So, the first ever BarCamp in Cape Town kicked off today. It was very informative so far, with a number of interesting talks:

What they didn’t teach you in CompSci 101, by a gentleman whose name I unfortunately cannot recall now, who, with 17 years of software development experience, gave us a quick rundown of the pitfalls and things to keep in mind as a developer.

Podcasting, by Glen Verran, who, along with his wife, operates South Africa’s most popular (at least according to this week’s iTunes ratings) weekly podcast, “The ZA Show.”

Andy Rabagliati gave an empassioned talk about the Linux Terminal Server project, which he has successfully used in schools and can be a powerful solution for disadvantaged schools who are reliant on “hand-me-downs” from corporations who throw out their old hardware. He also talked about Wikipedia, which he has snapshot’ed, packaged and provided to schools in a snapshot in order to overcome the lact of connectivity prevalent here, as well as his own pet project, Wizzy Digital Courier, which is a project to also attempts to overcome connectivity issues by using offline techniques (ie., a flashdisk) to shuttle data (scraped websites, email, etc.).

How to market yourself as a contractor, by Jo Duxbury, who operates Freelancentral, a service that connects freelancers in various disciplines to those seeking services.

Plone, by Jean Jordaan, who gave a quick introduction to this content management system, including a demo of how to quickly model business rules from a UML specification directly into python/plone models within minutes.

Successfully marketing yourself and SEO, by Christine Stander, who provides services in these markets.

Web 2.0, by Dave Duarte, who spoke enthusiastically about the opportunities presenting to businesses who embrace the “new web,” and illustrated his presentation using a number of interesting examples:

• bead4need, a charity drive which received more than $2500 after operating for only two weeks, just through social marketing
• Caffeine, a new “caffeine outlet” in Sea Point, who launched their blog less than a week ago, with a marketing gimmick of a free muffin and coffee for every blogger who posts about them.

Most interesting, for me, he also introduced the next speaker whom he collaborated with, while marketing their business:

Stormhoek Wines, by Graham Knox, an ex-advertising copywriter, who told us about the revolutionary marketing strategy this small winery from Wellington has embarked on. By exploiting social marketing techniques, they have created an avalanche effect to their blog (which serves as the front page for the winery too) — within a year of operating the blog, they are now at over 1500 daily visits, and pushing out in excess of 20GB per month. From shipping less than 500 000 cases of wine, to currently around 4 million. For all this, they were awarded the honour of “Best Consumer Campaign” at the annual unveiling of The Drinks Business Awards 2006 at the London International Wine and Spirits Fair in May 2006. One of their “gimmicks” was to offer free wine (shipped to anyone within their distribution countries for free) to any social meeting where Stormhoek was discussed. They also teamed up with Hugh MacLeod from gapingvoid.com, who drew a number of bottle labels, which were then available to the first 100 “geek dinners,” again for free. These guys have something great going…

Introduction to python, by Neil Blakey-Milner, who gave us a funny yet informed comparison between python and other popular languages such as C and Java.

Finally, a rousing speech by Max Kaizen, who emphasised what a unique position South Africa has in terms of opportunity (on par with those of India and other developing nations who leverage their IT skills) to provide world-class development services.

If today was anything to judge by, tomorrow should be great as well… I must thank Conrad Strydom on behalf of everyone attending — I’m sure he let himself in for much more than he bargained for by getting this whole thing organised, and he’s been spending much more time running around, answering his on this than is healthy!