Damian Nicholson

Last Saturday, I attended BarCampNorthEast at the Centurion in Central Station. To say the least I had a blast! It was great meeting lots of new people and finally being able to put names to faces. I’ll definately be signing up for next years event!

Also I’d like to say a huge thanks to Alistair and everyone involved for putting on a sweet BarCamp.

In addition to the whole networking/social side of the event, I found all the talks very interesting and informative. Since the nature of a BarCamp is to be very informal, lot’s of thought provoking discussion was had.

I’ve included a list of the talks that I managed to attend. Here they are in no particular order:

How to Make Money on the Internet, by Kieron Donoghue.

Kieron outlined his path into affiliate marketing as a career. Kieron’s talk inspired an excellent debate between himself and Ian Forrester about how some view affiliate marketing as a grey area. I guess this is more to do with the agenda/audiences of the parties involved. My view on this matter is that as long as his methods don’t involve popups or any of that nasty crud then more power to you sir!. Hell the guy’s just got a pimpin Range Rover, so he must be doing something right

PowerPoint Karaoke by “thehodge”

PowerPoint Karaoke was mega fun. For those who don’t know what PowerPoint Karaoke is, the hodge outlines it pretty well on his blog.

Introduction to Cloud Computing by a dude with a totally rad Stetson

This was a great talk as I’d known about Cloud Computing for a long while, and it was something I’d always planned to utilise at one point or the other but never had the time to read into properly. I got a lot from the guys talk as he concisely highlighted both the pro’s and con’s of Cloud Computing.

A discussion on procrastination by Alex Kavanagh

How we tend to do a bunch of small jobs and feel like we’re being productive, when in real terms we’re probably subconsciously trying to avoid the big daunting jobs. To combat this we discussed how all of us go about Getting Things Done(GTD).

Fibonacci and Photo’s

XKCD

Crazy presentation on Fibonacci sequence and how it is guised throughout todays world

Not following the crowd hosted by Ian Forrester

Talking about Spotify and what makes it such a hot app right now, since last.fm has been providing similar services for years. This is something that I’ll be making a separate blog post about so I can throw in my 2cents, so make sure to hitup my feed

As you can see I’ve forgotten a couple of names, which isn’t uncommon for me, so if you can fill the blanks, or if anyone wants me to link up things to their blogs/slideshows drop me a comment or a tweet.

Slops

• Being the only attendee from hedgehog lab BOOO!!!
• Not being able to make it to the Sunday as I had other commitments.
• Intermittent internet connection.