I am sitting here at BarCampAustin, the precursor to the SXSW 2007 conference. This one is really a bar camp. It’s at Bourbon Rocks bar, and the atmosphere follows suit. There is actually a bartender behind us, and even a bouncer at the door.
At around 7:00pm, I will be talking about UAB in Antartica, the project I mentioned here before. This is the next generation (can I say Antarctica 2.0?). If any of you remember my little schpiel about not building your own networking site at the NetSquared conference last year? Well, here it is, in action.
Antarctica.uab.edu is an educational outreach project by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB): a blog by a group of university scientists who are currently on the ice in Antarctica. Technology allows to tightly intertwine the blog with Flickr via 3 groups: public, crew, and classroom. The tagspace is shared between these Flickr groups and the blog (try clicking on the crew members names and tags in the right column), providing an impression that both Flickr pics and posts are in the same information stream. Also, bloggers can associate specific pics with posts with a simple tagging technique. When a picture is posted on Flickr, it’s linked back to the site, to provide to and fro traffic connection.
There is quite a bit of interesting technical stuff in this site, from nifty fixed-flexible window sizing to HTML text trimmer, from improved AHAH technique to using semantic markup to query Flickr API. I am going to go ahead and commit to talking about each aspect in a separate post, but at BarCamp I will concentrate on the XHTML Flickr API queries.
So if you have 30 minutes of free time this evening (that’s March 10, 2007), please stop by Bourbon Rocks on the 6th street and say hi.