Stubbleblog

This is cool, reality all starz is a competition to challenge “yourself and your friends to accomplish amazing adventures, feats of valor, or works of creative genius.” You go out into the real world and perform real acts like you’re a real human being. Then you submit proof online and receive points from your peers based on how well you did.

Some of the challenges are like party like a rockstar but there’s also a surprising number of people competing in survive a rollover accident.

It’s built by Peter Brown and Shelly Farnham from Waggle Labs. Shelly’s got a really interesting background in the academic side of social software (as a Ph.D and former researcher at Microsoft). Good people. Worth drinking with if you run into them at ETech.

ETech is my favorite O’Reilly conference because it’s the one that seems furthest from being vocational. My experience at OSCON is always around learning to use various technologies and my experience at Web 2.0 has been very business focused. The people at ETech always seem to be doing such far out things that I get caught up in their enthusiasm.

Sarah and I head out tonight. Hopefully I’ll finish the revision to Regular Expression Pocket Reference on the plane. Then tomorrow morning I’ll be rolling out the new design for my company so that I have something bright and shiny to demo. If you’re going to ETech I’d love to chat, partly because I’m looking for feedback but also because I want to hear what other people are up to.

Interesting that Joel is taking his entire team to ETech this year. I’ve been to every O’Reilly conference in the last three years save EuroOSCON and the defunct Bioinformatics. ETech is consistently the most interesting and fun. Apparently Joel gave his team a choice of conferences and they all chose ETech. Good for them.

I did overhear someone at Web 2.0 claim that they hadn’t told anyone that they were at the conference because they considered the trip a competitive advantage. My guess is that Joel feels the opposite, publicly acknowledging his team’s intentions gives him an advantage when it comes to recruiting and retention.

I guess openness is one of the Web 2.0 virtues that not everyone at Web 2.0 understands.