Break Time at SocialDevCamp East

So I’ve spent nearly several hours here at SocialDevCamp East at the University of Baltimore and I must say that I’m quite impressed with what’s been going on. Thank you to the organizers (David Troy, Ann Bernard, Keith Casey, and anyone else I forgot) for arranging cool sessions. I think that I’ve got some good videos to post on my Viddler account and even some videos. I was a little conflicted about whether to bring my “professional camera”, but figured I’d tone it down (a little bit).

Anyways, SocialDevCamp East is pretty informative. While I seem to be oblivious to the fact that I’m learning anything, I found the discussions quite entertaining and kept my attention. I found out that the guy in charge of infrastructure at Seesmic is here and discovered that programming for the semantic web is quite complex and prefers the designer view of creating websites and applications. Unfortunately, this barcamp-style unconference has fallen into the same plight as Podcamp DC – there are sessions that I wanted to attend, but did not want to adhere to the “two feet” policy. It seems that there was a session on microblogging et al and unfortunately (?) I was enthralled by the open discussion that took place with Dr. Henry Chen on the semantic web — which I thought was very related to how search engines are probably approaching Web 3.0.

I’m having to deal with some technical issues as well…while good that there are more electrical ports to charge my laptop, the Internet is spotty at best, especially with hundreds of folks trying to get online at the same time. Luckily I have a Sprint wireless Internet card that is keeping me somewhat connected. I guess I can’t be satisfied, but I’m pretty happy with the conference to date.

If you want to see photos from SocialDevCamp East, then they’re on Flickr (tag: SocialDevCamp East), or Twitter (#socialdevcamp).

More to come…much later…