Tag Camp Day Two Notes and Podcast
The second and final day of Tag Camp was certainly interesting. Like the first day, there were three formal channels of presentations, as well as a wide variety of informal discussions taking place in the main area. — The highlights of my day were …
Context & Ripple Effects
Tag Camp sat squarely in the mid-2000s unconference wave popularized by events like BloggerCon — participant-driven gatherings with loose tracks and hallway conversations doing much of the work, as the earlier BloggerCon-style coverage captured. It also landed at the peak of interest in tagging as a layer over publishing and search, days after Fred Wilson's piece on posting, subscribing, tagging and search.
First-order effects
- Attendees get day-two takeaways codified into public notes plus a podcast, extending the event's reach well beyond the room and letting non-attendees follow the tagging discussions.
- The three-track-plus-hallway format forces organizers and participants to self-select conversations rather than wait for a programmed agenda — the defining mechanic of this event style.
Second-order effects
- The template spreads fast: within a week the same community convenes again in Seattle, with notes from Mind Camp and enthusiastic attendee writeups confirming the camp format is replicable city-to-city.
- Publishing notes and a podcast per event becomes an expected output, turning small gatherings into distributed media artifacts that build momentum for the next one.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the unconference-plus-participant-media model becomes standard infrastructure for tech communities — events designed to be documented, not just attended.
- Tagging's prominence at gatherings like this foreshadows its absorption into mainstream platforms' search and organization layers, though which specific implementations win remains genuinely uncertain.
The trend: This is an early data point in the shift toward participatory, self-documented tech gatherings whose outputs — notes, podcasts, tags — become as consequential as the events themselves.