Web Developers & The Tube - Bar Camp London 5

I've just finished my first ever BarCamp this weekend and even though I'm not a developer, managed to survive it. BarCampLondon5 was held at eBay's UK head office in Richmond and was a weekend of great sessions by developers, geeks, techies and non techies (like myself) who all shared ideas, hacks, web apps, stories & photos in a free "un conference" event & overnight camp.


The event was sponsored by companies including the Yahoo! Developer Network (loving their API map above & just hope London Underground don't sue them!), MOO.com, Times Online, Microsoft and MyMuseli.

The atmosphere was really friendly & encouraging and even though I thought I wouldn't understand a word of what was being said, by the end of the Saturday I had put my name on the board to run a session on Sunday afternoon.


Thanks to the people who turned up to see it and if anyone wants to see the slides (about blogging breakdown and how to avoid it) let me know. I'm planning on doing the whole thing again next Saturday at Social Media Camp & will put the link to the slides up after that.

There were some very interesting sessions at BarCampLondon5, including a great one by Tom Whitwell from the Times Online about headlines and what makes people click


I sometimes spend a while deciding what headline to give a blog post and usually do write it first, although at times I can absolutely agonise over what it should be. Looks like the agonising is actually worth it.

Salim from thelondonpaper also gave an enlightening talk about what thelondonpaper are planning for its website and how they will measure its success. Apparently 10% of Londoners do have a preference for their free papers. Also some spontaneous research they carried out on the Tube yielded a pretty different response to the more structured survey they ran about website usage.

Andy Budd ran a fascinating session - Architecting Human Behaviour - on Sunday morning about architecture and how its planning can really effect how people behave, particularly in public "third spaces" which are neither work or home. Although he didn't mention station architecture or planning, I'm sure a lot more thought is going into Tube station design now. Just a shame that some of the hideous interchanges at King's Cross station didn't have a bit more planning behind them.

You can follow my random twitterings throughout the weekend on Twitter and a few photos from the BarCampLondon5 are here.


I also met some more people there who'd been at Thursday's Twestival, which was a party / charity Harvest Festival where you could've met some of the faces behind the avatars on Twitter. Many people who comment on & read this blog were there (nice to meet you all) and my photos from Twestival are here.