At last, I have overcome my network problems and can connect to the internet again. Well, kind of, at least, still no wireless connection, but I found a ethernet cable lying around, plugged it in, and it works. So far, the sessions have been interesting, but most of the time I struggled with the network after already having arrived late (the warmup party yesterday was nice, but I overslept because of it *g*). This doesn't sound like a good start, but I met a lot of nice people who made me foget my troubles 
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Right now, it's getting noisy in here, but I will try to jot down some of my thoughts about the BarCamp so far. First session was about what social networks and communities can learn from game design. Quite an intersting approach to the topic, has given me a lot to think about. The second session was about blogs and metadata, yet in a different way from what I expected (I missed the session presentations this morning). Patrick concentrated on how to mark up blog posts with metadata so that they can easily be cited by reserachers. The Zotero Firefox extension helps with this. Some very interesting discussion ensued, touching on Microformats, RSS, RDFa, and similar techniques. I might even implement OCoins in Serendipity some day soon ;O)
Oh, and if someone wants to know: I'm planning to hold my Serendipity session tomorrow. I definitely need reliable network access for this, as it will include a live demo of a fresh S9y installation. Alright peeps, gotta change rooms now. Later.
NoseRub is a project started by Dirk Olbertz of Blogscout fame. The idea of NoseRub is that it works as a protocol to aggregate data of decentralized social networks. If you want to check it out, the code of a sample application in its early stages is hosted at Google Code. The goal of NoseRub is that everyone can manage and/or host his/her own social network. By separating the profile, the network, and the data, everything will become portable to a great extent. You stay in control of your data, and if any of your friends update their data, these changes will automagically be incorporated into your app.
NoseRub was shown in public for the first time at BarCamp Cologne 2 (one of the most eagerly awaited sessions), where we could see the sample app on two local webservers. It was built around the CakePHP framework, so the structure of the code is very clearly laid out. Of course, because of its early status, many questions arose at the BarCamp session which need to be clarified and resolved (security concerns, technical specifiations). But all in all, the presentation left most of the participants in awe and/or enthusiasm. And so, like many others might already have done or will do within the next few days, I downloaded and installed NoseRub on my local server. What can I say, it works great even in its raw state. My guess is, that developers will improve it very quickly, add new services along the way, so that by the end of the year we should have a great application that helps us take over control over our social networks. Dirk published a quick tour of the sample app, check it out. I will certainly post more about NoseRub, so stay tuned.