It’s been a long time since i had the opportunity to hang out with a large collection of geeks. I used to love the ridiculous shit that emerged in hacker culture. This weekend, i went and played at FooCamp – Tim O’Reilly’s collection of geeks. It was such silly fun (think water-bottle rockets).

Basically, it was an opportunity for geeks to gather and share thoughts and ideas. There was a fire on Friday nite where we stood drinking and talking, playing with good geek toys (like the Seque and this cute little robot). On Saturday, groups of folk met to discuss different topics of interest. Of course, i went to the discussion on social software. I can’t say anything was (re)solved, but it was really fascinating for me to hear the geek perspective on social issues. ::sigh:: Such a disconnect between average folks and geeks, which is utterly frustrating.

One great thing came out of that meeting – i got to meet Scott McCloud. My dear friend Henry adores Scott so i was quite delighted to get to sit down and talk with him for a few hours. He is such a lovable guy and reminds me of Henry in that he’s brilliant, but quiet, geeky, but fascinated by social culture.

Unfortunately, i had to leave after only a day (to go to Ubicomp), but i’m still quite delighted that i got to spend a day amidst the geek culture that framed my collegiate years.

My primary cell phone is having a conniption fit and may not be playing during my tour-de-conferences. If you are planning on catching up with me at FooCamp / Ubicomp / AoIR, please drop me an email so that i can give you my temporary number.

Also, if you’re going to be at those places and i didn’t know it, please let me know! I’d love to meet up with folks since i’ve been so bogged down with school lately!

A note on a friend of mine’s blog got me thinking. She wrote, “i am in new york now, where people are about Doing, rather than Being, as seems to be the case in san francisco.”

I know that she’s right. This is a constant battle for me because i came to SF to do and yet most of my friends are practicing being. Of course, perhaps that’s precisely why i like SF. I feel a constant state to rebel against whatever is the norm in a given location. If people are being in SF, no wonder i’m hyper-doing. Hell, my vegetarianism has gone completely out of the door in SF; i’ve stopped doing yoga; i have little tolerance for the new agey shit (even though i kinda adored it in Boston). I wonder how conservative i’ll get here…

At least i know that i’ll never get conservative enough to appreciate the circus that just abrupted here yesterday. And if one more person makes an Ahhhnold joke, i’ll kill them. (Hmm… i shouldn’t really not develop violent instincts in SF… that would be bad.)

We hired my replacement at V-Day. It’s official. I’m officially leaving. Wow.

My replacement is a wonderful woman full of spunk (a.k.a. young and optimistic like me) and i’m excited that she’ll be taking the baton. In our group discussion over who to hire, my colleagues told me that they loved this woman because she has that same youthful (a.k.a. insane, intense, spastic) energy that i have. It was a little weird to think that someone valued my craziness and wanted to see it replicated in the organization. Hmmm…

Btw: if you’ve been trying to get in touch with me via cell phone, you should know that my cell died. 🙁 I’m trying to solve this problem in the next couple of days, but if you need to get in touch with me, email me and i’ll tell you what phone number i’m at at a given point. Oh, and if you have a Sprint phone that i can borrow for a bit, please let me know!

At Brown, we were required to submit a proposal of what we would do as part of our concentration. My roommate and dear friend wanted to submit his proposal in Postscript, a coded representation of what he planned to study… explanation through example.

This comic is for him:

Upcoming.org lets you list all of the events you are planning to attend, see what your friends are up to, and see what is generally going on.

I wonder if there’s a corrolation between Clay’s gut and the values of teenagers. I knew Usenet was dead when teens stopped knowing what it was. Same with IRC. Don’t get me wrong: all of us geeky social software folks still use both. (And Marc Smith still believes that we can make Usenet work.)

Teens are focused less and less on email. It no longer provides an identity marker in the way it used to. Even at universities, students are more likely to use their easily accessible hotmail account than the university account. This also means that they are forced to constantly fight the annoyances of spam.

The value of email is no longer there. Instead, youth rely heavily on IM (and SMS where available). Parents don’t get to read the records of these conversations and if spam is a problem, you can just block everyone but your friends. Plus, now that you can send IMs without having to be logged in (it’ll just get queued), why worry about synchronicity?

I’ve always been a big believer in paying attention to teens in order to understand the longterm viability of older technologies. But maybe Clay’s gut will be just as effective…

Because blogging is inherently social and a good way to chew on ideas with friends and colleagues, i’m going to be participating in Many-to-Many as a guest blogger.

(Do be warned: at times, i will repost things from there here, as relevant)

First, Friendster became a common vocabulary word in certain subcultures. Now, it has become part of the chorus in a song: “I saw your new boyfriend on Friendster…”