XTech 2007, day one
I’ve been a very bad conference attendee. I slept in this morning ‘till 11am and missed the opening keynotes. I was looking forward to seeing what Adam Greenfield had to say but I guess I was more tired than I realised.
It’s not like I had a particularly late night last night. I spent a very pleasant evening in a cosy bistro with Jessica, Brian, Andy and Gavin.
By the time I made it over to the conference venue, the morning sessions were wrapping up so I had lunch for breakfast. Once I was all caffeined up, I started getting ready for my talk.
I gave a presentation called microformats: the nanotechnology of the semantic web. I enjoyed myself and I think other people did too. I might have pushed the nanotech anology too far but I got a kick out of talking about buckyballs and grey goo. I talked for a bit longer than I was planning so I didn’t have as much time for questions as I would have liked but I also think I managed to anticipate a lot of questions during the talk anyway.
I should have really stuck around in the same room after my talk to listen to a presentation on RDFa and GRIDDL but I dashed next door to hear Gavin’s presentation on provenance. I loved this. He’s thinking about a lot of the same things that I have in terms of lifestreams and portable social networks but whereas I just talk about this stuff, he’s gone and built some proof-of-concept to illustrate how it’s possible today to join up the dots of identity online. I really wish he was coming to Hack Day.
Speaking of Hack Day (it’s just a month away now), I fully expect to see plenty of hacking on hardware going on. Before XTech, this was unknown territory for me but I know I’d really like to roll up my sleeves and get hacking (and I haven’t even heard what Matt Webb has to say yet).
Today I was introduced to a piece of hardware with a difference: the Nabaztag—a WiFi-enabled rabbit with flashing lights and movable ears. I want one. The Nabaztag presentation also included the quote of the day for me:
If you can connect rabbits, you can connect nearly everything.
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 5:32pm
Tagged with xtech xtech07 xtech2007 microformats
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