Event Review Technology

Mashup Camp 7 Wrapup

Mashup Camp Hackathon Prize

As I posted about last week, I attended Mashup Camp at the Computer History Museum this week. It has been a packed couple of days. I mentioned before I was not really considering entering the Speedgeeking Contest that occurs at each Mashup Camp. Last Spring’s Mashup Camp I was a bit depressed to come in last place, but this contest was different, this time they had one top prize (A MacBook Pro) awarded by attendee voting, but then the individual providers sponsoring the event also had their own contests of who had the best mashup using their service.

Even charged with that information, I still felt like I didn’t want to enter the competition, not really because of the agony of defeat, but because of the work that would be involved to do a mashup. However, when I heard about the Wet Paint Injected API, I knew I could in a relatively short period of time, write an awesome mashup using this service, and so I started considering it on Monday evening, a few hours later, I resolved myself and knew I had to give it a shot.

Mashup Camp was fun, especially the Speedgeeking and the Keynote from Tim O’Reilly, but the highest point of all for me was when the representatives from WetPaint announced in the closing reception that my mashup had won the Wet Paint Best Mashup Contest!

I’m so excited about this, that I’m going to cut this blog post short and go celebrate. Thank you to Wet Paint for both putting up an incredible Wiki Injection API for adding wiki content to pages (rather than adding pages to wikis), and for choosing my project for the Win, and thank you to the organizers of Mashup Camp for organizing a great Unconference.

The Organizers of Mashup Camp have announced another event at the Computer History Museum in January called Cloud Connect, and I’ve already registered for that one, so if you come, I’ll see you there.

UPDATE 2008-12-03: I just noticed the WetPaint team’s Blog Post wrapping up their experiences at MashupCamp and wanted to thank them for the prize (which arrived Today via FedEx), and for the card which is now pinned to the wall of my Cubicle. Check out their tales of upgrades to First Class at the end of their post, which I presume is on Virgin America, due to the mention of Massage Chairs.