I’m at 23C3. I went to a couple of sessions last night, but felt tired after all the christmas meat-eating, so I went home early — and got up really late. But now I’m here.

(Just now, in the middle of me writing this, Bicyclemark just said hello, sporting a 21C3 press pass pegged onto his shirt. Guess I’ll have to get that story later. Go listen to his podcast — it’s really good stuff!)

Like last year the male-to-interesting person ratio is totally skewed. I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of pony tails. It’s just that… well, you know. I’m strangely fascinated by the culture here — being no real part of it as opposed to a lot of the other conferences I attend. I’m not a member of this club, I don’t stand outside the building with the rest of the participants exchanging ‘yeah, we know it all, don’t we’-smiles (outside this bulding you can smell the weed). I get what’s going on — but I don’t ‘get it’. While geeky as hell (dresscode: cargo pants, i-don’t-care hair, shirt with geek print, sturdy shoes, important-looking cables in hand), it’s a nice atmosphere and you can just tell that creativity is bursting from the tip of these people’s fingers). And while the schedule reflects the surrounding world’s adoption of social web technology (the people representing that wave like myself are easily recognizable by their inabilty to understand the geek jokes at presentations), most sessions and workshops are pretty hardcore and refreshingly free of a lot of the buzz I get tired from so very easily in my daily involvement with digital technologies.

Oh, and ideology and politics is big here. At a conference. Nice. Think about it.

Just got back from a quick getaway to the Netherlands. With a brilliant sense of timing, I chose to return the day before Cross Media Week, Picnic ’06 which looks nice. I’m a lot more into the picnic concept than to the cross media idea which I’m not sure adds anything interesting to the deal. Anyway, I’m sorry I couldn’t stay, so I’ll be following Christian Lausten’s live blogging from the event.

Christian did his own event, Knock Knock, last week which I had the pleasure doing a lightning talk on videoblogging at. So I should be posting some interesting things on videoblogging as a follow-up; that’s on the list too.

I’m not sure I pulled the presentation off. I went for the Dick Hardt–approach, doing 120+ slides in 5 minutes flat which was new to me. My feeling was that the style is well-suited for short talks where you want to paint a picture rather than go deep into various parts of your subject. But as expected you have to practise stuff like that to keep the flow going. Which I only sort of managed. It’s a bit strange being so tied up to the exact words you’re using that you hardly get a chance to look up from your monitor. Eyecontact will be considered for next time.

You can discuss how much actual knowledge you can stuff into 5 minutes. I tried not to touch too many things in need of extensive arguments, but it’s a tough format for sure.

But now, onwards. There are mails to be answered, calls to be returned, shitloads of pictures from a boatcruise round the port of Rotterdam to be tampered with and uploaded (containers, yummy) and car video from the trip to Ã…rhus (first in a series) to be edited, just as I’ll try and get some relevant video-related material posted for the people attending Knock Knock.

What: An unconventional conference about videoblogging in Europe.
Where: Milan, Italy.
When: November 18–19 2006.
Who: Videobloggers, potential videobloggers and anyone interested in new media in general.

I’ll be there, looking forward to meeting fellow videbloggers and talk about videoblogging for two days straight. I plan on being there some days in advance to slam espressos and eat nice foods. Let me know if you’re in town.

Sign up if you wanna join us. Add your thoughts and ideas to the vortex.

Keep an eye on Andreas, who is one of the organizers.

History and drawings from Tveskov (hope he has something on the cars), reboot8 photogroup (like the 23 feature), good round up by Classy.

My video from the boat lounge on Wednesday — pictures at Flickr (added to the photogroup).

reboot8 was a tough challenge. I guess it was prettty much impossible not to disappoint anyone after last year’s insanely great event. Meeting expectations like that is a bitch. However, I think it was pulled off rather well. It seemed like everyone was busy doing their thing, resulting in a less hectic atmosphere. I attended a second conference earlier in the same week and had to meet some deadlines during the conference, so I was a bit tired, not really capable of talking to a lot of new people which I felt I shared with a lot of the people I know. Nevertheless, people were nice and smart and everyone seemed to have a nice couple of days out. As a few people stated elsewhere, there might not have been that killer keynote that turned everything upside down, but come to think of it, that might be a healthy sign, that all the stuff we’ve talked about for years now…is real.

Noone had to persuade everyone else that blogging / social software is the new black, noone wondered if this and that might happen next year or the year after. It’s already happening — and the reboot attendees is busy building and experimenting. Next year I hope to see someone challenge whatever it is we’re all doing, but for now I’ll just sit back and enjoy the fact that it’s happening. Right now.

The demos made that even more clear. Lots of interesting stuff being made and launched. Really liked the Imity demo — and the list of Bluetooth-partyers; Rust-imity.

The second day did it for me; there was more energy and I catched some really good presentations that made me think.

Also good to note the self-organising going on here and there, pecha-kucha being one.

Ended up at a bar, leaving at 7AM. I headed home, the rest ended up doing a drive-in at 7-eleven.

One last note: I guess I’m not the only one that look forward to the videos from the 2/3 of the conference I couldn’t attend. Trouble is, it’s about 50+ hours of DV-footage that has to get captured in realtime and converted into a format suited for web — which takes even more time. They might have it all figured out, but if that’s not the case, how about a collaborative effort where we split the tapes between us, committing to capture and compress a tape or two. It might be a logistical nightmare and I haven’t talked with the reboot crew about it, but at least I’ll be glad to assist…

40+ developers from 11 countries made this a wonderful event. Met some nice and cool people, most of them already with their hands dirty from doing sites with umbraco. Sweet.

The venue, Kulturhuset Islands Brygge, proved to be very well suited for the conference — everything went well and even the weather turned out ok in the end.

Good presentations, lots of talks, ideas, questions, examples.

My photos can be found at Flickr: Umbraco Codegarden 06. Also, take a look at the CodeGarden blog for more updates — maybe a bit of video one of these days.

Hope to see you next year.

It’s a local event, focusing on social media, supported by the community. Trine-Maria has more information in Danish.

I’ll participate — and I’m curious about the ‘conversation’ frame as I’ve been spending quite some time thinking about the various ways we’re defining what we do with social media. More about that later.

Give me a shout if you’re gonna be there.

We’re thinking about doing a small blogger meetup. Stay tuned for details.