Came across a post from Alec Saunders about Monday night’s DemoCamp (number 12), and it reminded me that I meant to write about it too. It was at No Regrets in Liberty Village, just down the street from Tucows — where I went to DemoCamp #3 (I think it was) about a year ago on another frigid February night. The place was packed to the rafters, and despite a balky sound system and some cranky Wi-Fi it was a great show.

Alec calls it slam poetry for geeks, and he has a point. He juggled his five BlackBerrys or whatever it was to demo Iotum’s TalkNow, and did a fine job (as befits one of last year’s DEMO gods), and Albert Lai told everyone a bit about how Bubbleshare.com got to where it was and why it decided to be acquired by Toronto’s Kaboose network (and then dropped his laptop on the floor). Will Pate did a demo of Flock, and remained cool as a cucumber even when David Crow’s Mac froze and had to be rebooted, and even when someone asked why Flock didn’t just make Firefox extensions instead of creating a whole new browser.

Dave Humphrey talked about how his students have been helping develop the Mozilla open-source browser code, and we had some updates too — from Scott Brooks and his partner at Conceptshare.com, who risked their lives to drive down from Sudbury, and from my pal Mike McDerment’s Freshbooks.com (which is hiring), as well as from Brent Ashley, who said that he more or less gave up on his Ajax blog-chat app because he realized that “no one really gives a shit about being able to chat on a blog.”

Sacha wandered around taking pictures of everybody so that they could be collected for a DemoCamp index (and because Sacha is terrible with names and faces), Jay told everyone to introduce themselves to someone new, Joey made some bad jokes about David’s heart attack last year and handed out dried mango slices all the way from the Phillipines, and a great time was had by all.

I’d like to echo my friend and fellow blog-conference organizer Mark Evans’s post earlier today about conferences and un-conferences and camps and whatnot. It seems some noses got out of joint over the whole MashupCamp versus BarCamp thing, after Ryan King dissed MashupCamp by saying it had jumped the shark, and that it was a bad imitation of BarCamp (which he helped organize).

He seemed to be mostly reacting to a fluff piece about MashupCamp at CNet, but Doc Searls took it as an attack on David Berlind and rallied to the defence of his friend. Then Tara Hunt got into it over at Horsepigcow and took a few shots at Doc, who then apologized in a comment to her post, and updated his own to correct some of his remarks, like the gentleman he is.

Luckily, things seem to have blown over, with Doc smoothing the waters and Tara accepting that, and Chris Messina (Mr. Tara Hunt) who writes a blog over at factoryjoe.com and was also an organizer of BarCamp, saying in a comment on Nick Carr’s blog at roughtype.com:

I really hope that these Camp Wars or whatever dissipate faster than they got started. Seriously, there’s no need to fight… there’s enough space in the world for more than one kind of camp. We’ve got our ideas, they’ve got theirs and that’s what makes this whole great experiment tick.

Hear, hear. As someone who is currently planning a conference, I’d like to say that there’s a pretty big spectrum out there, from the un-conference, barcamp, democamp model all the way to the big, expensive conference with speakers and panels and sponsorships and free lunches and Wi-Fi everywhere. We’d like to find a place somewhere in that spectrum where people can get together and have some fun and maybe learn something new, and hopefully we can do that.

Update:

Adam Green pointed me to Rick Segal’s post on the topic, which brings some much-needed perspective. Great idea about the bag of chocolate coins too :-)

Before too much time has gone by, I wanted to write something about DemoCamp Toronto, which was held on Monday in the offices of Tucows, a domain registrar and blog software provider run by my friend Elliot Noss. Organized by David Crow, it was a fun event attended by about 100 people as far as I could tell. There were six presentations (including one from Blogware), each of which lasted about 20 minutes with a demo and questions.

Brent Ashley presented a chat application for blogs that he developed a while ago called (what else) BlogChat, a group from the University of Toronto presented a wiki-style software development tool called Dr. Project, OpenBlue presented an online shopping platform for jewellers, and Geoff Whittington demonstrated a local job/social networking site called Local Guru.

But for me the standout of the night was Nuvvo, an online learning platform developed by John Philip Green, his wife Malgosia and a small team. Nuvvo provides everything you need to start offering an online course in something – such as “Hindustanic music for the Western listener.” You can create a course in minutes, send and receive messages, upload files and Nuvvo provides an online payment system as well. There is a free tier, and then for-pay tiers will be coming soon with extra features.

All in all, I had a great time watching the presentations and listening to the questions along with my friends Rob Hyndman and Mike McDerment, and enjoyed the discussions over beers afterwards as well. Nice job, David.