BarCampBlock - Thank You! Tara you are Ms.BarCamp!

I've been to BarCamp Boston and Manchester, but it was a totally new experience going to BarCampBlock in Palo Alto, where it all started.

I spent more time on the block than sessions and learned a lot! The beauty of BarCamp is that each person takes something different based on what they are focused on and what they contribute!

Great Organization to the team and Ms.BarCamp Tara!
My previous topics at Barcamp Boston has been about taking a concept to business and raising money. I decided to go with an open mind and not talk about the same topic.

Thanks to Tara, Chris, Tantek, Ross and Liz on great organization. The energy all over the block was amazing and contagious. Tara would be talking to a group, and keep an eye to refill drinking water and food to keep us all fed. She is amazing, and is Ms.BarCamp!

Utream.tv captures the chaos and energy as everyone rushed to the grid to build the conference schedule on the fly!



Brian Solis has done justice to cover the people of the crowd! Missed Robert Scoble sneaking out of his non-blog week :-)

Lawrence Sinclair was a star as he instantly brought together a bunch of Facebook App Developers and formed a co-working group to develop more cool Apps.

Its an understatement to say that I met most of the people who I've got to know in the first 6 months of my valley visits all here at BarCampBlock.

One has to experience BarCampBlock to know how being a techi is cool here, being an entrepreneur is great, and everyone gets to action to brainstorm and collaborate in real time to create the thriving silicon valley culture!

I've been bitten by the "Facebook As a Platform" bug recently and some of Dave McClure's tests on Facebook and it influenced my view of what hallway sessions and BarCamp sessions I participated in.

Sessions - So much to choose, so little time

So many sessions covering so many topics! Too bad I don't have a Time turner like Hermoine so, can't time travel to attend two parallel sessions.

I presented a session on "Social Media Optimization (SMO) for Facebook" which had 40+ audience in the Socialtext co-working room, with a whiteboard and great conversations.

The Wikipedia definition of SMO is broad. I focused on SMO for Facebook App Developers. What to utilize of current Facebook API and support to make your App on Facebook to reach users with clean UI, messaging, target users and influencers of your space and create viral play.

I had fun and left with more things to think about and made more friends on Facebook :-)

Session Summaries

Nelz has done a great job of summarizing sessions I missed!

I liked the session on "Future of Widgets" by Shawn Van Itersum, Product Manager of Clearspring, a Widget development platform.

He had a session on intro to Widget in the morning. The afternoon one had great conversations. Rashmi of Slideshare.net had great questions on widget analytics which are issues I have faced.

Clearspring offers a Widget development platform for developers. I am not sure how it compares with going with RockYou for Widgets or the Gigya Widget distribution platform. Shawn was a good presenter and made a compelling case for Clearspring so I am going to check them out for sure!

The discussion was not about his company but about widgets and problems of supporting widgets for multiple platforms, distribution etc. Clearspring is mostly available for content widgets on Myspace. There was some discussion about Widgets for the blogosphere.

All in all, a day spent well, worth pondering year long till next years's BarCamp.

Update: Brad Templeton of EEF was there. Gotto join EEF to donate using causes App.
Had great conversations with Nate (CTO) of Pbwiki.