I'll be heading to Foo Camp
later today and in Sebastopol most of the weekend. Who else will be
there? Have
a look.
I don't know what to expect there, but it should be an interesting weekend.
Update: Apparently the first rule of Foo Camp is that you don't blog about Foo Camp. Too late, I guess. I noticed that Dan linked there too and figured it was okay. Oh well. Apparently "invitation only" means "secret--don't blog this."
Sigh.
Perhaps someone should have mentioned that earlier to the 150 bloggers that are gonna be there.
Update #2: Ah, Scoble says that Dave outted the outting. How amusing.
Posted by jzawodn at October 10, 2003 11:37 AM
So... You're off to some secret invitation only society meeting in the wilds of somewhere.
Please: No naked drumming.
No presuming the press don't have telephoto lenses.
No kool-aid.
other than that, have fun!
Maybe.
If that's what this sort of thing is all about.
All the cooler kids (like me) are going to the more super-secret Bar Camp.
Well, we know that you, Dan, and Scoble are going. I guess I should have signed up to write O'Reilly book #4 to get invited :) There's always next year.
Soon to be seen in future blogs:
This one time, in Foo Camp...
;P
I heard about it a few days ago when Doc Searls mentioned it and linked to the Wiki in his blog. So you weren't the first to 'out' it.
Paul: I think I've technically written four O'Reilly books, no invite here. Maybe #5 is the magic number.
What kind of sense does it make for a company that made its reputation on being open to have a conference of bloggers and say "Don't blog this." Geez. Share what you learn and keep an open mind.
I wonder why they wanted to keep this thing secret and how they thought with WiFi there that they would be able to.
Hey I get it -- I'm not their friend. But maybe they should listen to people who they don't think of as friends. Those are the people you can learn the most from.
It's so silly, had we known this conference existed, the last session at BloggerCon would have been *totally* different. BC was a user's conference. We could have come up with a list of issues for the geeks to address. The users had a lot of ideas. Wasted opportunity. There just isn't enough time to keep wasting these kinds of opportunities.
BTW, I read about it on Doc's site as he was preparing to go. That was the first I heard of it. I strongly doubt they got him to agree to keep it secret. I know Doc pretty well for many many years.
My main regret about not being there are all the cool people I've not met (like you Jeremy!) who will be there that I won't get to meet. Damn.
I read about Foo Camp over at Nat Friedman's blog on Thursday so it wasn't exactly sooper seekrit ;-)
The entire universe revolves around Dave, why would O'Reilly want to exclude him?
I wonder where this "super secret, no blog" meme came from. Not from us. We invited a bunch of people, some of whom invited others, we put up a wiki so we could all help plan the weekend together. No one ever said "don't blog it" -- and in fact, the first time anyone asked, at the opening of the weekend, I said "sure." (There was one brief wiki outage, after the link was first posted publicly, and someone thought we might not want it to be public, but as soon as I heard about it, and we were able to turn on the backup feature, it was opened up again, a few hours later.)
As to all of the people who weren't invited -- we couldn't invite everyone. We tended to invite friends (that is, people who we know and like, and who like us, plus some people that we know only a little and want to get to know better).
And we didn't invite all our authors -- there are lots of you -- just the ones who we knew are interested in some of the same technological edges as we are right now. I'm sure we missed lots of people we would have loved to have there. If you're an O'Reilly author, and you wish you'd been invited, bug your editor (who would have been the person to invite you) -- I had to twist many of their arms even to get them to come themselves. (We have a lot of homebodies who wanted to go home after our editors' meeting, which just happened the week before.)
The event was a lot of fun, and I'm sure we'll do it again.
I wish I knew why there was so much whining about not being invited. If I had a buck for every party I wasn't invited to, I could retire.
A lot of it came from the fact that when people began to link to the Wiki, it suddenly became a "this is a private event, go away" page.
Of course, after getting to Foo Camp, I talked with Brian Jepson and he explained the thinking. But from the *outside* it looked that way initially.
When folks started blogging about how great it was (like me), much of that vanished I think.
