There are many niggle things about Twitter, one of which is when someone asks for something to be “retweeted”. When that happens I not only get the original, but others post the same thing again and again.

Retweeting can be a really useful thing and I am not discouraging it. I would say don’t just retweet just because someone asks, do it because you want to tell your followers, but other than that I would encourage it. It can result in people outside your direct Twitter circle finding out about something they will find interesting or useful.

I have had an idea to solve this. No, stop, come back, it might be a good idea for once. Why not implement a retweet feature in Twitter. It could work in a not to dissimilar way as favouriting a tweet. The difference is when a friend, or several of your friends flag it for retweeting it will appear once in your stream.

The only technical problem I can see is that if the tweet is not flagged for retweeting straight away the tweet could get berried in the past and missed. There are obvious UI solutions to this, and I would look at aliasing the original tweet each time, but with Twitters scalability problems this solutions need to be really really simple to implement.

Please do post any thoughts here, or on Twitter.

Do you use Twitter? Do you live in or around Newcastle upon Tyne? Do you fancy meeting other people who have answered yes to the previous questions in a pub for a pint? If the answers are yes, yes, please read on.

I am wondering if we should have a Tweetup. This would be just like when you tweet that you fancy a pint a couple of friends on Twitter join you. The difference is we give a couple of weeks notice so people can plan and not just a couple of hours as per usual.

The idea is not mine. There have been several round the world, and one is being run tonight in Preston. The format seems to vary some what, but I am suggesting we don’t try anything complicated and just gather informally for a chat. Restricting your sentences to 140 characters is optional. ;-)

So what do you think? Please let us know by completing this criminally easy poll.

Update: So that is a good solid yes. In my experience not all the people voting here will make it, and people who were not interested would not vote. That being said others will come, and we do not need any more than two people for it to be successful. I will seek some venue and day feedback next month and we can give it a go.

My name is Alistair, and I am a BarCamp addict.

What is a BarCamp? In short it is an open conference with many session over many tracks. You can attend any of the session be they presentations, discussions, demonstrations, or whatever. The only condition is that you need to participate, and you should really run a session yourself.

I am posting this because I have been asked by the organisers of BarCampLondon6 for a list of prior BarCamp organisers, and doing this puts in to perspective just how much of a addict I am. In 2006 I found out about BarCamps through a blog and managed to get on the reserve list for BarCampLondon06, and then got to go, and then went to more, and more, and more.

You will have a long way to go to beet my addiction though. After Ian Forrester could not make it to London4 and Tom Morris did not attend BathCamp I am the only remaining person who has attended all of the UK overnight BarCamps. In my defence Ian and Emma Persky have probably attended more BarCamps than I because they have had the opportunity to attend other European BarCamps, but this is not a problem to me as it is an addiction and not a competition. ;-)

For reference this is a list of BarCamps I have attended, and the session I have run. I appreciate you may well not be interested, but to be honest this list is as much reference for me as it is for you.

• BarCampLondon06, 2nd & 3rd September 2006, Geocaching
• BarCampLondon2, 17th & 18th February 2007, Travel information
• BarCampSheffield, 26th & 27th May 2007, Geocaching
• BarCampBrighton, 8th & 9th September 2007, Geocaching
• BarCampLondon3, 24th & 25th November 2007, Web site show and tell
• BarCampBrighton2, 15th & 16th March 2008, OpenID live demonstration
• BarCampNorthEast, 24th & 25th May 2008, Organiser + Speed talk on Geocaching
• BarCampLondon4, 31st May & 1st June 2008, DAB Data services open discussion
• BarCampLeeds2008, 16th & 17th August 2008, Geocaching
• BarCampBrighton3, 6th & 7th September 2008, I have a complaint (mutual moaning session)
• BathCamp, 13th & 14th September 2008, Geocaching
• BarCampLondon5, 27th & 28th September 2008, Dyslexia
• BarCampSheffieldII, 28th & 30th November 2008, What is community
• BarCampLiverpool, 6th & 7th December 2008, Geocaching + Privacy open discussion

So now I have the record and I can stop, right? Wrong. It is nice to have, but I am not actually that bothered about the record. I attend BarCamps because I enjoy them and the company of fellow attendees. I could just miss one to demonstrate that, but I do not want to.

