So last weekend I went to SemanticCamp, a semantic BarCamp organized by Tom Morris here in London at Imperial College. The event was kind of “OK”. I said OK because honestly the event was not the best thing for me. I personally went because I was wondering what all this “semantic” stuff was all about. I guess more people had the same idea, and as a result, at most of the times, only 1 talk was going on. Combine this with a lot of no-shows and you get bored soon. I didn’t feel like listening to too many talks on RDF so I hung around with some people in the other rooms instead.

There were some great things about SemanticCamp though, most important of which was the organization, the location, and the drinks afterwords. One of the other great things about SemanticCamp was the Semantopoly game, custom made by Jon Linklater-Johnson. The game is a kind of Monopoly where you can play a web “celebrity” and buy technologies and social networks to make mashups and get venture capital. One of the board characters was Jeremy Keith so image the joy we had when Jeremy decided to play himself in the game.

Here are the photos:

Time for the third Geek Dinner event of the year already. This time I invited two guests, Paul Jones and Ian Forrester, to talk on the very hot topic of DataPortability. If you don’t know what DataPortability is, take a look at the website or this interesting video:

The date is the 27th of February, the venue is the same old Ye Olde Cock Tavern, and this time we will start at about 7:30. Food (open buffet) will be £5, and please let me know if you are coming so that we can guess the amount of food to order. Hope to see you all!

[Upcoming link]

• www.dontclick.it - Very interesting web design where you don’t need to click to navigate. Feels a bit like mac’s one button mouse idea.
• Like it? Tip it! - Tipping goes Web2.0!
• Have a Website? It?s Time to Add a WebClip Icon - Short tutorial on how to make a nice webclip icon for the iPhone/iPod touch
• Yahoo! Design Pattern Library - Interesting articles by Yahoo on how to do proper webdesign. Have to read it through one day.
• Funny story about computer confiscation in Denmark - The title is quite descriptive….

During the last Geek Dinner, Ian was passing around some flyers for an interesting event called “Over The Air - 24 Hours of Mobile Development”. From what I understand, it is going to be some kind of Hackday for mobile development, which is bound to be cool.

The date is the 4th and 5th of April (yes, with a Barcamp-like overnight) and the location is Imperial College. I finally have a decent mobile platform with my recently bought iPhone, and therefore I think I might go to this event. Are you joining me?

If you ever read the comments here, you might have noticed the avatars that show up with some people. These are not Gravatars or MyBlogLog avatars, no they are avatars personally hosted by those commenters on their own site. What drives this mechanism? The plugin is called hAvatar and the technology involves Microformats.

hAvatar is build by Alper and what it does is simple: it fetches the URL you use in the comment (either your OpenID or other URL) and sees if you have a hCard on that page. A hCard is a Microformat and is nothing more than some extra semantics added to your page that represents you business-card. In the very literal sense, a hCard is the Microformat equivalent of the vCard format.

Now, if your hCard has a photo attached to it, the hAvatar plugin will take that URL, wrap it in a tag and return it to the template. All you then need to do is call the hAvatar call somewhere in your comments loop, and boom you have an open-standards-defined avatar system on your blog!

Download it here and take a look at my front page for an example of an hCard with an attached photo. People using the plugin at the moment include MissGeeky, TheBleacher, and obviously Alper and I.