Treat with Jermolene

The organisers have posted the video from the talk that I gave at the Next08 conference in Hamburg earlier this month. It doesn’t seem to be possible to link directly to the video; you’ll need to scroll down until you find “Jeremy Ruston”:

http://www.next-conference.com/next08/program.html

I was a bit more nervous than usual because I was standing in at short-ish notice for my boss. I added some laconicity, but the material is essentially his, as you can see in this video of JP giving the talk last December at LeWeb 3 in Paris. Osmosoft helped out with the slides, using RippleRap and TiddlyWiki to maintain my strict PowerPoint quarantine.

Happily at least one person liked it.

Along with several of my Osmonaught colleagues, I will be attending OpenTech 2008 in London on Saturday July 5th 2008. It’s a very low cost event (£5 to get in!), and is focussed nicely on the hacker community. I went to the last one in 2005 and had a great time.

This time, I’m giving a talk entitled “TiddlyWiki Tales” which will be a round-up the latest TW developments, both from Osmosoft and the wider community. Later on in the day, my colleague Paul Downey is talking about “The Web as Agreement“.

We’re also holding a competition with a TiddlyWiki flavour and some interesting prizes:

The TiddlyWiki OpenTech competition gives you the chance to win a BUG (plus four modules)! The BUG base station and modules use open source software and snap together to create whatever device you want. There’s also a great second prize of a GP2X Linux powered handheld games console. A stack of O’Reilly books will be the third prize.

For your chance to win one of these great prizes, all you have to do is show us your TiddlyWiki skills. TiddlyWiki is written entirely in javascript, and has a great plugin architecture, so just like the BUG you can twist it to do whatever you want. It can pull in RSS feeds, and because it can be a local file (and you don’t have to worry about same domain policies), it’s great for mashups. There are already 400+ plugins you can use, but don’t let that stop you from writing your own new ones!

(See the Osmosoft site for full details).

So, I’ll be attending BlogTalk 2008 next week in Cork, along with most of the Osmosoft contingent. I’ll be running a brief demo of some of the latest TiddlyWiki wizardry, and we’ll have a little exhibition stand too. Being a webby sort of conference, we’re running a RippleRap server so that people can create and share notes about the conference sessions (regardless of the state of the wifi!).

I went to BlogTalk 2006 in Vienna as an independent hacker, and thoroughly enjoyed my first exposure to a crowd of people who are generally at the forefront of thinking about social software. Thomas and John do a tremendous job of bringing people together, and so I’m delighted that this time around BT are one of the sponsors of the event.