Barcamp was awesome. Massive knowledge transfer. Half the workshops I attended were great, and I missed many more that I wanted to check out. I frightened DB by saying that I liked it so much I would attend one every month if they would organize it. Even the t-shirt was nice.

Quick notes:

Peter van Ganderen gave a great overview of the state of digital archiving today. The only known solution is moving your data from one hard drive to the next, and aiming for non-obsolescent file formats.

Brent van Weringen talked about the state of mobile phones, the MVNO world, data, and where phones are going. The short version is that data is a weird market right now, and Brent suspects that there will be lots of money for a data-centric MVNO that leverages a few key strengths: a limited, targeted, tightly-integrated hardware-software platform and upcoming phones that will access WiFi and WiMax seamlessly. The sum total would be a cheap data plan on a phone that jumps from mobile networks to WiFi/WiMax in order to save on data charges for the MVNO. We’ll see. Right now, a lot more MVNOs are staring at microscopic client logs. So maybe they had best try something.

Richard Sexton, who works at Technicolor locally, told some great stories about Dr. Uwe Boll and thinks that his critics are about to find out that Dr. Boll is a pretty good boxer. Richard was actually trying to talk about how he thought that video game tropes and visual styles were ruining movies, but I don’t think he made the point. What I frequently worry about (perhaps too often) is that video games are being infected with the style of movies, whether they need it or not.

DB presented on memes, using the example of his icryptex meme, and had some excellent info on how the thing propagated from his referrer logs. Here’s a hint: Internet Dark Matter (aka email, IM, and other visits without referrals) is a powerful source of links.

Photocamp, a presentation by Kris Krug, Warwick Patterson, and Matt Trent was great. The part of the presentation on what the future ideas in digital photography will be shocked me: for a start, how about “plenoptic” cameras that will allow variable, post-hoc choices of depth of field and focus; relighting one image using the data from another, space-generation and photo-collaging from arbitrary collections of photos, and more.

Todd Maffin, official blogger of the CBC, bravely faced a crowd that mostly consisted of people mad the CBC was underfunded, plus me who was mad the CBC was funded. He had some interesting stuff to say, including how the crisis for the CBC is not just its so-so-to-poor ratings, but also its 65-yo-white-people demographic. Things are different for CBC Radio 3, which actual listeners may know is not really a radio station.

Oh, and we’ve had our differences, but trust the photo: Boris Mann is evil.
Boris Mann
Look! He’s evil! The photo!