If you are interested in attending a BarCamp then keep an eye on the BarCapm.org wiki for ones around you. I will hopefully be attending BarCampLondon6 and BarCampBournemouth, and many more this year. Don’t forget we are also organising BarCampNorthEast2 and we would love to soo you there. So, you are reading this blog about BarCamps, so why not sign up to one and get addicted as well. We would love to see you there.

So, I had another daft idea, built it, and decided to share it. If you are like me you will like to skim thought all your friends “tweets” on twitter.com even thought you don’t read them all properly. I was doing this whenever I tweeted myself so when I posted something I also read all the way back to my prior tweet. The problem is when I am out and about I will tweet when I do not have time to check other updates, or have nothing to say after reading the some tweets.

Okay, I can just keep reading backwards until I see something I remember, but I decided there was a better and more over engineered option here. I have set up two Twitter bots that tweet the time on the hour, and at midnight. These can be followed along with other friends and show a distinctive icon. Now all I have to do is remember is the time you last checked your feed.

The bots are called hourtick and daytick. Please feel free to follow them. They are work in progress so all feedback welcome.

You may know that I am a prolific BarCamper, that I love the concept, and really enjoy attending these events. I will be blogging about this addiction soon and will catch up on some well needed blogging about BarCamps I have attended.

I am writing this to stat to addressing a problem we have always had with BarCamps, and a problem that is getting worse. This problem is people signing up and not attending. At the recent BarCampLondon5 there were 150 tickets allocated and only 100 turned up. Most of these absentees were people who had not attended a BarCamp before. At BarCampNorthEast we shockingly had only 30% attendance. Even the first UK BarCamp managed 80%, and that was when we were all new.

Tickets for the popular BarCamps are hard to get and there is nothing more annoying to me than not being able to get a ticket when there would have been room. This is something we need to fix.

Overbooking is one option and is sometimes done. We kind of did it for BarCampNorthEast. We released tickets for everyone we could legally fit in the building rather than a comfortable level. We were convinced that we would not have full attendance, but would not have to turn anyone away if we were wrong. Considering the effort some put in to attend I do not ever want to turn people with tickets away.

BathCamp (the BarCamp in Bath :-) ) tried to decrease nonattendance by charging £5 a non refundable and spending the money on a t-shirt. For legal reasons that are far to complex to go in to here you should not charge for attendance and a t-shirt was a nice work around. Attendance was not bad, but was not perfect either, and I would say that the payment did not make much of a difference.

I have given this whole situation a lot of thought and I am wondering if the solution should perhaps be one of communication, or not relyaing on non attendibng deligates to communicate to be more exact.

Once we have booked then we often get no more than one email, and we never need to confirm we are still attending. Yes people are asked to say if they are not going, but this is obviously not working. Should we expect people to confirm they will be attending a week or two before the BarCamp instead of cancel if they are not?

I agree that we should not have it so a person who has missed an email can not go, but a date can be set in advance and an email reminder sent out in addition to tweets, blogs posts and whatever other communication tools are available at the time.

Taking this one step further, why not allow people to book queue-jumper tickets in advanced so they can plan ahead. This queue-jumper ticket allows you book a full ticket when they are released very close to the event. The queue-jumper ticket guarantees an event ticket if you book that event ticket in a predefined time window just before the event. After that window people on the resirve list can book, and finally anyone can book.

This can be done with something like EventWax and spreadsheet software to check there is no cheating.

All this actually does is bring the date when someone commits to attending the event closer to the event and this might not solve the problem. It could though so should we give it a go?

In the words of an old exam paper…. Discuss. :-)

After the success of the eventful Hack Day London in 2007 I was very keen on attending the 2008 generation of the event called Mashed. This was held last week in London’s Alexandra Palace again. The name change comes from the event being run and partly sponsored by the BBC, and the Hack Day brand is associated with the prior co-sponsor Yahoo.

