Russell Beattie

Back home! Today was a very relaxed half-day, but still totally worth it. I got to meet even more cool people and have more cool conversations right up till the last moment when I dropped off everyone in downtown San Francisco. Incredible.

What an unbelievable privilege. Seriously - the quality of people I met at Camp Foo was as high as you'd expect and then some. I think the sessions were very secondary to just hanging out and chatting with all sorts of interesting people. You'd bounce from interesting conversation to interesting conversation, wander by and see a group of people clustered around something amazing, and just everyone generally geeking out and having a good time. There were no clueless people (well, maybe except for yours truly). I mean really, really high signal to noise ratio.

The FooTV thing didn't work out as exactly as I hoped, but that's okay I learned a bit anyways. I've discovered that shoving a camera phone into someone's face and saying something like "talk to me" doesn't actually work. Not surprising, but you've got to try it to see it. Also, my freakin' email agent software sucks. It barfed few posts from other phones (and then summarily deleted them) so I think I lost a few photos. And if someone doesn't see their pic or video show up, there's no incentive to keep posting is there? I'll have to work out why it was dying... And sorry to those monitoring the feed - there wasn't much posting today, I arrived late then I just stopped and tried to enjoy the last few moments of the event.

Taking video of happenings if possible but you've got to make an effort to get close up so you can hear and see the people better. Though I think in general, the point of mobile video is different than camcorder videos. It's less about archiving and more about capturing things spur of the moment. Just like you take out a nice camera to take pics of a great view, but use your camera phone to snap some random moment out at a restaurant, you use your normal camcorder to record graduations and things like that, and mobile video for those other live happenings so they can be put up online as soon as possible. In order to really work, I think people (myself in particular) taking mobile videos will have to learn a little of the art of making a motion picture and editing, or viewers will have to learn to enjoy raw footage. Maybe a little of both. I really believe in the power of taking and immediately disseminating mobile video, so it's really just a matter of learning the best way of doing it.

Anyways, it was a pretty great weekend. I feel very lucky to have been invited. I want to publicly thank Tim and company for putting the event on and for the free t-shirts and food, etc. It was awesome. For the next nine months all I'm going to be thinking about is trying to figure out what incredibly cool-ass thing I can do and put out there to make sure I get invited back.

:-D

-Russ