Given that it's SXSW Interactive this week, before the music craziness starts there's quite a lot of different mixers/parties/events - call them what you will.  Anyway one of the more prevalent and highly valued events tends to be Barcamp.  I'd never been to a Barcamp event before although I'd heard/read quite a bit about them, so even though I'd been @ MIX for a couple of days I gathered a little more energy for an un-conference to see what was what.  I am of course neglecting to mention that Josh Holmes told me I should be there , so like the dutiful technology kid that I am, I went.

First off, I was really surprised by the level of organisation - nice easy online sign in (cool AJAX app), great t-shirts, proper plastic attendee badges, free food/drinks/beer and an inspiring and excellent venue @ GSDM (I was really jealous of the environment in fact).  I only grabbed a couple of sessions, one about OpenSocial, Google's API for social networks, and listened in on a talk about iPhone development, both with the official SDK and on Jailbroken phones.  For me the OpenSocial talk was the best and it highlighted some things I didn't know about social networks.

For example, did you know about XFN?  I didn't, but I do now and I would never have found out about it till it was already seriously (seriously) old hat.  Basically, it's a way of relating people to yourself, using a set of pre-defined relationship tags.  The good news is that this is all standard HTML, it's indexable by things like Google's crawler and it costs nothing to implement.  My blogging platform supports it in the HREF link editor for example.  By way of example, this is how I tagged Josh's link above:

<a href="http://joshholmes.com" rel="friend met colleague">Josh Holmes</a>

This may not look like much, but it's a simple way of tracking relationships with people. I like.   After I grabbed a couple of sessions we had lunch, a couple of beers and then Morty and I did a quick interview with the Viewzi.Tv crew on the future of search engines, what we like, what we don't.  If you haven't seen Viewzi, go sign up for a developer account and check it out. I left not long after that, leaving my Leica D-LUX 3 digital camera sitting on a couch, so after a frantic hour where I realised I couldn't find it I was relieved to be notified it was safe and sound at the venue and it's been secured.  I'll post pics when I get the camera back tomorrow.