This is an event where lots of people, be they developers, designers, engineers, or anyone else who creates stuff, get together and creates something in 24 hours. There are few restrictions on what you can do and although you have to use an API from on of the sponsors to enter the compassion you can produce anything you want.

One of the best bits about such an event is that it gives you the chance to work with other people who have different skills so you can create far more than you can on your own. I was asked by Euan Spence to join the Social Flight Simulator team and I was also planning on working on a hardware mashup with Pete and Brian, and anyone else who wanted to join in. Naturally there was not enough time to do all this, but the flight sim worked and we won something. I will blog about what we achieved in the near future.

The event was well organised again and there were many improvements. Strangely most of the improvement involved simplifying things. The only recommendations I can make is to reintroduce the welcome so new people know what is going on and so people can find others to help with there projects, and to introduce recycling bins.

There were free buses laid on this time from many places throughout the country and I thought this was a great idea to make the event less Londoncentric. It was a great shame that few signed up for them, even fewer turned up, and the Newcastle/Sheffield bus only had three of us on. One of the reasons was probably the 2am departure time, but I don’t have a solution for this problem.

The event was covered in part by the BBC’s Click and there are plenty or photos on flickr. Well done all involved, and hopefully see you next year.

I am typing this during the demos of what has been developed. Considering the small number of people working through the night, and the lack of time to work on stuff through the day, I am surprised at number of entries how managed to produce something.

Nigel and I have been doing some playing with our idea, although because we were so far behind we have not entered it for any of the competitions. We started out with the idea of producing a Bluetooth version of Geocaching. What we ended up with is an Arduino sampling data, a server parsing this in to EEML, that is being relayed through a public facing server, and being rendered by a JavaScript applet for presentation on a mobile device. The idea of the project is to allow people to monitor things (temperature, light, etc) at a remote location. Our next project will be to figure out why we need to do this.

The event is not completely over, but I suspect I will not have a moment to blog anything later so I thought I would blog my closing comments now. It was a good couple of days and now I just need to go home to bed.

This Friday and Saturday I am at Over the Air, an event hosted at Imperial Collage in London and supported by the BBC. The concept of the event appears to be a version of Hack Day crossed with a general conference, all with a focus on mobile technology.

There is a good number of the usual suspects here, and a lot of new faces as well. I have been to a few seminars and have been working with Nigel on a few mad ideas using the Arduino boards. A big thank you to tinker.it for the loan of the Bluetooth board, and we hopefully will be able to revile our work tomorrow, if we get it finished, if.

To be honest I am not enjoying the event as much as a BarCamp or Hack Day. Most people are not bothered about producing something unlike Hack Day, and as a result neither am I. Also there is nothing really wrong with the seminars, but most feel more like a sales pitch than something I can learn from, and nothing like the quality of knowledge transfer you get at a BarCamp. That being said I am happy to be here and hope that others are getting a lot more out of the event than I.

We have watched the TV on the big big screen, there is a Werewolf game going on at the moment, and we are all spaced out on the gazillions of comfy beanbags. Some of us are working on projects for tomorrow, but most of us are just chilling, blogging and working on personal projects.

I hope to conclude my brief summery of the event tomorrow, but there are plenty more blogs covering the event.

Yes, at long last we have a confirmed venue for BarCampNorthEast that is to first be held in The Art Works Galleries, Newcastle.

I see a BarCamp is a gathering of people who want to learn stuff off each other and generally socialise with new friends. To find out more about BarCamps check out the BarCamp wiki.

Already there a few good people are intending to come, and [free] tickets go online soon. It is all about the people who attend, so make it that bit better and come along yourself. All you need to go is give a presentation or run a session, and if you think you can’t do that then get in touch and I will explain just how easy it is.

Finally if you know me and need a floor or couch to sleep on on the Friday or Sunday then let me know and I will see what I can do. Also any other questions, no matter how random, please do ask.

Update: The first round of tickets are available at 11am on the 1st of April (and no, this is not a joke).