This weekend was the very first BarCamp London, hosted somewhat surreally by Yahoo! at my place of work. I’ve only been there a month, but it still felt very odd to have a bunch of geeks camping out in the office all weekend. Without wishing to sound sycophantic, kudos to Yahoo! for taking a step of faith and turning their place of business over to a group of mostly strangers for a weekend. The fact that it was so successful (owed to both the organisers and the participants) will surely literally open doors for future events in and around London.

Without going too much into the detail, it was a great event and I’m really glad I went. The deal with BarCamp is that there are no tourists – everyone who attends has to contribute back to the event, typically by giving a presentation or leading a discussion on a topic of their choosing. This seems to have put a few people off attending, as talking in front of a crowd can be an understandably daunting experience for some, and others perhaps think they have nothing worthwhile to share. In fact, the very requirement for everyone to contribute really takes the pressure off and I think added to the informal and friendly atmosphere. Everyone’s in the same boat, and so every speaker has the support of the people they’re speaking too. There really was very little pressure and it was great fun. What’s more, we had talks on subjects that would never have been covered if the leaders of those sessions hadn’t been required to share something.

I did my presentation on the subject of parsing microformats. I’m not sure if it was a bit dry as a subject matter, but enough people showed up to the session that I think there must have been something of interest there. It rounded of a nice progression of talks from a intro to microformats by Frances, to a look at the d.Construct backnetwork by Glenn Jones.

Speaking of d.Construct (consider it tagged) I’ll be heading down to Brighton for this year’s event at the end of this week. As I did last year, I’ll be recording the sessions for podcasting, so if you’re one of the unfortunate folk who wasn’t able to get a ticket this year, hopefully you’ll be able to gain at least some of the benefit of the event afterwards. Nothing, of course, is a substitute for actually being there, and I’m really looking forward to it. Last year was great, and I think this year can only be better.