Bar Camp NYC, Bar Camp Dallas and Being a User

My focus has tended to be on creating technology rather than using it. Of course, crafting the user experience is part of the creation process, but when I use software I tend to analyze it rather than just sit back and enjoy it. That's changed since I became involved with Bar Camp. Using the Internet to organize people in the real world has put me on the other side of the looking glass, and I'm not always comfortable there. (I often have the urge to rewrite whatever software I happen to be using, which is a distraction)

Bar Camp NYC, though, got me excited about being a plain old user. I've got a dozen pages in my notebook filled with cool stuff to check out (Plus another few pages filled with ideas to develop, but that's a different blog posting)

So far, I've used SuprGlu and ThumbStacks. Spending time describing SuprGlu would be a waste, just check out the Bar Camp Dallas SuperGlu page at:

http://barcampdallas.suprglu.com

If you want your stuff to appear on the page, tag it "barcampdallas" using technorati, del.icio.us or flickr and it will show up. If you know of another tag stream that ought to be included, let me know.

Thumbstacks isn't as far along, but still doesn't need too much verbage: It's like Writely for PowerPoint. If you're a fellow Writely addict, you'll go check it out immediately, if you're not, I'd check out something like Writely first then get back to ThumbStacks as it matures.

So, if all that cool stuff is going on in NYC, what might be going on in Dallas? I already found out that Firewheel Design (they of BlinkSale, Web 2.0 Poster Child) is in the area, who else have I missed? What other cool stuff is going on? Come to Bar Camp Dallas and find out...


tags: barcampdallas, barcamp, dallas, 2006, architectonic, writely, suprglu, thumbstacks, aggregation, web2.0, powerpoint, barcampnyc, nyc