The first day of Reboot 9 in Copenhagen is at an end. It’s been quite an inspiring day: lots of good talks but, more importantly, lots of great conversations with smart interesting people. This is my second year here so today has been a nice mix of meeting up with old friends and getting to meet new people.
This year’s theme is “human”, a typically philosophical subject for this blue-sky conference. Getting into the spirit of things, I gave a presentation called soul. It wasn’t quite as pretenscious as last year’s talk but it was certainly a rambling, haphazard affair. I really just wanted to tie in a bunch of ideas that I’ve been thinking about lately: lifestreams, portable social networks, online activity as gaming… but mostly it was a recruitment drive for Hack Day.
You can download the slides of “soul” as a PDF (with notes).
I was in the first speaking slot and I was very happy to get it over and done with. I had been slightly panicking over this talk and only really got it together during an extended stay at Stansted airport on the way to Denmark. Thanks for the two hour delay, Easy Jet.
Even with the main talk done, I had one more task to accomplish. I foolishly agreed to do a micro-presentation—we can’t call them Pecha-Kucha, donchyaknow—of 15 slides with exactly 20 seconds per slide. I finished the slides for that shortly beforehand and then started psyching myself up for it by hyperventilating and increasing my heart-rate.
I think it paid off. I had an absolute blast, people seemed to enjoy it and Andy asked if I had been possessed by the spirit of Simon Willison.
Oh, and the subject of the rat-a-tat talk was Hypertext: a quick list of tips for improving your links with rel, rev and various microformats. Help ourself to a PDF of the slides.
Update: Here’s a video of my micro-presentation. I was even more incoherent than I feared.