Last month in Portland, Oregon, approximately 250 people convened on Cubespace, a co-working space, for BarCamp Portland 1. BarCamp, if you aren't familiar, is an unconference - an Open and free event whose content and direction is decided by its participants. It's a great way for people to come together in the spirit of community to share knowledge, talk about technology (generally related to Web apps and Open Source), and generally geek out. Started two years ago in Palo Alto by Andy Smith, Chris Messina, Eris Stassi, Matt Mullenweg, Ryan King and Tantek Çelik (among others), it has grown quickly to an international scale. To date there have been BarCamps in Amsterdam, Austin, Shanghai, Milwaukee, Paris, San Francisco, Chennai, London, and many, many more places.

One of BarCamp Portland's organizers, and artisan of all things community, Dawn Foster, took a moment to answer some questions relating to BarCamp Portland and the BarCamp phenom in general. Read on!

DLS: What inspired you to take up organizing BarCamp Portland?

Dawn Foster: Last year, I was lucky enough to be invited to FooCamp, which is a yearly invite-only O'Reilly event that was the model for BarCamp. Spending the weekend having discussions with some very smart people from across the technology industry was an amazing experience, and I wanted to replicate that experience here in Portland. We have a great tech scene in Portland with so many users group meetings, but very little cross pollination between groups. I wanted to create a monthly meeting that brought a diverse group of techies together for networking and discussions about a variety of technologies. As I was talking to people about this idea, I learned that Raven Zachary was starting to plan BarCamp Portland. The two ideas were so similar that Raven and I decided to merge them into a monthly BarCamp Meetup that we would use to plan the BarCamp Portland event.

Over at the Technorati Weblog, Tantek Çelik has announced two new products, Microformats Search and Pingerati. In case you're not familiar, microformats are small bits of XML that can be used to describe things like events, product reviews, or contacts in a way that's easily readible by both humans and machines. Technorati's microformats search, which is currently in the "technology preview" (i.e. beta) stage, lets you search for microformat-tagged information posted to any of the millions of blogs Technorati indexes. Pingerati is a new site that you can "ping" to get your microformats indexed by Technorati's microformats search, as well as a service for developers that can send microformats to other sites. For example, if you ran a calendar site, Pingerati could forward all of the microformatted events that it receives to your site, kind of like a Ping-o-Matic for microformats.