Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

At Barcamp London last weekend there was an interesting presentation on a new online digital world called Second Life.

Sounds like some sci-fi geek website? That’s what I thought.

“Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by 289,256 people from around the globe.

• From the moment you enter the World you’ll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you’ve explored a bit, perhaps you’ll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business.

• You’ll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow residents. Because residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other residents.

• The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world currency, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online currency exchanges.“

Our presenter at Barcamp told us Second Life was going to be the next big thing to hit the internet. I was quite sceptical, and still am. Are people really going want to spend more time behind a computer, creating a fantasy environment for their cyber-self to live in? Sounds rather far-fetched.

But then what was on BBC News this morning? Second Life. A BBC news correspondent interviewed one of the Second Life web designers in Second Life. The news correspondent and web designer had 3D models created of themselves and they walked and talked around one of the Second Life “islands”, they were then teleported to another “island” where “people” were dancing to Duran Duran music in a large concert stadium.The news is that Duran Duran, the real McCoy, will soon be performing to a universal crowd in the digital world of Second Life.

Me, the cool, slick, Mark Cruddas, just styling my hair!

So don’t waste any more time, go register, download and install the 25mb program file, and take a walk around cyberspace. Judge it for yourself.

That’s what I plan to do.

So on Saturday I went to Barcamp London, held in the Tottenham Court Yahoo Headquarters.

For those of you that judge a conference’s success by the amount of freebies you get, I got 4 free t-shirts so there you have it, it was very successful … For those of you that judge a conference’s success by the quality of the presentations, or the assortment of skilled individuals attending, I better go into a little more detail.

The Barcamp Cape Town attendees reading this post are probably wanting to know how the London event compared with the Cape Town event. Well the answer is not that black and white. I think its quite hard to compare the 2 Barcamps. Barcamp Cape Town was first of a kind, not only in South Africa, but Africa. Nothing like this had happened there before. It had a unique African flavour to it that was completely different to Barcamp London. The beauty of the British Barcamp though was the amount of resources made available to it, i.e. a fast, fat internet connection, big web companies sponsoring it, like Yahoo, eBay, Techcrunch and the BBC, and a country where blogging is a far bigger thing.

The amount of hugely skilled geeks who attended Barcamp was amazing.

• There were the Yahoo staff, some of which worked on the new community project Yahoo Answers, others who worked on the management of the content for the Yahoo homepage (which many of you probably default to),
• The BBC Backstage former senior producer, Ben Metcalfe, and his successor, Ian Forrester involved in the BBC’s developer network to encourage innovation and support new talent.
• Usuability and accessibily experts like Andy Budd and the guys at Flow Interactive.
• An Instant Messanger Security Expert.
• Flash gurus, including Aral Balkan.
• Every type of developer you can think of flashing around words like “Ruby on Rails”, “Python” and “Geotagging”
• And of course a few fellow web designers who probably were one up on me because they knew what “Ruby on Rails” actually meant.

20 minutes into the Barcamp event there were already 85 photos of Barcamp London avaliable on Flickr, loads of Wordpress blog posts reviewing every minute that went my, and even videocasts being uploaded. That’s the amount of geeks we are talking about that were surrounding me. Intimidating?

There were so many presentations on such a variety of topics you felt you couldn’t blink or you’d miss out on a wealth of knowledge.

The Geeks and what the geeks were talking about

In the evening, after a few slices of pizzas and a few Stella Artois bevvies, I had my beer armour on and wasn’t so afraid to ask stupid questions. Needless to say geeks and beer are a funny combination, after too many beers the conversation gets even more geeky, I’m not lying when I say I had conversations with guys about cling ons, why William Shatner should have patented the cellphone after acting in Star Trek, early mainframe printers and how they worked, and vector imaging in air traffic control.

All in all it was a great day to network with very bright geeks, find out where the internet is going, and how you can try to stay innovative making developments for it.

Did I forget to tell you? Tomorrow I’m venturing out of my cosy home office, commuting into Zone 1, and trekking to the Yahoo Head Offices, which plays host to this year’s Barcamp London. Barcamp is basically a tech/design/development geek gathering and a great place for networking.

I attended the Barcamp Cape Town unconference earlier this year.
Sponsors include all the big cheese:

• Yahoo! UK, who are providing the venue and connectivity!
• eBay, who are providing Saturday lunch
• Another Yahoo! UK property (TBC), who are providing Saturday dinner + beers!
• BBC.co.uk and backstage.bbc.co.uk who are providing both Sunday breakfast and Sunday lunch!
• TechCrunch, who are providing drinks and snacks for the event!
• Chinwag, who are sponsoring event t-shirts!
• Belkin, who are providing power and network equipment

The attendee’s list also includes some big names with the likes of Ben Metcalfe and Ian Forrester organising the event. No Ian and me are not related… or at least I don’t think so after looking at his picture. Also Andy Budd, the managing director of Clearleft, looks like he is attending and I’m defintely looking forward to his talk.

A summary of the event will be posted on Monday.