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daI'm going to Chicago for a perl conference that starts Monday. This is the most geekish group I am involved with. In addition to many other things about YAPC that I enjoy, I like the opportunity to learn what all the alpha-geeks are up to these days. The conference flavour is not particuarly higher-ed, corporate, or trade-show. It's more like a smallish con, or a swap-meet trading in programming ideas. I always learn something interesting, and often something I can take and use at work immediately. But a lot of it is just plain fun. (For example YAPC was my first exposure to massive numbers of laptops with wifi, in '01 or so.)
This year's mailing-list and wiki have been gearing up for a few weeks, and people are starting to make their plans for hacking sessions, being tourists in Chicago and so on. (I've made plans for a less herd-oriented tourist experience;![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
emaki , another friend Arguile, and I will be touring in a small group on Saturday and Sunday).
The conference planners are taking advantage of the stuff that seems to be called "Web 2.0" these days, including social-networking services, AJAX (which is less server-intensive web tools built with javascript and xml), and "mashups" between web tools. This makes sense; the organizers this year include a number of bloggers, a podcaster, and a part-time magazine-publisher.
Yesterday, they announced the "official tag of YAPC". I initially scoffed, thinking it overkill. Then I thought about what it would be used for; del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos, perhaps technorati blog-searches, and google searches. So yes, it makes sense to standardize on a tag, and since most people will be bringing laptops, cameras, blogging, and maybe bookmarking whatever they discover at YAPC, it makes finding stuff in these web services much easier for those of us who come along a bit later.
This morning someone converted the official schedule to ical format, including abstracts. Someone else posted it to Google Calendar, which is pretty handy for me, though I'll probably use ical for the duration of the conference since there isn't a guarantee of network quality.
So what's the point? I suppose it all comes down to laziness. ;) And, hopefully, building on the work of others (and giving it out for others to do the same in an open-sourcy way).
This year's mailing-list and wiki have been gearing up for a few weeks, and people are starting to make their plans for hacking sessions, being tourists in Chicago and so on. (I've made plans for a less herd-oriented tourist experience;
emaki , another friend Arguile, and I will be touring in a small group on Saturday and Sunday). The conference planners are taking advantage of the stuff that seems to be called "Web 2.0" these days, including social-networking services, AJAX (which is less server-intensive web tools built with javascript and xml), and "mashups" between web tools. This makes sense; the organizers this year include a number of bloggers, a podcaster, and a part-time magazine-publisher.
Yesterday, they announced the "official tag of YAPC". I initially scoffed, thinking it overkill. Then I thought about what it would be used for; del.icio.us bookmarks, flickr photos, perhaps technorati blog-searches, and google searches. So yes, it makes sense to standardize on a tag, and since most people will be bringing laptops, cameras, blogging, and maybe bookmarking whatever they discover at YAPC, it makes finding stuff in these web services much easier for those of us who come along a bit later.
This morning someone converted the official schedule to ical format, including abstracts. Someone else posted it to Google Calendar, which is pretty handy for me, though I'll probably use ical for the duration of the conference since there isn't a guarantee of network quality.
So what's the point? I suppose it all comes down to laziness. ;) And, hopefully, building on the work of others (and giving it out for others to do the same in an open-sourcy way).
