being organized by Peter Forret.

Hey, Ton, I'm hoping you and your crew will be interested in one or both camps. What do you think? (and yes, I still "owe" you a post on the 4 jobs meme...it might end up being a podcast or something suitably different).

Sounds like fun...wish I could attend lots more European events, but I have to ration out my travel a bit. Hopefully the ForTheImpatient crew will be able to figure out some good areas and set things up nicely for a bigger (or at least...more international?) attendance in September. I'll be watching it with interest.

It was my great pleasure to meet the three guys from ClipperZ (The image is a little blurry, but that's because I had them shout "Identity 2.0" when I took the picture :P).

We sat down for several hours to discuss Identity 2.0 and some of their thoughts on blog owner centric vs. comment maker centric systems, talking mainly about SXORE (Marco has a post with SXORE feedback) and coComment. No comments from the SXORE team on that post, although Bryan Rieger found it. Go Vancouver people!

In any case, they are thinking about portable reputation (or maybe federated reputation would be a better phrase) as an initial application that can be built on top of Identity 2.0 systems. A reputation manager (a reputation provider? store?) would support multiple identity systems for authentication, and also share reputation with other reputation managers. This would initially be based on some very simple metrics, like perhaps whether or not a comment was approved, but certainly could support multiple other values (which gets quickly into a discussion about designing karma systems, perhaps, although it would depend on the feedback loops involved). Definitely subscribe to their blog if you want to keep up with what these guys are up to.

The other exciting thing I found was that here was a new "Web 2.0" style startup company based in Italy that had a lot more in common with Vancouver or San Francisco than anything else I had seen up to that point in Italy. We discussed the difficulties and benefits of a distributed team (although they are all in Italy, they live in different towns), and the usual roundup of tools -- they tried Basecamp but ended up using Trac, their user interaction diagrams are in OmniGraffle, we discussed Campfire vs. Skype bookmarked chats, or perhaps a Jabber multi-user chatroom.

It's nice to see such interesting things happening in Europe, and I have more of an interest in cross-pollination with European companies and clients than I do in jumping down into the scrum in Silicon Valley. I'm already scheming what the next European event will be: perhaps a BarCamp Brussels? Could be organized around Euro OSCON 2006 at the end of September 2006 (the Call for Participation deadline is March 6th).