Foo Camp was great, better than every year except the first. The sessions I went to were all really fantastically interesting and I wanted to get some of my mental-notes and scraps of paper stored somewhere accessible.

How to eat like a caveman.
Eric Wilhelm of Instructables put together a great round table about diet and in particular the Paleolithic diet which is rich in wild game, fish, some wild fruits, nuts, and vegetables. My notes have a bunch of reading material. S. Boyd Eaton. Loren Cordain’s Paleo Diet. The China Study. Healthy at 100. Marion Nestle’s Food Politics.

I’m about half way through The China Study which has a broad range of research showing that animal protein promotes cancer growth and a host of other diseases. As a result I’ve been eating a diet that’s mostly veggies, fruits, nuts, and beans. I feel great and don’t have the hunger pangs, binges, or food comas that I used to have. I still need to reconcile why people in the discussion were eating so much meat if they’ve read this book.

Continuous Partial Attention.
Kathy Sierra started a discussion around whether living in a world of continuous partial attention was going to lead to a world without experts because nobody will have the focus to become great. Twitter seemed to be catching a lot of the blame. IMHO, declining school athletic and music programs could easily be a bigger culprit (that’s where I learned to focus). I’d like to see data that there is in fact a declining per/capita number of experts. I wonder if people won’t naturally adapt. I turn my email and IM off when I need to focus. Best phrase was Blaine’s “Twitter produces ambient intimacy.”

Surgeons don’t get surgeon’s block.
Cory Doctorow explanation to his students about how writer’s block is bunk. I keep that phrase in my head now to avoid paralysis (notice four blog posts in three days).

No investors ever.
Don MacAskill and I led a “No Investors Ever! Build to Own” discussion. There were a lot of people there who were quite happy owning their own profitable businesses (Don included). People who weren’t happy were struggling with the idea that they were missing opportunities by not taking investment.

dopplr
I finally got on dopplr, the social network for travellers. It’s sweet.

Shelly from Pathable wrote a great summary of the social software package we put together for Foo. I especially like her description of the collaboration:

we were, individuals from five separate organizations, collaborating to create a fully featured, unique social networking experience for Foo Camp attendees – with only six weeks to piece it all together. This, as much as anything, emphasized for me what a great job O’Reilly has done in creating an environment that generates the level of trust and shared passion that enables this sort of effort to succeed.

The folks from Pathable, CrowdVine (me) and iCalico got together at Foo Camp to prototype a social software package for conferences. We had a lot of fun and got enough traction for the concept that we’re putting together an official package for other conferences/events.

Here’s how it works. CrowdVine provides a social network which let’s people do some pre-event networking by putting names to faces and arranging for in-event meetings and then do some post-event networking where people follow up with the people they met during the event. Pathable provides badges or badge stickers that use their social matching algorithms to recommend maches and opposites (a fun group to meet) and groupings into colors and tags. The badges make for great conversation starters. iCalico provides social conference scheduling. You can mark which sessions you’re going to and also see what sessions your friends are interested in.

Here’s what Scott Berkun had to say after using the package at Foo:

Not sure how much these folks charge, but smart conference organizers should be hiring these folks. Conferences talk the talk about connecting people and building networks, but rarely do anything to facilitate it. Crowdvine and pathable are real tools to help make that stuff happen.

If you know anyone who runs conferences or events I’d love to talk to them.