i thought there was a bar involved...

So I went to BarCampNYC2 this weekend, which is less exciting than it sounds (camp!? bar!? sweet!), but still a good time. In a nutshell, BarCamp is a bunch of (somewhat) geeks getting together and talking about (somewhat) geeky things in (and this is where the false advertising comes in) somewhere other than a bar*. Discussion topics ranged from Pervasive Games (hosted by Dens) to "Hacking the Long Tail" to "Xquery Redux" (whatever that means). I led a little discussion on monetizing social networks which was fun -- a number of people there were actually running their own websites and were grappling with that very problem and had lots of good insight to offer.

In the spirit of geeks getting together to talk about geeky things, the entire (un-)conference was documented on a variety of web 2.0 sites, all tagged with "barcampnyc2". In particular, you can see everyone's photos on flickr, watch videos of some of the talks on Google Video, or read what other people had to say via Technorati.

* BarCamp gets its name from FooCamp. "Foo" & "Bar" are the traditional names given to throw-away variables when programming.
Photo is of the free shirt given to attendants. We do love them tech swag.