I just went to BarCampBoulder, and had a blast. Basically, it’s a self organized conference. Free, no set schedule (there’s a white board with a tenative schedule) and anyone can give a talk about anything. Very cool. Here’s a random link fest covering topics I chose to make note of.
- Microformats, especially hCal. Feasibility of machine aggregation of Boulder free events, and complexities inherent in such an effort.
- An understanding of how slippery the concept of “The Semantic Web” is.
- An excellent post about handling credit card transactions.
- To clean up user generated content, and avoid XSS attacks, use UBB or some other markup language. Another option is to validate any user generated content against an XHTML Mobile DTD, which should screen out any nastiness.
- CA-Cert, a way to generate SSL certificates for free, that is slightly better than self signed certs.
- CardSpace and OpenID,and the differences and benefits of using each.
- A post about the Laws of Identity
- ColourLovers, for all you palette hounds out there.
- A fascinating discussion of the amount of data running through Digital Globe’s systems.
- An overview of CMSes worth looking at: Typo3, TextPattern, Radiant
- A discussion of how open communities work (and don’t), including Wikipedia.
It was a fascinating day. There seemed to be a business track and a technical track, and there ended up being about 30ish folks there. Well worth it, if for no other reason than the intellectual ferment.