Mashup Camp Ups and Downs | July 23, 2007
by Jeb Boniakowski
I'm on the plane now (after my five hour ground delay at Mineta) thinking about Mashup Camp and my main takeaway is that I'm still a big buyer of the Unconference format. It's even more striking given that the last conference I went to was Enterprise 2.0. It does seem to lead to higher-quality discussions and a general better use of time.
However, I think this may also be related in part to the relative lack of an obvious huge sponsor presence at small events like Mashup Camp. ETech is awesome, but there's no way around the fact that the "product pitch" keynotes from the major sponsors are essentially live-action infomercials. Mashup Camp also seems to buy into the "Manufactured Serendipity" school of conference design. Thats practically all they are giving you, really, but it's better than going to a multi-day conference and realizing that the only valuable parts were the three fifteen minute coffee breaks.
On the negative side, it's pretty clear that "mashups: the software" have aged better than "mashups: the music". During the cocktail hour on the first day, they had some DJs playing a set made up exclusively of mashups, as far as I could tell (I actually left. it was too much, but the DJs had something with the word "MASH" involved on their shirts, and it wasn't a stencil font separated with asterisks). Sure, I remember going to a party years and years ago and being like, "what the hell? Is that Christina Aguilera singing over the Strokes? That's hilarious!" It was hilarious. Once. Now its about as cool as fake Paul Thurrot.
