Guide to The Mashup Camp Social Network
From MashupCamp
This document is currently under-construction. Please bear with us as we complete it. Thanks!
There are many ways to engage the Mashup Camp Social Network
There was a day when the "The Mashup Camp Social Network" was little more than this wiki's RSS feed. Thanks to the wonders of Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, lifestreaming, etc., there are many more options for socially engaging Mashup Camp and your fellow mashup campers before, during, and after each edition of the event. Given the growing numbers of ways to engage the Mashup Camp Social Network, we decided to create a handy-dandy guide to help you better understand your options.
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Tuning into Mashup Camp's RSS & Atom Feeds
Depending on what you want to tune into, Mashup Camp runs several feeds that you might find handy. Here are your options:
Watching for new posts on the Mashup Camp blog
Yes, there is an Official Mashup Camp blog. In addition to being a good place for campers to go to find out the latest logistical updates, it's also a pretty good source for a lot of what's going on in the world of software mashups. Like all blogs it has its own RSS feed and here it is:
http://blog.mashupcamp.com/rss
Watching the Mashup Camp Wiki For Page Additions and Updates
Right now, you're looking at one of Mashup Camp's wiki pages. Wiki's are perfect for events like Mashup Camp because it's a way to create, share, and collaborate on living, informative documents. Camps and unconferences (not just Mashup Camp) are often all about creating, sharing, and collaborating on ideas so, philosophically, camps and wikis are very well aligned.
For example, we have a central wiki page where Mashup Campers are encouraged to suggest discussion topics for the open discussion component of Mashup Camp. It's a living document that's open for editing and truly represents the spirit of collaboration.
Wiki pages are being added or edited all the time. Campers are updating the suggested discussion page, they're creating new pages that have profiles of themselves. They're documenting sessions as they take place at Mashup Camp, and more.
There are two ways to stay in touch with all the changes being made to the wiki. One is to visit the Recent Changes and the other is to point your RSS reader at Mashup Camp Wiki's RSS or Atom feeds. Here they are:
RSS: http://wiki.mashupcamp.com/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=rss
Atom: http://wiki.mashupcamp.com/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=atom
Following Mashup Camp's Twitter Account
Mashup Camp's Twitter account is likely to ebb and flow depending on where we are (in time) relative to the next event. If you already are a user of Twitter, then simply visit the Mashup Camp Twitter Page (while logged into Twitter) and click the Follow button. But if you'd rather tune into what we're tweeting via RSS, you can do that too. Here's the RSS feed that's tied directly to our Twitter account:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/16482023.rss
Further below, we have more information about how to best engage Twitter if you'll also be tweeting about Mashup Camp.
Keeping Track of New Videos Posted to Mashup Camp TV
Thanks to the folks at Kyte.TV, we've set up a video channel that (a) is embedded on the Mashup Camp Web site at http://www.mashupcamp.com/tv, (b) is embedded on the Mashup Camp Facebook page at http://tinyurl.com/mucface, and (c) can be embedded by you just about anywhere (Facebook, MySpace, NetVibe widget, a Web site, your blog, etc). There are some videos loaded up there right now from previous Mashup Camps. We encourage you to check them out and to embed our player on your site (click the Get & Share button).
If everything goes according to plan, we'll be shooting a bit of video from Mashup Camp and some of it will be LIVE... in other words, piped directly into any instance of Mashup Camp's Kyte.TV player in real-time, no matter where it's embedded.
But, if just want to be notified of when the "TV channel" get updated with new content, you can tune into an RSS feed that we've set up specifically for that purpose. Here it is (it might be empty right now):
http://www.kyte.tv/account/rss.html?key=sV9jax1sUPCHJCf1
The Kitchen Sink Feed
We of course recognize that the last thing that some of you want to do is point your RSS reader at a bunch of different feeds. And who knows when we're going to add another one that you have to keep track of? So, we took all of the different feeds and mashed them into one firehose. You can see that feed in action by visiting our Facebook Page where every item is clickable and will take you directly to the original source page. Or, you can click on this URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/MashupCampBackchannel?format=xml and it will take you directly to our kitchen sink of a feed.
Mashup Camp's LiveCommunity (and it's LiveStream)
If you visit any of the non-wiki pages on the Mashup Camp Web site (eg: the home page or one of the blog pages), you'll notice a gray bar stretching across the top of the page with the number "6" on the left-end and a Google search box on the right-end. This bar is not only your access point into the Mashup Camp LiveCommunity, it's also a way to monitor the MashupCamp LiveStream. LiveCommunity and LiveStream are technologies provided by SixGroups.
The Mashup Camp LiveStream
The center of that gray bar is called the LiveStream. The LiveStream is exactly what it says it is because (a) it's "live" -- it's dynamically refreshing itself all the time and (b) the content the LiveStream is refreshing itself with is coming from a multitude of sources including the following:
- All tweets on Twitter with the hashtag #mashupcamp
- All blog content tagged for mashupcamp or #mashupcamp that's indexed by Technorati
- All videos posted to YouTube that are tagged for mashupcamp or #mashupcamp
- All photos posted to Flickr that are tagged for mashupcamp or #mashupcamp
- All messages posted to the Mashup Camp LiveCommunity through the Mashup Camp LiveCommunity interface.
