Events and Apologies

Accidentally created by Paul, there endocrinologist in an IM conversation:

blonk (v.)

To blog without notable creativity, recipe store inspiration or merit; covering the same ground trod by countless others in the echo chamber; blogging as an alternative to thinking.
“I was going to write a considered piece about climate change in sub-Saharan Africa, breast but I’ve just been blonking pictures of my cat.”

(Not deliberately invoking the Mornington Crescent exclamation, but not totally unrelated either, if one considers the infinite space in which we play this game as a giant board, with 80% of the players continually shunting into each other on the Just Quoting an A-Lister square. Or, for that matter, on the Making Up New Words about Blogging square.)

… partly because I demand to win something, this site but mostly because I can’t properly do the next post without this one, and it’s been knocking at my brain for the past month. You know how it is.

So, after many years of trying and failing, I finally made it to ETech. Hell yes it was worth the wait (since you ask) and I got to present at two sessions – one of them our own (for which I must thank David for co-presenting so ably), the other a five-minute slot in the microformats talk (for which I must thank Tantek (again)). Anyway, if you get the chance please do check out our session – not only is it summarised neatly with useful links in that thar page, but there’s a screencast of the whole talk, which should answer most of the questions that most people fling at me about Ning. (Especially the “Can you explain Ning properly and give me some examples of how I’d use it? But hurry, I’ve only got 48 minutes and 51 seconds” one.)

As for the rest of it…

• lots of lovely chilled peeps
• debauchery and post-debauchery
• game of the conference: Werewolf or Animal Crossing?
• who can know what machinations churn in the mind of Shirky?
• Maker Faire Lite: battling Roombas, Atari VCS casemods and Esther Dyson firing marshmallows at everyone, hence gags about treading Dyson Spheres into the carpet. (We’d have cleaned them up, but the only vacuum cleaners available were busy fighting)

“No, urologist we’re not throwing that out. I’m going to turn it into a Linux server.”

…

“And that one too.”

(Took two old machines for recycling today, medicine one of which was the original home of Shooting People, more about and had four 9GB SCSI drives precariously balanced in it. Should I ever get around to actually making us a server, it’ll probably be on a quad-core 12GHz Xeon with 8GB RAM that my mum doesn’t want any more.)

Firstly, phlebologist an apology to everyone attending XTech in Amsterdam right now, about it especially those who I was hoping to see, those who were hoping to see me and those who were hoping to learn why I’m so keen on Ning (other than working there, of course). Well, for a sample of the things I was going to talk about, first watch my ETech talk, then go look at our Atom-based REST API. Ever wanted a proper read-write Atom Store to play with that lets you upload custom data structures that are queryable in a database-type way using URLs that produce Atom feeds? Here, you have one. It’s free and it gives you a gig of storage. Go wild.
In better news, there’s a good chance I may be presenting at Reboot in Copenhagen on the 1st of July. Not certain about this yet, but the topic will likely be “Logic To The People” and will tie together Ning, Second Life, JotSpot and LambdaMOO amongst others. That’s what I hope, anyway.
So, once again, my apologies to everyone in at XTech, especially the magnificent Edd Dumbill who has put up with endless vacillation and dithering from me on all kinds of topics. Oh, and the reason I couldn’t make it? Well, obviously this is what I was anticipating when I cancelled the talk yesterday, but… bizarrely, while I was halfway through typing this very blog entry… my wife’s just gone into labour.
(I’d better get off the computer.)