If you're in Silicon Valley, a geek, and bored tonight, you should come to Barcamp. There are dozens of geeks. It's going strong. We'll be here until...

Back at Barcamp...

Sitting with Bill Lazar. He is customer services for Raw Sugar. I've known Bill for years. He's a geek in the valley. He used to work at Sun on the iPlanet app server team.

This is very cool. It is a search engine, but one with a huge twist: it lets you add tags to search results.

It's a bit rough cause it's still alpha quality. But, this is cool. The more people who participate the better it gets too. What about spam? You have to sign in with your name and email to tag so spam can be removed easily.

What do you think?

Wow. Just arrived at Dave Winer's OPML Roadshow (movie here) in Berkeley and there's a ton of people here. What a great weekend for geeks! Ray Ozzie is here. So are a ton of geeks who have changed the world.

Tim Bishop has a report on the roadshow.

Strata Chalup is at Barcamp. She told me about her post: Rss Neither Overhyped nor Underdeveloped.

She's an RSS evangelist. So am I! "You know how hard it is in an organization for other people on your team to figure out what your'e doing." She says that tagging and RSS will make good things happen in the enterprise. She was also at the Blog Business Summit.

That's the Barcamp talk. Off to Berkeley...

Kevin Cheng, the artist who draws OK/Cancel is here at Barcamp. Very cool.

He's talking about doing RSS for his comic. He's scared by RSS because he needs people to visit his Web site in order to serve ads that would make money for him. I suggested he consider doing product placements on his comic

Tom Conrad just started the RSS vs Web Feed argument again. He's an RSS'er. Why? Because he says that while Web Feed helps you discover what it is, it isn't memorable. It isn't something you will likely tell other people about. I'm wearing an RSS shirt that I got at Gnomedex.

I'm an RSS evangelist. Will I be a Web Feed evangelist? Far less likely.

RSS is a brand. Web Feed is something you do. Sorta like "GMC" is a brand of car. I rave about my Ford Focus. I don't rave here about "my car."

So, call them Web Feeds, but I'll call it RSS when I'm evangelizing it. I sure do wish this industry would be consistent, though, but it's not. That genie is already out of the bottle. I'm off to Dave Winer's OPML dinner, by the way. See ya there.

Last night I drove Chris Pirillo to the geek dinner in Palo Alto. He was raving the whole way there about Gizmo (Gizmo's from Michael Robertson, the guy who wants to take down Microsoft with his Linspire Linux desktop, I guess now he wants to take down Skype too). Robertson was on Chris' audio show this week so you can listen to what he says about the effort. Pirillo was raving about it, says it's better than Skype, in his opinion. I have to try it out.

What do you think?

OK, I've been seeing lots of cool stuff this week. Silicon Valley's just rocking. Ajay's car and natural-language speech recognition car is the coolest (you should have seen the geek's reaction to it last night), but it is expensive and you won't be able to buy his software for at least a year.

Pandora, on the other hand, is here now (you need a beta invite) and is simply the coolest thing outside of Microsoft that I've seen in a long time.

It helps you find new music. Tom Conrad: you have a winner on your hands. Congrats.

Tom sent me an email explaining what it does: "Pandora is a "music discovery service" designed to help you find and enjoy music that you'll love. It works like this: you give us the name of an artist or song and we instantly create a "station" that plays songs that share musical characteristics with the artist/song you entered. From there you can fine-tune the station to your tastes by giving us feedback on the individual tracks we play. You can make up to 100 unique stations that play all kinds of music - Pop, Rock, Jazz, Electronica, Hip Hop, old, new, big names, and small acts -- over 300,000 songs from more than 10,000 artists. Pandora is entirely web-based; you won't need to install any software to start listening."

Tom Conrad has the court now. He's showing off Pandora. Tom has been on this blog before. He's CTO of Pandora (formerly Savage Beast).

Are you a music lover? Do you want a system where you can say "I like the Black Eyed Peas, what other music would you suggest for me?" That's just what Pandora does.

Unless you're at Barcamp you need to be invited into their beta. Same as Flock.

More on Pandora after I watch a bit more.

I was just reading the tech blogs over at weblogs.asp.net and saw that Jason Salas has citizen journalism in action: pictures of Northwest Flight 74 on Guam. Nose gear failed and the plane skidded along the runway. Wild.

Rob Chartier was looking out his window in Vancouver and a Nike Ad featuring Markus Nasland floated on by.

Wow, that's like a real-world pop-up advertisement!

Riana has a fun Google Sponsored Link stalker story. Look at the Sponsored Link for when you search Google for "Jason Calacanis." If it disappears, there's an ad that says:

blogger integrity?
not with Jason Calacanis
a clueless "pseudo-journalist"
www.stankdawg.com

Why did that guy run that ad? Turns out Jason and Riana heard him talk at Defcon and thought he gave a bad speech. Jason said so on his blog, earning him an online Adsense stalker.

Shelley Powers: FooBar.

Shelley, I don't know about about how many women are at Foocamp, or speaking there, but here at Barcamp Riana Pfefferkorn is holding court. 21 guys are listening to her. Three women are in her audience. She's awesome. Teaching us about Google Adsense.

She'a a search engine marketing expert. She should be speaking at the Blog Business Summit. One problem? She doesn't have a blog that I can find.

Great speaker. I've never heard of her before. See how this works? Open event. No invite needed. Open stage. Wanna talk? Take a spot on the whiteboard and talk. She said she was up until 4 a.m. working on her slides.

We're gonna hear more about Riana. That I promise you.

Look at my referers log (that's a list of who is linking to me and sending me traffic today). What's surprising there? Digg.

The comments on Digg about meeting Steve Jobs in the street yesterday are pretty fun.

Diggnation is an online TV show done by Digg's founder, Kevin Rose.

By the way, whenever I hear about something I haven't tracked before I go over to Wikipedia. Here's the Wikipedia entry on Digg.

Technorati pages for Foocamp and Barcamp.

Someone uploaded a Flickr foobar fight. Heh.

Rory Blythe, Microsoft employee, talking about Windows Vista's virtual folders feature: "I’ve decided that it’s been a little too long since I’ve nearly gotten myself fired, so here goes."

Hmm, I told people at the Blog Business Summit to hook people with a provocative headline or initial paragraph. This one does just that.

I changed the name of my comments to "Mudpit." Got lots of compliments on that among the geek crowd. Don't want to get into the Mudpit? Start a blog and link.

I just arrived at Barcamp. There are geeks everywhere. How do you know you're at Barcamp? Well, look for the microwave tower on top of the Ideo building in downtown Palo Alto. It's aiming at Barcamp and is how my packets are spreading to the rest of the world.

If you're in Silicon Valley you're missing a very interesting happening.

Right now I'm listening to a demo of Flock, a new social browser. This looks awesome.

There are several sessions going on at one time with about 20 people in each. Munchies out in the hall. Cool Tshirts.

When I walked in everyone said I had to see Flock. Kevin Burton met me and talked to me about it.