Tech users and programmers emerged from Des Moines and the surrounding areas to participate in today’s BarCamp Des Moines event, hashed as #dmbarcamp and aggregated back on dmbarcamp.org.
The topics for the event are crowdsourced and then voted on by the participants to determine the presentation order. Nine hour-long sessions were scheduled with 3-4 groups holding discussions during each session.
One session that emerged in the morning was on microblogging, specifically trying to discuss the idea of signal versus noise and some of the basic functions and features being used.
I got to lead the microblogging session and field some great questions from the audience. Because several of the participants were new to the concept, I also spent some time on the origins of Twitter and its functions.
Other topics in the microblogging discussion included:
- applications being used
- which platforms are out there and what they do differently
- how to find the signal amongst all the noise
- cleaning your follower list
- ways to consume data produced by microblogging
Due to time constraints, Twitter was the main focus of the conversation, but I also introduced Microblink as a source for news and updates on the industry as a whole.
In addition to all of the sessions taking place, many of the participants are microblogging about the event with the #dmbarcamp hashtag and uploading photos via Bright Kite and TwitPic.
