Mashup Camp 2 Day 1: Wrap party

End of the first day of Mashup Camp 2, and boy, is my brain tired! It was a great day of new ideas, debating opinions, seeing new cool stuff, and meeting new and old friends. After some wrapup comments, we moved on to the after-party, and also had a chance to see the exhibits at the Computer History Museum (which I skipped because I had seen them in February, and because the conversations upstairs were too interesting to leave).

I ran into Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk, with whom I’ve exchanged email and blog comments but didn’t realize that he was here until he introduced himself when he stood up to make a comment in the main session. I guess that I wasn’t reading his blog at the time of Mashup Camp 1 (which he also attended, but at which I didn’t meet him), and I’m so behind in my blog reading now that I didn’t see any of his current Mashup Camp posts. I really need to review that Who’s Coming list more closely.

I also met Cameron Jones, a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who is studying web mashups as his research. He contacted me and other Mashup Camp attendees a few weeks ago by email to get connected with the idea of interviewing members of the mash-up community for his research. Who knew that you could do a Ph.D. thesis on mashups?

I had a chance to chat with lots of other people who I met at Mashup Camp 1, although my memory for names is shockingly bad so I had to do a lot of discrete reading of name tags. There’s a much greater sense of community now than at the first camp, and a continued sense of excitement. Also, as I noticed in the session on “mashdowns“, some shifting of focus to business/enterprise mashups, which is really what I’m here for.