Today, I attended BarCamp Cambridge - or BarCamb. It was pretty good. One track with about ten presentations. The chairs were a bit hard, but otherwise it was a great event. 
I gave a talk about microformats, the Semantic Web and GetSemantic, plus some of the things we are working on - non-human profiles and GenderHack. Of course, the guiding philosophy behind both is that we need to be less serious on the Web. A design principle for the next web: Silliness is Good. We'll get around to building the Semantic Web once we've finished smoking this blunt and playing this Tower Defense flash game.
There were some great talks - bioformats is a fantastic idea, and AlertMe could be the UK version of Ambient Devices (based in Cambridge's Massachusetts namesake) in turning your house in to a gadget laden ambient information router thing. The site promotes a very strong security angle, but there are a ton of other interesting uses for the technology they are building. There was some other cool hardware stuff too like the guys who were building thin clients for the developing world, so that you can have multi-user terminals based on Ubuntu. Hardware is the new software, or something.
A mental thread started today which still needs work on whether the university is dead (in the Steve Gillmor sense of the word of having lost it's unique position of value). Like a decayed tooth, there is something quite rotten in the modern university system. On the one hand, we have universities conducting brilliant work - at the venue for today's BarCamb was the laboratory in which a significant chunk of the human genome project was worked on (the result - in printed form - looks only a fraction less readable than the average Perl script). But, science departments are closing because they cannot get students for undergraduate study. Schools are neglecting their duty to prepare educated citizens, with courses outside of the ICT / business studies "sit in front of a screen and push the buttons we tell you to press" mould are dropping like flies. Try studying Computing at school. Or Philosophy. You'll find it quite difficult.
Humanities courses are leaving students even less understanding of their subject. Having only been required to read one Platonic dialogue during three years on a philosophy course, I am currently autodidactically reading through the whole lot. Combine this with tuition fees standing at £3,200 a year.
I'm already seeing programmers grabbing a copy of Dive into Python or PickAxe, and spending the three years they'd spend slaving away at Java finishing school teaching themselves.
I have a funny feeling that in these postmodern times, BarCamp as undergraduate humanities training may turn out better people than universities are. Something to ponder. I was going to talk about this, but it's a bit too rough and unfinished even for BarCamp.
