I’ve not picked the venue for Saturday yet, but it’s going to be a pub somewhere in very-central London. It should be easily accessible from the underground so people from far and wide should be able to find it without having to brave Zone 2. Sunday is going to be a more local affair at The Dove in Hackney, and probably include a lot more Belgian beer.

Comedic self-hype aside, I would really, really love to see as many people I can before I leave. I don’t know how often I’ll be back on British soil, so this might be the last time for a while.

Let me know if you can come by flagging yourself attending on one or both of the Upcoming events. Space on the beanbag/sofa/floor of my flat is available, if you ask nicely.

• Ben’s Great Getaway Saturday
• Ben’s Great Getaway Sunday

Leave comments to let me know roughly what time you’ll be in, and I’ll try to sort table reservations, too.

Replenishment of the mind and soul, that is. The body, for its part in all this madness, will not be thankful. The combined effect of parties late into the night, every night whilst sustained only through a diet of 80% pure beef is not necessarily something doctors of NHS would endorse. This and the sleep depravation left me absolution shattered last year.

It figures I’d want to do it all again. ‘Spring Break for Geeks’ they call it. Taking years off the life of our planet to fly half way around the world for this over-indulgence is just half the battle; you don’t win at SXSW unless you take a proportional amount off your own lifespan too. In the interests of a high score, I’m staying on for SXSW Music too.

I have, as is traditional, failed to blog anything at all during the event so far. Interactive has in fact been and gone before this entry was finished, which puts me in a strange pre-present-past tense tangle. Regardless, it’s all been very good.

The boxes are all ticked: Wild parties, catching up with friends from all over the world, eating so much tex-mex it makes you ill? Pretty standard and successful trip so far.

I will attempt to do a better write up, of course, but in the mean time your best bet is to track me on Twitter. Better yet, now that SXSW Music has started, is to check the really, really cool Out-Of-5 tracker than Mike Stenhouse put together. It’s a really brilliantly simply tool to review stuff through Twitter and as well as passing judgement, provides a chronological listing of (mostly) everything I’ve seen in Austin. I highly recommend it.

More soon. Now, more music to see.

The advantage to being about being 34,000ft above the Atlantic Ocean is that there’s crap all to do. I can listen to music, or I can poke Steve Marshall with a newspaper. Two hours into the flight the latter activity has been exhausted for excitement, and music (Radiohead’s magnificent ‘In Rainbows’, by the way) works in the background anyway.

So, MacBook open, and a blogging imbalance to redress. The absurdity of my silence to become abundantly clear in the next few paragraphs as I reveal that my life has been unusually lively of late.

Speaking

From March 2nd to March 4th, WebCamp and BlogTalk took place in Cork, Ireland. For the first time in a formal setting (by which I exclude free-for-all BarCamp unconferences) I’ve been invited to speak. Naturally it’s my specialist subject of microformats that’s behind the invitation, and I’m sitting on the Mashup’s & Microformats Panel during BlogTalk, whilst presenting an ad-hoc introduction to Decentralised Social Networking (using microformats, specifically) at WebCamp the day before.

It’s one of those life-bolt-upright events, I think. One of the moments where I cannot modestly hide from the fact that I’ve achieved something. I do that; excluding myself from general achievement or describing myself below the others around me. I’m pretty sure it irritates people, who in turn generally give me a frustrated look and insist I just concede that I’m good at what I do.

Standing alone by the gate at Heathrow Airport, sending text messages half way around the world to arrange liaisons in Cork, about to embark on an expenses-paid flight and stay in expenses-paid accommodation, I can’t hide from the achievement.

There’s pride, also anxiety. Going to Ireland separates me from the usual safety net of the London-centred web community. Leaving for a place with no trusted friends in the audience and no one to reassure me that whatever I do will be fine.

I digress with meta wankery. Going to Ireland has been a wonderful experience. My sessions seemed to go down very well, I got lots of very positive feedback and at least one of them was recorded and should be on the internet for me and everyone else to view shortly. WebCamp — a much more structured day than a BarCamp or last month’s SemanticCamp — went really well. Uldis and John did a great job organising it, there were lots of fascinating insights into microformats, FOAF and (most revelatory to me) XMPP. XMPP could change the world, seriously.

BlogTalk is a two-day conference, but for my other commitments I could only attend the first day. Whilst WebCamp was down and dirty with technology (not least Dan Brickley’s beautiful MacBook Air), BlogTalk provided a much broader look at the industry of blogging in general. Pieces on content, trends and overview outnumbered the technical (although microformats seemed well grasped). It made for a good mix though, with my time in the audience spent appreciating more hits than misses.

