Oxford Geek Night 8 review
The eighth Oxford Geek Night on 27 August 2008 had a musical theme, with keynote talks from music-industry geeks and even a solo guitarist alongside the more typical mix of local volunteer "microslot" talks.
Rhodri Marsden from the Independent and Scritti Politti spoke about how musicians might as well make content available for free these days, while Ian Hogarth of Songkick.com explained how the industry might more easily popularize and monetize gigs using that very content.
We then departed from our usual schedule by having a question & answer session, at the end of which we were all agreed there was certainly money somewhere in the industry, but nobody was quite sure where.
After a quick break four plucky local volunteers talked about all manner of subjects, with Rachel Andrew discussing the different ways of processing payments for your company's online sales and the main security requirements, and James Turnbull whetting our appetites for the soon-to-be-released version 1.0 of Django.
We ended the night with a book raffle, courtesy of APress, and everyone gradually dispersed into the August evening, still chatting away.
The next Geek Night - OGN9 - is on Wednesday 22 October, and we'd love it if a good few Oxfordshire geeks volunteered for five-minute microslots. Whatever vaguely geeky matter you've got to get off your chest—useability, design, hardware hacking or coding—give it a whirl and tell it to a friendly, appreciative audience:
The aforementioned solo guitarist is, of course, Ben Walker, who has recently joined the Torchbox team and whose "You're No One If You're Not On Twitter" is today featured on the YouTube homepage with more than 100,000 views.
Oxford Geek Nights are free events, sponsored by Torchbox and Google.
