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]

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?

So my first Geek Dinner is a wrap, and although I got a lot of people telling me they really liked it, I still think some things need to go better next time. First off, we didn’t get the dinning area in the venue, but the rather warm attic room instead. It was “ok” for this time as we didn’t have that many people but next time I will make sure they understand what room I want. Then there was the food that wasn’t ordered, even though I gave them the number of guests 2 days before. So, we ended up with a weird selection of food, including some rather tasteless pathe. Next time we will have some more variety in the food.

Finally, it was a bit unfortunate that London is plagued by the flue, disabling at least 4 guests from coming. Combine that with some people only noticing the event a day before the date, and you end up with about 20 people instead of maybe 30+.

In the end though, the Geek Dinner was a success, with a very interesting talk by Dr Clayton. Ian was able to film the talk (part 1, 2, 3, 4), although he had to switch batteries twice in his camera. Guy West took a audio recording, and I took some photos but was to distracted to take any really good ones. I am already thinking of the next guest to have on, because things an only go better from here. See you next time?

So, besides organizing a Geek Dinner I thought it would be nice to organize another Werewolf Night. Same venue and time as the Geek Dinner, just 2 days earlier (the 5th of February). If you haven’t ever played Werewolf, take a look at the (incomplete) wiki, and then join us on the night. The more players the merrier.

Let me know if you are coming, either here in the comments, or on the upcoming page.