Riding now on the train to Dublin, watching the Irish countryside with its very green fields and patchwork stone walls, I’m finally rested enough to properly reflect on my week in Ireland and the crazy month before.





For a small Pennsylvania company to fly to Ireland, there best be a good reason for it. Our primary goal was to create PhotoBingo, then play a game at FOAF Galway, giving nifty shirts to all involved. Beyond this, our goal was useful conversation: Q&A on other efforts, breakout session brainstorming, table chat on shared topics, and feedback on our own products. Though things didn’t quite go as planned, I’m glad for it, as the results were better.

I’m very impressed with how well our team worked together these last few weeks. Connecting Tidepool with Storymill with PhotoBingo, then all of these with w3photo and friends, was a real integration headache. (Steve actually got an ocular migraine from working too hard!) From the start, the real point of PhotoBingo was to do something fun with a wide mix of photos, aggregating from several sources, pooling a jumble of metadata to power a silly game that shows annotation in action.

We started down this path last May in New York, attempting valiantly at the last minute to connect Tidepool with the w3photo effort. As always, it was “the longest yard” that held us back. All the pieces assembled, but not matching up as easily as hoped. To that point, we’d spent most of our time on Tidepool, and not our companion product, Storymill. Marrying the two has been quite a task, both in May and this last month.

And that’s the real benefit to this summer sprint we’ve been on: connecting the two. With different teams on different paths, the two worlds finally converged on the way to Galway. While at the workshop, we had some great semweb talks and made some new friends, such as Joseph Smarr from Plaxo. As for how the demo went, I’ll let pictures tell the tale...

Here's the room we were in (I'm on the panel, third in from the right):





Here, Jon Rabone and I are frantically fixing last minute bugs:





Here I am showing PhotoBingo to the group:





And here is the result:





As someone said, we were "foafdotted." As another said, "Murphy's law gets doubled in Ireland." For those curious, we were inches away. The bingo calls were actually getting made, we just couldn't see them due to a missing JSP taglib definition. Hence why it was so easy to win ... all the tags had been called, we just didn't know it :)

Translated: one line of code would have fixed it.

As for the "foafdotted" thing ... that's another kettle of resources. We'll restart the game after we've kicked the tires a bit.