Monday, April 02, 2007

Bar Camp Ottawa

This past weekend I presented about the future of television on the internet at my first BarCamp here at Carleton University. I was impressed at the amount of interest and opinions everyone had about the topic. It's encouraged to actively participate when you attend a BarCamp event, so it didn't take much to spark a conversation between everyone.

The main idea of my presentation was the fact that more and more people are downloading shows off the internet. If these shows have no commercials then how are the networks making their money? And if the networks aren't making money then the quality of television is going to go down, hurting the public in the end.

I thought this subject might hit home with a lot of people since downloading shows is so easy, and it affects everyone. I was actually impressed by the number of different views people had. We got into topics like bandwidth, and net neutrality. It was very engaging.

There were a couple of other presentations of note that I attended. Jeff Parks had an interesting presentation about usability, which he portrays every week in his podcast. Stacy Young also did a fine presentation on introducing Apollo to everyone.