I just posted a huge comment over at David Crow’s blog, then realised this might be a classic case of ‘get your own blog’, as it happens I do have my own blog so I’ll post a slightly modified version here.

These thoughts are in response to Jerry King’s thoughts (3rd comment down) about directions the DemoCamp/TorCamp ‘movement’ could go in, and various reactions.

There’s a very strong case to be made that there’s lots of cool tech stuff happening in relative commercial obscurity in Toronto. And taking some of those projects and encouraging and supporting them into successful businesses would certainly be a good thing. Getting more involvement of ‘grey hairs’ with real experience in this stuff can only help that.

Jerry King asks ‘if the folks presenting at MaRS on Tuesday evening can’t speak intelligently about the commercial aspects of their very own ideas, who can?’. I think there’s an obvious answer to that, people like Jerry himself can speak intelligently to the commercialisation of ideas. Jerry demonstrates this point by suggesting several fascinating business models for the hacked digital camera idea, which Randy Glenn (who gave that demo) self-proclaimed as being business model free. I should note, Randy’s was one of the most encouraging and inspirational demos I’ve seen at TorCamp yet, it wasn’t perfect but it was fascinating, to me at least.

I guess what I’m saying is that there is room for both hacking for hacking’s sake and a more focused, business directed approach to development. In fact I’d argue that neither can thrive without the other. Personally, I’d be really sorry to see the business angle nudge out the for-it’s-own-sake stuff in the TorCamp ‘movement’. Perhaps there’s room for two streams? ViableBusinessModelTechCamp and CoolButTotallyUncommercialisedCamp perhaps?

Sorry for the run on comment, but I felt particularly strongly about this after contrasting my impression of this week’s DemoCamp (passionate and real) against iSummit (corporation heavy and the passion largely missing, or at least focused on cold hard cash).

I should note, I’m not taking some anti-capitalist stance, I just feel that there has to be room for both the pragmatic business approach to tech and the non-commercial ‘because it seemed like a good thing to do and I could do it’ approach. Blending those two worlds (done right) can only be a good thing. I definitely wouldn’t want to see business savvy as a criteria for DemoCamp, I’m not there for business savvy, I’m there to see technically cool and socially inspirational stuff people are working on (could be just me though).

Today I attended day one of iSummit, the Toronto conference about ‘Content That Pays is a high-level conference dedicated the business of content on interactive platforms.’ See Gagglespace for some live blogging of the event.

It was the MARS building at College and University. The same location as this weeks DemoCamp that I also attended, but about as different as you could get in terms of attendees and focus. Hacking just for the fun of it DemoCamp Vs. where’s my ROI iSummit (I generalise).

Still, despite the corporate heavy attendance (it costs $375 for two days after all) I was really impressed by the lineup of panels. In the morning I caught the keynote by Alexander Manu and was really impressed.

Alex was super enthusiastic and talked a lot about play, and how it is central to human being but so often marginalised in our society. He spoke about the fact that work or play were seen as either/or, when really we can and should combine the two. I can really see the truth in that, having gone from working for the Provincial government and (shuffling pointless paper) to working for myself where one of the big problems is telling myself I need to stop and go do something else every once in a while, because I really enjoy the stuff I’m working with. You can probably guess which role I was more engaged and effective in. (hint: it’s not the soul numbing one).

Later in the day I caught Jim Munroe’s panel on Machinima. Jim does some very cool stuff in DIY media and publishing, as well as being an author, and the panel was fairly indy. I don’t know how much the panel meant to the ROI-focused in the audience but I liked it.

Now I have some work to finish and then I’m off to the party tonight. I’m tired from working late last night, but there are free drinks and some cool people there.

OK, I’m convinced. Mesh is web 2.0, it’s in Toronto and I’m reading good stuff about the plans (like this and this).

So, as of just now, I’m registered to attend Mesh 2006, Toronto’s web 2.0 conference. Looking forward to it.

Speaking of conferences, I’m planning to get to at least part of the iSummit conference taking place in Toronto this week. This one’s also 2.0 flavoured, but with a media industry slant. There are some interesting (not-too-corporate interesting) looking panels here, for example Wednesday’s schedule has a conflict between We/Me Media: When YOU are the Content featuring Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress (Matt was part of an excellent panel I enjoyed on DIY web projects at SXSW). However in the same time slot there’s a Machinima Showcase panel moderated by Jim Munroe, a local doing some cool stuff in indy media (in the most literal sense).

Riya is a very Flickr-like online photo album tool, but with one very cool added feature.

Our face recognition technology automatically tags people in photos so you can search for just the photo you want.

I just tried the system. First downloading the desktop client, the uploading about a hundred photos as a test (this bit’s rather slow). Once the photos are up you go through a training process of telling Riya the names of the faces it pulls out of your photos.

The training took about 10 minutes and worked surprisingly well. After training Riya it recognised about 80-90% of the faces in my photos. Maybe not a scientific test, as my uploaded photos contained one or two of a small handful of people. But still, I’m impressed.

My immediate impression of Riya was ‘cool, but beyond the novelty what’s it for’. But thinking about it I can see some real use cases. As an example, my Dad recently switched to a digital camera and takes thousands of pictures a year. Now if Riya could take care of indexing all of those with the names of the subjects then finding photos of cousin Jo or Dan’s kid from down the road suddenly becomes a lot less of a chore.