The LiveStream is a great way, at any time (particularly while you're at Mashup Camp) to monitor in real-time what is being said or published about Mashup Camp from around the Internet.
The Mashup Camp LiveCommunity
Not only does the SixGroups LiveCommunity technology offer the Mashup Camp community another way to monitor Mashup Camp's real-time LiveStream, it also provides the Mashup Camp community with a Twitter-enabled text and mail messaging backchannel that allows members to:
- Post messages directly into the Mashup Camp LiveStream
- Automtically dual-post your "LiveCommunity direct messages" to Twitter as well
- Post replies/comments to any post that appears in the LiveStream regardless of how that post got there. In other words, the original post could have been posted directly into the LiveStream (per the first bulletpoint) or it could have ended up there by way of the LiveStream monitoring of Twitter, Technorati, YouTube, and Flickr.
The LiveCommunity functionality also offers an intra-mail capability that allows members to send mail to other LiveCommunity members. These members could be members of the Mashup Camp LiveCommunity or members of any of SixGroup's other LiveCommunities. Direct interaction with the LiveCommunity functionality requires that you first establish a user ID with the SixGroups LiveCommunity service. This ID is not the same ID that you may have received or established with any of Mashup Camp's other systems (registration, the wiki, etc.). The LiveCommunity feature accepts OpenID credentials, if you have them. Once you've established credentials with any SixGroups LiveCommunity, you do not have to establish another set of credentials to join another SixGroups LiveCommunity (for example, the one for Web 2.0 Expo).
Become a Fan of Mashup Camp on Facebook
We're not sure why, but if you search Facebook for Mashup Camp, it won't turn up the Facebook Account that we've established as our base camp on Facebook. So, there it is. Now you know where to find us on Facebook (just click on the aforelinked text). What can you do once you get there? Well, for starters, you can become a fan of Mashup Camp (and we hope you will!).
Why become a fan of Mashup Camp on Facebook? For starters, it's a pretty easy way to connect with other members of the Mashup Camp community semi-outside of the context of Mashup Camp. For example, by going to our Facebook page and becoming a fan, you can see who else is a fan and they can see you and, through Facebook's "friending" technology, invite one another to become the other's friend.
Facebook is also one of the communications channels we use to reach the Mashup Camp community with messages about our events. By becoming a fan of Mashup Camp on Facebook, you're guaranteed that you won't miss any important communications from us.
Our Facebook page offers other functionality as well. For example, through the "Send a message" tab on under the "Share button," you can be a part of the viral engine that draws more people into the Mashup Camp community by sending messages to your friends that invite them to join the community. Via the "Post to Profile" button, you record your thoughts about mashups and Mashup Camp in a way that is automatically added to your list of Facebook posts. Your posts are reflected on your Facebook Wall (where others that view your wall will see them). Additionally, when your Facebook friends click on the "Posts" tab where they monitor all the posts by their friends, they'll see your post there as well.
Finally, the Facebook page is one other way to monitor our various RSS feeds. We've piped our aggregated FriendFeed feed into our Facebook page in a way that any of our feeds that you might normally consume through your RSS reader will also be reflected on our Facebook page as well. Right now, everything is aggregated into one feed and items from various sources are intermingled according to chronological order. We can break them out too, into separate sections, if the feedback we get says to do that instead. Let us know.
Are you Blogging, Tweeting, Filming, or taking pictures about Mashup Camp?
Given how bleeding edge the subject of mashup software development is, and how tied into feed technologies like RSS and Atom it is, most members of the Mashup Community are also prolific contributors of content to the Web. That could be through blogging, Twittering, sharing pictures on one of the many Web-based video and/or photo sharing services like Flickr and YouTube YouTube.
Tagging your content
If you're one of the many campers that's publishing content about Mashup Camp to the Web, then we encourage you to tag your content with one of the following tags. Not only does use of these tags make your content more easily discovered, it increases the likelihood that we'll pick it up in one of our various feeds where your post automatically gets link-love.
mashupcamp
For content that permits multiple simultaneous tags (eg: blogs, photos, and videos), we encourage you to tag all of your mashup camp content with this tag.
mashupcampfall08
Additionally, for content that permits multiple simultaneous tags (eg: blogs, photos, and videos) and that's specific to our Fall event (Nov 17-19) in Mountain View, we encourage you add this additional tag.
#mashupcamp (the hashtag)
If you're microblogging using Twitter, Jaiku, or Pownce, then we encourage the use of this hashtag in each of your posts. For those of you not familiar with hashtags, depending on which service(s) you use, they could get special treatment. For example, whereas hashtags are treated just like any text when a Twitter post is viewed in it's normal context (for example on a regular twitter page), hashtags that appear in any of Twitter's search results are linked (and will spawn another Twitter-search should you click on them).
