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So I was all psyched up to go to BarCampSydney 3 this weekend, but woke up on Saturday feeling a little flu-ie. Having roped DG into giving me a ride into the uni I couldn’t really pike out though.

I got as far as about 3 in the afternoon before the flu symptoms were too much to bare, but I did get to see a few decent presentations and ran into a few notable notables. Luckily I was able to convince Michael to leave early so I could get home and put my head down for a while.

What follows is a brief rundown of the sessions I was able to attend

• Interesting discussion about why we still write software in a text editor titled, ‘Making PC’s Cooler’. As was the theme for me at this barcamp I walked into this session late. I was still able to participate in a very lively discussion about it anyway.
• There was an interesting talk on the mobile market which I unfortunately missed the first half of as I was in a discussion about the OLPC’s adhoc mesh networking.
• Saw an entertaing talk that revisited the demo days and introduced a cool demoing java app called Processing (it does more than just demoing).
• Walked in on second half of yet another talk on Facebook that was, as always, good banter.
• Walked out on a dicussoin about Web 3.0, try as I might I just can’t stand hearing people talk about Web 3.0 and take them seriously just yet.
• The only session I saw fully was pretty actively discussed. Marty Wells and Elias Bizannes gave an intro to DataPortability. Lots of talk on what it means, how hard it is to do, and what the next steps should be. It’s an interesting idea, which I agree with completely on academic terms. I just think, like others, that given the amount of publicity they’ve received so far they need to get something real out soon or risk losing momentum and becoming yet another overly-complex standard. This is not necessarily an easy thing to do as the problems DataPortability is trying to solve are incredibly complex

Actually most of the interesting discussions happened in the hallways between (or during missed) sessions. Mike Cannon-Brookes had a captive audience talking about what he got up to at NZ FooCamp recently. No doubt all the geeks in this discussion were incredibly jealous. The GoodBarry guys were there as well and we had an interesting talk about ad-tech and gaming. Also chewed the fat a little with Nick Hodge and DG about the Asus EeePC.

I’m sure there was more that happened during the day that I missed, but I’m still feeling too sick for my memory to work properly. This will have to do for now.