This past weekend in Toronto was barcamp tdot held in this massive open space in Liberty Village. (For those of you not from Toronto — Liberty Village is in an up and coming part of town filled with software shops and both g-rated and adult media offices.

The first talk I went to was about elements of design and was lead by John Green of Nuvvo. Although I have played around with Photoshop for a number of years, I never took the time to understand the fundamentals of on-screen graphics. John discussed things like vector vs. raster graphics and additive vs. subtractive colour theory. I learned quite a bit but not that much of it was applicable to my day-to-day work. If I could wish upon a star, it would be that the next talk focus more on things web developers need help with such as layout and selection of colour palettes.

Next I dropped by the Extreme Programming room and got to work with Mishkin Berteig of AgileAdvice.com. The XP room was set up to mimic a typical software development project with one moderator acting as the customer. Mishkin worked patiently with us to demonstrate how we’d go about putting agile programming practices to use. Unfortunately 45 minutes just wasn’t enough time to get much done. I really enjoyed wrapping my head around the problem and would have definitely got a lot more out of it if I had spent the rest of the afternoon there, but I wanted to check out other topics.

Next I was off to a talk lead by Derek and Ryan of Redflagdeals.com about making money on the Internet in Canada. This was a lively discussion. Here are all the insights in one big list:

• know your audience - and create content relevant to them
• credibility is crucial - develop a relationship with your audience
• interaction (forgot to take notes on this point)
• 80/20 rule applies - 20% of audience are power users that provide 80% of profit - get to know them and treat them like gold
• good content is viral
• Chad from tophost.com encouraged us to look beyond Canada and the US
• Ken from onedegree.ca cautioned us not to target a niche within a niche
• other sites mentioned: postbidwin.com, moola.com, conceptshare.com, zoomer.com and some others…

For the last couple sessions I walked around and did the tour thing. It probably wasn’t the best idea because at times it was difficult to hear what was going on and I really didn’t get a feel for the group.

Regardless, I had an excellent time hanging out with everybody. Thank you to the organizers and all the sponsors. I’m wearing my barcamp tdot t-shirt right now.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcamptdot, torcamp