A Sustainable Train of Thought

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Last week I was in San Francisco for CookCamp and Calls For Change at ETel. Now I’m just getting back from a two-day, last-minute trip to Switzerland.

I’ve written about my experiences at CookCamp over at Tasty Thinking, but in brief: we pulled it off without a hitch, and more importantly there’s interest in taking CookCamp forward in a variety of directions. One possibility is a larger event in a few months. Another possibility is a model which integrates CookCamp into other barcamps.

As was the case for my last trip to San Francisco, where I attended both HealthCamp and the Internet Identity Workshop, I was able to combine multiple conferences into a single trip.

CookCamp’s been in the works for several months, but at the last minute Victor pointed out Calls for Change at ETel. As a nice side-effect, during the breaks I wandered around and chatted with some of the conference attendees. I ran into (the guy from) Jaiku Surj, one of the conference organizers with O’Reilly; and one of the guys who worked on Platial.com.

Perhaps most interestingly, we met the guy behind Open Moko. After telling him of the BarCamp experience with CookCamp, we kind of threw out the idea of an OpenMokoCamp, which he got rather excited about. I think it would be a great way to build buzz around the phone and develop a cadre of core users and proselytizers.

I don’t know how much I can talk about the trip to Switzerland at this point, save to say that it ended with this....

A flurry of comments attached to this image posted on Flickr caught my eye (via Macrumors).

The subject involves a forged Apple event invitation, and I found the depth of analysis contained within the comments to be fascinating, if slightly…well, let’s just leave it at fascinating.

Put it this way: when people start talking about the invitation’s kerning, or how the stars in the background are “ugly”, or even how the choice of words is “NOT Apple-like”, well, that shows just how deep “teh Design” runs over at Apple and how discerning some of its customers are. Talk about a brand!

Now all we need are NON-design types using that language and we’ll have a real revolution on our hands.