BarCamp Leeds

A full auditorium of people gathered at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds for a day's information sharing at the second BarCamp Leeds.

Dom started the day off with 'SEO = evil ?' and managed to defend SEO practitioners (as opposed to snake oil engineers) in quite a skeptical discussion. Rather than gaming the inevitably gameable system, he advises sticking to the current guidelines that the search engines provide. Good advice for getting the 90% of SEO that site builders can manage for themselves, but no word about what the magic 10% that the SEO specialists do is though ;)

The next session was a demo of Ableton Live, bringing a bit of sonic creativity to the camp. A brave tour of a track in production took us around the software alongside some discussion of the advantages that this particular package offers to both the relative newbie and the touring performer. Given Ableton's accessibility, it would be nice to see some dedicated workshops in the future to encourage more music production.  Cloth Cat provide short courses in music production software, including Ableton, for anyone who fancies a go.

Dean Vipond, a designer from Orange, presented a consideration of design vs usability. Usability can be seen by some designers as an optional extra, or even something to be avoided altogether. As standards become less avoidable, designers are required to pay attention to the balance between marketers wanting to achieve maximum exposure for their product, the technical constraints and what the end user needs. Employing user centred design and user testing can make achieving this balance more manageable.

The HM Revenue & Customs site was discussed as an example of a site that really needs to be user centred - people aren't keen to visit in the first place so the experience has got to feel safe and guided. Other experiences can be less usable - Nintendo's Metroid Prime site encourages the user to explore a very freeform and alien experience which reflects the mechanics of the game that it promotes.

Ultimately, designers and usability practitioners can inform each other and co-operatively build better experiences for users.

After lunch, professional pirate Tom Scott presented lessons learned from making things (especially video) popular online. Even taking Sturgeon's Law into account ("90% of everything is crap") there are a few things that can help before, during and after the creative process.

A good guiding principle is the Effort:Awesome ratio as a guideline. Unless the Awesome > the Effort, spend your time coming up with a new idea. There are a few things you can do to reduce effort : use a tripod, shoot against a static background, get room tone (background audio noise) to paste over audio glitches, film more than you need and remember to get some cut-aways.

Editing three times enables you to make it look good, then better, then get rid of all the extra non-essential stuff that gives viewers time to click their way elsewhere.

Viral propagation depends on you sending your final piece to your friends. It matters not who - what matters is who they send it to and there is nothing you can do to influence that.

Simple ideas win. Just by registering yarr.org.uk, Tom ended up being the UK official point of contact for International Talk Like A Pirate Day, interviewed by Newsround on the deck of a tall ship at Southampton boat show in full pirate regalia. You can spend a million on an idea and on the web it stands about the same chance of success as the one pursued in a spare hour for the giggle.

People from the GeekUp community have been busy recently and each got a 20:20 to give them some air :

Paul Robinson's Kagtum web project is a 'Pandora for news' that addresses the decline in meaningful news coverage by providing an avenue for getting news that you are interested in and that's local to you from around 400 newspapers, 100 blogs & 100 other sources. Stories are geo-coded with the help of OpenCalais, your habits and preferences are filtered with CRM114. Events will become part of the information stream. Northerners, sign up to be an alpha user.

Robert Burrell Donkin was creating an open source release candidate, JSieve, a domain specific language for handling email.

Paul Horsfall has hacked together an Etch-a-sketch emulator in Ruby (with Ruby Shoooes) with an Arduino based hardware controller.

John Leach, ukelele player extraordinare, is taking articles from Wikipedia and singing them. The songs are derivative works of the GNU FreeDocument licensed articles. Performance of them raises some subtle questions about the nuances of copyright law :) Sing your own into ukepedia.com.

Tom Smith has a crawler that finds ukelele songs for analysis to locate those which are easy to play. Adding info in from last.fm, blog and forum rankings allows value to be added and demostrates that a hobby site can be reinterpreted as a commercially valuable engagement engine.

Barry Carlyon is contributing to a bug tracker for the php scripting language as part of the Google Summer Of Code.

A couple of these projects are using Ohloh to track their project's progress.

After the afternoon break, we've got Lee ringing the death knoll for the iPod on the grounds that all the other simple music players have died and that we're all DJs even if we're not yet aware of it.

The Pacemaker from Swedish ex-popstars Tonium allows us to revisit the mixtape era by selecting tunes, create sets and share them. It's got a crossfader, pitchshifts to +-100%, offers filters, effects, looping & EQ and it fits 120Gb of tunes in loads of formats into your pocket. It can sort your tracks in various ways and beat match for you.  Line-out, headphone-out and USB get signals and power in and out.

It's accessible enough for someone who's never seen one before to use to mix with but at £429 it's not cheap and the floor reckon it needs wireless and bluetooth connectivity adding into the mix.

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