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…just started an hour ago… check flickr for photos tagged barcampvienna and the Wiki for the schedule!

just a quick reminder: Vienna’s very first Barcamp is going to take place in about one week - saturday, sept. 30th., 10am - at the One Smartspace (thx 2 One!). if you’re in town and want to hang out with the geeks, feel free to join us! [Barcamps are ad-hoc (un-)conferences/meetups without static agendas, everyone is welcome to speak]. to get involved, visit the wiki! btw, the whole event will be video-taped and made available online soon after…

the second annual Second Life Community Convention taking place in San Francisco just finished yesterday. Mark Wallace from 3pointD.com was kind enough to transcribe the kick-off speech by Mitch Kapor. Mitch Kapor created Lotus 1-2-3, founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is chairman of the Mozilla Foundation and at the board of Linden Labs (creators of Second Life). with a record like this, it’s not a big surprise that the speech he gave on SL’s history and long-term perspectives is inspiring, to say the least.

with currently almost 550.000 residents (half of them being active during the past two months), SecondLife has seen an exponential increase in usage since creditcard-checks were abolished - a measure heavily critized by many long-term-users. as for content, more and more companies take the step to go virtual: recent announcements and rumours included Adidas Reebok and Toyota. jack in!

“BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.”

essentially, BarCamps are ‘unconferences‘, meaning that all attendees are participating in some active way, i.e. taking a speech, demoing or help others in doing so (”no spectators, only participants”). to this day, almost 50 BarCamps all around the world have taken place, mostly in the fields of technology and new media.

after I did a post on barcamp.org about a possible BarCamp Vienna a month ago, I was finally contacted by Helge today. Helge already had registered barcamp.at and set up a Wiki looks like something is happening here, so if you’re in the area and want to participate, join the Wiki!

BlogTalk Reloaded is taking place in Vienna on october 2nd & 3d. BlogTalk is a conference focused on social software and emerging internet technologies:

The international conference BlogTalk Reloaded will bring together different groups of people using and advancing the Internet and its usage: Technical and conceptual developers, researchers with interdisciplinary backgrounds, and practitioners alike. It is designed to initiate a dialog between users, developers, researchers and others who share, analyse and enjoy the benefits of social software. (blogtalk.net)

confirmed keynote-speakers include Danah Boyd, Matt Mullenweg (founding member of WordPress) and Rod Smith (IBM) and Jan Schmidt (bamblog).

if you haven’t been to denmark yet, here might be a good reason to go there this summer:

This year’s Wiki Symposium brings together wiki researchers and practitioners in the historic and beautiful city of Odense, Denmark, on August 21-23, 2006. Participants will present, discuss, and move forward the latest advances in wiki contents, sociology, and technology. The symposium program offers invited talks by Angela Beesley (”How and Why Wikipedia Works“), Doug Engelbart and Eugene E. Kim (”The Augmented Wiki“), Mark Bernstein (”Intimate Information“) and Ward Cunningham (”Design Principles of Wikis“).

more info at http://www.wikisym.org/ws2006.

if you’re in San Francisco, you’ll probably have a hard time deciding which conference to attend today: if SuperNova wasn’t enough, BloggerCon IV is starting on june 23rd. BloggerCon is an “un”-conference organized by Dave Winer, the sometimes-debatable A-list- & longtime-blogger who came to fame by inventing and evangelizing RSS and podcasting.

there are several options to tune into BloggerCon:

• IRC channel at irc.freenode.net/bloggercon
• live audio-feed at http://smartstr.wm.llnwd.net/smartstr_liveces (windows media)
• live video-feed at http://media.ito.com/kevinmarks/bloggercon.mov (quicktime)
• mp3-recordings are available after the sessions
• …and of course numerous (live-)bloggers

ps: in case you wonder, “unconference” is a geek-term describing a meeting where content is driven by all its participants instead of just a single person.
pps: don’t forget Gnomedex, another tech-conference starting june 29th

san francisco - supernova 2006 just started yesterday, june 21st. supernova is a high-grade technology/media-conference with the aim “to understand how decentralization and pervasive connectivity are changing our world” (about supernova).

today’s top-event at the conference is definitely ‘Connected Innovators’, an exclusive showcase of twelve selected startups. Connected Innovators was created in association with web 2.0-evangelist Mike Arringtons TechCrunch and features up-and-coming companies like ether, Vpod.tv and netvibes. each company is pitching their services/products in a 5min. presentation.

and the best news, for those not lucky enough to attend supernova: Electric Sheep is relaying the event to Second Life - live, video-stream included! Connected Innovators is taking place on June 22nd, 6:00pm SLT (=Second Life Time , which is equivalent to Pacific Time). maybe cu there!

from wednesday (may, 31st) to friday (jun, 1st), the linuxwochen 2006 (”linuxweeks”) are taking place in vienna. the schedule offers a plethora of panels and talks on linux, security and opensource-software in general. if you are in the area, be sure to drop by!

mike arrington has an interesting post about this weeks innovate 2006 in zaragoza, spain (a conference foccused on technology entrepreneurship). in his post, mike introduces various european companies and their consumer-oriented web-applications, f.e. vpod.tv, an upcoming video-sharing site from france/spain, or the online-feedreader feeds 2.0 from greece (whose beta I immediatelly joined). as a european, it’s always good to see innovative products and encouraged startups from this part of the world, as it seems sometimes impossible to do this outside the valley…