You can take the tour to find out more and try it out, though you are warned that it’s in ’so beta it hurts’ mode and may well eat you photos, tags or even your pets without warning or recompense.

There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in technology right now. Here are a couple of things that are on my radar right now:

I’m really looking forward to BarCamp Toronto (aka TorCamp), May 13, 14. I went to the first TorCamp and got a lot out of it, though what you get out of BarCamp seems to be even more than usual a function of how much you put in, the description emphasises that interactive part too.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

Just finalised, immediately following BarCamp will be mesh, Toronto’s web 2.0 conference.

mesh is Canada’s Web 2.0 conference, being held in Toronto on May 15 & 16. You will hear from thought leaders, connect with peers, and get a better understanding of the impact of new developments online.

Not sure if this one will be right for me, as the focus seems like it might be a little web 2.0 101. But the speakers list does look pretty cool Om Malik, Jason Fried and Joe Messina amongst others, so I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

To finish off this morning’s forward look I’ll mention a short, interesting piece at Fast Company, Fast Talk: What’s the Biggest Change Facing Business In the Next 10 Years? with thoughts from 10 luminary types. Avram Miller (who has an oddly 1995 website for a web tech guy) says:

The cornerstone for this millennium is the end of time and space. Most organizations today are run the same way as early-20th-century businesses. Everyone goes to his car, drives to work, has certain hours, has a certain job. It’s all built on the factory model. Moving forward, it really isn’t going to be important where you are in order to do your job.

I think that’s fairly true right now and it’s only going to get more true as time passes.

So, it looks like I did an awful job of posting anything at all from Austin while at South by Southwest Interactive. But that’s a good thing, it means I was too busy and engaged to be writing about stuff.

One of the, many, panels I really got a lot out of was Tagging 2.0. If you’re not familiar with tagging, here’s a definition from a blog that also has excellent notes on this panel:

users label objects with one or more terms that describe or are related to the object, and can also search all users’ labels for terms or keywords to find any objects that anyone else labelled with those terms.

Interesting uses of tagging can be seen at Flickr (for photos) and Del.icio.us (for links, sorry about the stupid name).

If you’re at all interested in tagging check out the extensive notes on the panel here and here. I was particularly impressed by the things that Rashmi Sinha was talking about, tagging from a cognitive angle, but all the panelists were very informative.

How’s that for insightful? Just now I was listening to In the Heart of the Moon By Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabate, which reminded me that Mr. Farka Touré died earlier this week. Now I never met the guy, but I do know that (to my untrained ear, and lots more trained) he was a wonderful musician. Also I know, or at least I read, that when asked he described himself as a farmer, not a musician. I don’t know exactly why that seems important to me, but it does.

If you can discern any particular meaning to this post I would encourage you to leave a comment explaining the point, for me and any other poor soul who gets to this point and wonders the same thing.

Rest in peace Ali Farka Touré

Can the panels a person finds interesting provide a useful window to their soul? No.

But it might be interesting anyway, in a kinda alphabetic-history meme way.

So here are my selections for the morning of Saturday, March 11:

10:00 Traditional Design and New Technology (I don’t know what this is actuallly about, but I picture desiging webpages using wood-cut tools, and I like that picture)

10:00 Beyond Folksonomies (I don”t know what is beyond folksonomies, but it might be fun to find out)

11:30 How to Do Preceisely the Right Thing at All Possible Times (who couldn’t use that knowledge, though it might get a bit boring if it really is *all* possible times)

11:30 Book Digitization and the Revenge of the Librarians (personally I hope that Google do succeed in their goal of ‘create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages’, but my aruments are ill thought through, so if this panel can clarify that and what methods librarians use for revenge then I’ll be happy)

Extra author’s note: It may be revealing that I have marked up my print out of the panel schedule with a complex system of circles, squares and triangles, which were consciously intended to provide useful visual cue regarding my selection. However I suspect that these symbols relate subconsciously to a desire to return to a state when watching this TV show was the highlight of my day.

This may be the annoucement of something new for this blog, on the other it may not. Right now I’m blogging at 34,000 feet on my way to Austin, TX for the South by Southwest Interactive conference (SXSWi for short).

So far on the Hogtown blog I’ve been writing what I think will interest my target audience, whoever that is, and I don’t think I’ve been doing a great job. Now I’m thinking I will blog more about what I’m thinking or interested in, and if anyone else finds that relevant then great.

I’ve just been going through the panel list trying to figure out an itinerary, and there’s hardly a slot that doesn’t have two, three or four interesting looking panels competing for my attention. On top of that there’s a bunch of evening events (read drinking with geeks) and informal stuff, summed this probably equals one fascinating and exhausting 5 days in Texas.

I’m not going to try any sort oof documentary blogging (my recall troublesome forgetfulness of names rules that out, if nothing else). I am going to try though to blog some of the thoughts that come to me as I go through these five days, and I suspect they will be many and incoherent. I’ll try to edit a little though.

This seems to be the week for groups I’m involved with to launch blogs. First it was NewPath Network and now it’s Wireless Toronto’s turn to launch a new blog.

For anyone who follows this stuff, and many that don’t, it’s been difficult to miss the big news this week that Toronto Hydro are planning to create a citywide (kind of) Wireless network. You can read more about it over at that Wireless Toronto blog I think I mentioned earlier.