On microformats and mashups

My panel on Mashups & Microformats also seemed well received, and I think I presented myself and the microformats community pretty well. I was able to reel off my piece trying to preserve the exclusive association of ‘microformat’ with microformats.org, and push the ever important point that ours is just one way of producing structured patterns in HTML. (Oh, I said ‘patterns’ not ‘POSH’. That derogatory nonsense acronym needs to go.)

Reviving the ‘Mastermind’ metaphor, the panel questions split nicely between a specialist subject of microformats and general knowledge round that gave reign to babble a little about mobile, as well as pull in a fair bit of Yahoo! for the mash-ups focused portions. It has to be said, Y” alt=”” border=”0” /> is a great place to work and get involved in all this stuff.

Clogging the Tubes

My solo slot from WebCamp was recorded by Stephanie Booth, who did a sterling job taking video from most sessions during the day, and in BlogTalk, too. I’m not sure at this point whether the panel was recorded or by who, but I’m hopeful.

I’ll link to that when it makes it online.

Cork

Without dragging on at too much length, I was really taken with Cork. Aral and I spent at least an hour wandering the old, pedestrianised streets around {{PLACE}}, soaking up the early evening atmosphere and being thoroughly indecisive about where to sit for dinner; a farcical number of eateries are intensely crammed into an inexplicably small area. I’ve no idea how Cork supports so many but as a tourist it’s excellent. I’m pretty certain that I’ll need to come back for a holiday sometime.

American Adventure

Back to a slightly turbulent 34,000ft. I’m en route to Austin, Texas (via Houston) for South By Southwest. It’s going to kill me. Not the plane (else you’ll never read this to know), but the twelve days. Steve and I decided that if we’re going to do this properly we should attend not only the SXSW Interactive conference, but also the music festival that follows. I was physically crushed after just interactive this year. I’m not sure how this year is going to work. I remain defiant in my youth, but there’s a twinge of doubt.

It’s also looking likely that I’ll be spending the Easter week in San Francisco before returning to the UK. I’m all set out for an excellent few weeks.

Lots of interesting things presented, but there was no escaping the presence of a more semantic web.

On a personal level my presentation on ASP.NET and Web Standards got a fairly sparse attendance (not much of a surprise, given ASP.NET’s reputation), but I think I presented much, much better than last year so it was well worth it.

I also got to stand on a microformats panel with people far more accomplished than myself; an altogether great experience to talk in front of a large audience whilst surrounded by encouraging and passionate speakers. Thank you very much for including me, I hope I proved some worth.

Also, does anyone have a photo of Windows Calendar crashing during my demo? (Update: Yay Norm!)

The presentations on RDF also caught my interest, and there’s a lengthy post about that coming up next.

Elsewhere, it was an all out enjoyable weekend. David Emery gave another interesting insight into the music industry, I finally got to meet fellow microformateers Chris Messina and Brian Suda, Jeremy Keith and Brian drafted the XHTML Enemies Network at 4am on Sunday and Werewolf was great fun all night long. Oh, and Steve got ridden side-saddle. All in all, the UK technology scene is looking healthy and enthusiastic; apart from Steve who is just looking powerless in the face of women and Andy Budd’s heckling.

So microformats were out in force and are an increasingly accepted tool in the web design utility belt. Not everyone is on board yet, of course, but I do think there’s a lot of motivation and encouragement for microformateers to push out some more complex and advanced demonstrations for the converted. Because microformats are so heavily based around real-world usefulness, any ‘next step’ demos we assemble are going to appeal to beginners as well.

I’m wondering if getting some working demo of decentralised social networking with OpenID would be the way to go. In fact, if a simple PHP library can be developed from that to make it implementable in existing, larger sites it could provide further benefits than a clever demo.

Events like this are going to continue throughout the year with Manchester, Brighton and Newcastle already raised as possible locations for more BarCamp events. Ian also says he’s keen to run some smaller grass-roots conferences in London. A good year and a busy conference season is in store.

In fact, the next few months suddenly look rather busy:

• BarCamp London 2 (Saturday–Sunday) in London
• South by South-West Interactive (March 7th–15th) in Austin, Texas
• Future of Web Design (April 18th) in Kensington, London

BarCamp is going to be a lot of fun. It’ll be my second experience of presenting, something that experience and confidence can only improve. Last year, Steve Marshall and I threw something together on Workflow and it was tough going when it came to stand up. This time around we’re divorcing to do our own thing, which should make it easier; only needing to fill a 30 minute slot rather than 60. I’m also sitting on the microformats panel, so I’m putting together some demo’s to introduce that, with a slight new twist.

Presenting Two Point Oh Yeah! T-Shirts for the AJAX generation.

