I returned from BarCamp in New York last night. Overall, it was more fun than educational, but that’s only because it was so fun.

Some geeks in Palo Alto started BarCamp last summer as a response to O’Reilly’s invite-only Foo Camp. Then came BarCamp in Amsterdam, and then BarCamp in New York. About 70 people showed up for 36 hours of geeking out in the 9th floor office of a t-shirt company. I only knew three of the people there, though as a bonus, Noah T. Winer (yes, THE Noah T. Winer) showed up on Saturday night unannounced. In general, it was very refreshing to be able to make ridiculously technical jokes and still get a few laughs.

Mike Goelzer and I presented our idea for making the entire web as unreliable as Wikipedia. It went over reasonably well.

There are a lot of pictures from the event on Flickr under the tag BarCamp or BarCampNYC. In most of the pictures that include me, I look like an idiot, but there are a couple where I look relatively normal.

Points that I want to make without taking the time to embed in standard prose:

1. It was fun to see stuff about us pop up on Flickr, people’s blogs, and other websites throughout the weekend.

2. It’s interesting to meet people whose blogs/websites I’ve read before (notably Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, and Jesse Chan-Norris).

3. New York was depressing. I’d been avoiding going there for 33 years, and it doesn’t appear that I was missing much. Not going to San Francisco– that would be missing something. I realize that experiencing New York from the 9th floor of an office building is ridiculous, but at least I can rule out the possibility that it’s Nirvana.

Many thanks to Amit Gupta, Mike Goelzer, Nick Gray and everyone else who helped organize the event. You’re all invited to BarCampBoston some day, unless I move to Kuujjuaq, Nunavik.

I flew down to New York this morning for BarCampNYC. We’re all in the offices of a T-shirt company on the 9th floor of an office building on Broadway. As of 3:10 pm, there are 55 registrants, we’ve consumed roughly $300 of pizza, and we’re almost out of nametags. I don’t think I’ve seen so many weird laptop-carrying zealots in one place.

There are four presentation areas: Conference, Kitchen, Dev Room, and /etc. The latter was added as an afterthought this morning as the first three rooms were filling up. The list of presentations is also on the wiki.

This morning, I saw a presentation by Duncan Werner about thumbstacks.com, a website he developed that is an AJAX version of Powerpoint. It allows you to create and share presentations on the web. Near the end of his presentation, someone asked him how many hours he had spent writing it; he replied with something like, “Longer than I should have– I started it on the 30th, so almost two weeks, working half time.” For what he demonstrated, I am impressed that he could pull it off in 7 days of work.

Any BarCamp folks going to the GPLv3 launch conference at MIT on Monday? I’m planning on covering it for Wikinews, and I could use some help.

Stage 2 of my trip to New York City for BarCampNYC begins tomorrow morning around 7:30. Stage 1 was last night when I drove down to Boston from Wiscasset, Maine, where I work. I spent the day debugging a DNS problem and preparing for the Wikr presentation at BarCamp.

Wikr is a Firefox extension that Mike Goelzer and I have been working on. (Yes, it’s a stupid name, but at least it’s short.) The idea is to establish a means for synchronizing web improvements across trusted peer groups.

The “means,” in this case, is Mike’s Rails server and an RSS + SSE feed.

“Web improvements” is a contentious phrase– what improves the web for me doesn’t necessarily improve it for everyone else. The closest implementation I’ve seen of this idea is Greasemonkey scripts– scripts that allow the user to filter, augment, combine, and tweak web pages into something they prefer to the original. What Wikr is trying to do is to allow people to subscribe feeds of improvements from people or organizations that they trust. Myself, I’d love to have a feed of Google maps links embedded in any news story I read, so I can see where places mentioned are, like this imaginary weather report: “It was 10 degrees below zero in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik today.” Someone else might want a feed of spelling corrections, or a feed of bloggers’ posts about political articles they read.

“Trusted peer groups” means any group of people who trust each other and have the organization to get a feed together. Obviously, a lot of this depends on how easy it is to generate and host feeds. The Platypus extension for Firefox is a GUI for creating Greasemonkey scripts– in the end, Wikr might turn into a repackaged combination of Platypus and Greasemonkey with a little Javascript gluing it in between.

The authentication model is still half-baked. Each group will need to decide who is allowed read-only access to the feed of improvements and who is allowed bidirectional synchronization (the SSE in RSS + SSE). We haven’t developed anything beyond that principle yet.

As a demonstration for BarCampNYC, we have Mike’s server set up with an RSS + SSE feed. We also have an extension that synchronizes the pool of Greasemonkey scripts on Mike’s server to a local cache of scripts used by Firefox.

We’re also hoping to have a website and mailing list set up by the time BarCampNYC ends, so interested parties can follow our progress or join the fun.