Steve Jenson's blog

The fruits of FOO

The fruits of FOO

There's some bitterness around the blogosphere fueled by people who didn't get invited to FOO Camp this year. There's even an alternate camp called Bar Camp formed by people upset about either not getting invited back or who weren't invited in the first place (well duh, autocratic structures breed resentment).

That aside, I took a few minutes to dig around the blog posts of past FOO attendees and noticed a theme: Lots of excitement, lots of interesting discussion, and lots of fun but I was left with one question:

Where are the fruits of FOO? None of the ideas I've heard about over the past 2 FOO Camps seemed to make it into any products, demos, specs, or code that I've seen. They seemed to fall into a black hole.

Are there worthwhile ideas coming out of FOO Camp? Definitely. For example: Greg Stein's idea to use the Vary header to make a backwards-compatible way of dramatically reducing the cost of fetching site feeds for clients smart enough to implement it.

So how can the participants of FOO Camp make sure their delightfully cross-pollinated ideas escape this fate? They should figure that out at this year's FOO Camp.

# — 20 August, 2005