Next up was Tara Hunt who is with Ma.gnolia and they announced that they are going completely open source which should take their product to the next level. They are going to be the wordpress of social bookmarking allowing people to download and start their own social bookmarking platform. It was a good presentation about why being open gives you more power with the community you are trying to work with.

After a little coffee break we were entertained by Ben Huh of icanhazceezburger.com which talked about the evolution of memes and the humor that can be funnier with the use of social media and the power of community. If you haven’t ever checked out that site or the original LOLCats.com with captions under funny pictures you are missing out on a core part of the funny side of the Internet. I love good presentations and his slides used the eras of grow for the site in one word formats like the site, for example “icantgetanysleep” or “programmatica” eras. He used lots of pictures and few words which made his talk funny and impactful. These are good lessons for any business person that has to present a topic that is left of center and needs to be recieved by everyone.

Last before lunch was Danny Sullivan on how using search can meet real life. He touched upon a couple of important points:

“It’s easy to underestimate the importance of search in our everyday lives. Only a few years after search engines arrived, they had replaced friends, books and libraries as the top resource people used to answer questions. Today, the frequencies of daily search use continues to rise — as does what you can find in search engines.

If you look at how the real world – rather than just the “web world” – is increasingly becoming searchable, and at the impact this has. Is Google StreetView cool until it’s your house that’s showing up? Should people be able to pull material even if it’s “public” in other ways? Do we need to better understand how revealing search can be about ourselves, in particular when so many are now Twittering and Flickring their private lives?

And what happens as search continues to jump off our web browser and into our televisions, iPhones and GPS units. These bring us a world of new search opportunities, such as location-specific restaurant search — but they also open new concerns about the search records and profiles left behind. After exploring some of the issues, plenty of time for audience discussion.”

Great session and now it’s time for a great lunch, networking and video interviews of some of the attendees.

Next is going to be coverage of the afternoon sessions. Stay Tuned.

For those of you who don’t know Kris, he is a fashion and editorial photographer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and founder of photography studio Static Photography.

He is an author, having co-written BitTorrent for Dummies with Susannah Gardner, and a technologist. He was also the president of Bryght (a Drupal development company) and founder of early web community spark-online.com. Now he is president of Raincity Studios who acquired bryght some months ago. Raincity studios is the A-Z supplier of web services from planning to development to implementation to hosting.

Krug is the organizer and founder of PhotoCamp, a photography unconference with BarCamp origins, and has organized 5 of them including Northern Voice 2006, BarCamp Shanghai, Barcamp Vancouver, Northern Voice 2007 and Northern Voice 2008.

Krug is a well known contributor to the Flickr photo sharing community website. His photographs have appeared in JPG Magazine, ION Magazine, Business Week, Wired Magazine, and others. He has published interviews with technology personalities in Digital Web Magazine, and he has covered events as diverse as SXSW, the 2006 Winter Olympics, and the Consumer Electronics Show. He has been a regular guest on The Lab with Leo, a talk show devoted to technology and its effects on the G4Tech channel talking about topics like Facebook apps to the growing Chinese market. As a speaker, he has been invited to a number of media and technology events, such as SXSW.

He just got back from Beijing and taking photos at the Olympics. His big piece of advice that was non-technical was to find a theme of your pictures (faces, reflections) to find a style that people will recognize your work. Plus, and most of all, take photos every day if you want to get good.

Here is a great summary of his tips for everyone with any kind of camera:

Tips:
1. Light in someone’s eyes (that little twinkle in person’s eye)
2. Evaluate the light
- Sun? Shade? Incandescent. Halogen?
- Look around – highlights, shadows, spotlights
- Put your subject in good light

- Work with Whatcha Got
3. Shoot in Low Light/Available Light
- Sometimes don’t use flash
- Increase your ISO (ASA)
- Increase your aperture (F-stop) make it lower 1.2, 1.4, 2.8
- Decrease your shutter speed
- Focus manually if autofocus fails you
- Tinker with manual setting/metering
- Brace on things (tripod, gear bag)
4. Reflections are Yummy!
- Puddles
- Glass
- etc.
5. Pick a theme
- ex: Gnomedex Wall of Love
- Poloroids
- Portraits
- Black & White/Sepia/Over-exposed
- Laptop Stickers/Geeks & Gear
- Funny Faces
6. Learn your camera
- Isolate the variables – depth of field, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, etc.
- Tinker, tweek, shoot lots, share your photos, get feedback, change it up
- Share your gear – find someone you can test out lenses, flashes, etc. with
- SET THE WHITE BALANCE!!!

To check out his work, head on over to his Flickr site and start drooling.