A few of us have been wearing the tees for a week now and the ‘Well Fed’ feed icon design has gone down a storm. We’ve not got the website how we’d like it just yet, but since demand is there we’ve got a placeholder to tide you over and you can buy the shirts directly from Spreadshirt who’re doing the printing.

There are separate stores for the US and European orders, so import taxes and transatlantic shipping need not be a problem.

The full website will drop in a week or so at twopointohyeah.com, once I’ve moved and regained internet access.

Enjoy!

It was a really good event socially and there were some real gems amongst the presentations and discussions that took place. Standing out for me were:

• The discussion of digital music, which could easily have gone on all day
• Dave, Guy and the Salted boys doing Pecha Kucha and their incredibly addictive and entertaining Delicious-based Pecha Kucha generator which powered an excellent, audience participation session on Sunday.
• Whilst the idea of intense personal branding didn’t really grab me on a personal level, the follow-up discussion was very interesting indeed about the relationship between people and their companies, the expectations of clients and of what we offer the wider community in our output.

Steve and I presented as well, he spontaneously naming our effort ‘Workflow Fucking Matters’, the potty mouth that he is. Although the audience was small it was still quite difficult presenting, neither of us being especially experienced. I think Steve did fine presenting the theories of workflow design, then I had a crack at providing examples from Wordpress’s rather flawed admin UI and the rather more beautiful Flickr Organizr.

Whilst I’m going refrain from outright self-criticism, I do think that I let BarCamp’s laid back attitude come ahead of my lack of experience and that I should have prepared a lot more. I certainly hope I didn’t bore anyone too much as I failed to focus enough on each of my points. I did at least have a far less uncomfortable discussion about workflow implementation with David Smalley afterwards, which reassures me about the subject matter at least.

I’ve not released my slides as they’re really nothing without the spoken content. However, Steve videoed it and many other presentations throughout BarCamp as has plans to release them as soon as he can – once he’s done being pedantic with the editing anyway. I’m not sure whether he plans to release ours as-is or whether he’ll edit it in the interests of making it better viewing (and therefore more useful).

It does all make me wonder about public speaking generally. It’s something I’m very keen to do more of, but there’s so much experience I need to gain, particularly just with my delivery, that I’m not sure how best to proceed without feeling guilty for those who have to witness earlier efforts as I start out.

I wonder if at a future BarCamp (or similar) some more experienced public speakers would consider adopting someone less experienced to share in their presentations, taking off some of the pressure and providing a bit of mentoring along the way too. I know there are a lot more people than just me who’d appreciate a chance like that if anyone is prepared to offer.

Anyway, self-doubting aside it was a truly excellent weekend and I’m really looking forward to the next. BarCampBirmingham*, anyone?

Thanks to everyone else who came, and thanks of course to Ben Metcalfe, Ian Forrester, Paul Hammond and Murray Rowan who were as ‘in charge’ of a BarCamp as is technically possible.

Roll on d.Construct.

*I’m aware of course that there has already been a BarCampBirmingham in the US. I’m referring to Birmingham in the UK, of course.

Therefore, I’m off on holiday to Malta with my family tomorrow until the 28th.

I’ve not set an auto-response on my email because right now I’m subscribed to mailing lists with it as well and there’s nothing more irritating than getting holiday auto-responses through mailing lists. I vow to sort out my list addresses soon, but for now I hope you’ll accept this post as notification that I won’t be answering any email for a week.

Best wishes for the week.

Sandcastles image is ‘Someone Else’s Sandcastles’ by Jason Coleman.

BarCamp is coming to the UK next month for two days and many are attending.

8th Rule: If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present.

Woah scary. I’m not the most experienced of public speakers nor the most confident so I’ve teamed up with Steve Marshall and we’re going to try and do a short presentation and then incite some sort of discussion. Rule 4 states that intros must only be 3 words, which at the moment means I’m working to the draft title ‘CMS Workflow Sucks’.

I’m not 100% sure if we’re allowed to/supposed not to talk much about presentation content beforehand, but since Steve and I are still just chucking ideas around there’s not much more to say that is in the title (maybe it’ll stick). Steve knows a lot about workflow, especially from a CMS administration point of view having built at least one large, bespoke CMS that included rather smooth multi-user workflow. I… well I just dislike the way Wordpress has a gazillion different views for managing comments.

From a desire not to be over-ambitious with the speaking side and from a little chat with Drew on the matter, I’m favouring a short two-part presentation. First explaining workflow and why it matters and why neglecting the administration side of your CMS or Web App is Bad™, followed by a small handful of examples (hopefully positive as well as negative). Then try to open it up for audience members to tell us how much we suck and that they like to see their comments displayed in subtly different and varyingly ineffective ways.

If anyone has done this before and would like to advise against such a format, comments are open.

Hoping to see you there. Is sleep expected at these things? Will there be XBox?