Saturday, October 18th, 2008

This was an unconference about space and place.

I organized a session called ‘Geolocal AutoScribing RSS Feeds’, and began the session by drawing a big grid of Portland’s quadrants on the white board. I labeled them NW NE SW SE, and then began drawing circles all over the place. The circles represented ranges of ‘hearing’ that a mobile device might have to RSS feeds. I pointed out that as one progresses from street to street, quadrant to quadrant, one’s phone should understand this and automatically subscribe the user to the geolocal RSS feed for that area. That way, data can be very relevant and contextual to the area.

I made an extensive post about Autosubscribing RSS feeds at Hazelnut Tech Talk. It contains full session notes, pros and cons, and some example use cases.

The unconference event was very relaxed, and there were a lot of very bright people with excellent ideas. Here, Anselm is discussing the viability of Geolocal RSS feeds as applied to his Citybot project.

Unconference Grid

The following is what our unconference grid looked like. Note the bright and enjoyable colors. They helped us to delineate between joy and happiness.

Everything on the grid had a Geolocal theme, and every session was engaging and interesting.