Jessica and I flew into Copenhagen yesterday. By fortuitious coincidence, I ended up sitting next to Tom Armitage on the Sleazyjet flight from Stansted.
The first day of Reboot is progressing nicely. There have been some excellent presentations so far. I’m not in the best state of mind for paying attention — I didn’t really get a good night’s sleep — so it’s a testament to the speakers that I’ve been able to stay awake at all.
Matt Webb kicked things off with an imaginative talk about building a browser of the future that incorporated more of our senses. I like the idea of web pages having tastes and smells. During the next session (Visualisation put into perspective) I realised that tag clouds are smelly things: tags are shown with varying strength of odour.
The data visualisation talk was also really good for showing some excellent, excellent usage of SVG. Seeing SVG on a mobile really brought home that the S stands for scalable.
The slidesless seminar on Karl Marx was, I’m sure, great but unfortunately my lack of sleep was catching up on me and my brain just wasn’t capable of following the many, many ideas being thrown out. I had revived by the time I got to the T.L. Taylor’s talk on play, specifically in terms of massive multiplayer online games. It was a fascinating talk delivered in a really engaging way. There was a lot of food for thought packed into it.
After lunch, a notoriously tricky slot, J.P. Rangaswami gave a rousing, inspirational, impassioned talk on, well… just about everything. You had to be there.
If that wasn’t enough to get me inspired, it was followed by Steve Coast’s talk on the first year of OpenStreetMap. This is the same talk he gave at XTech but I missed it then. I heard it was one of the better talks in Amsterdam so I was really happy to have the opportunity to catch it here. He didn’t disappoint. It made me want to get a GPS device and get out there and start mapping.
Right now there are some lightning demos being presented and I’m taking this opportunity to grab a comfy site and take a breather.
If you want to keep up with events here on Technorati and Flickr, most people are tagging posts and pictures with “reboot8”.