Since I am at our annual Faith Camp this week and spending copious amounts of time in a sheep shed with only a slow Internet connection over my mobile phone, I am spending very little time online this week. Hey, what do you expect? This isn’t RailsConf — there isn’t a MacBook or an Ubuntu T-shirt in sight…
I have found in recent months that spam comments are sneaking past my arsenal of defences at a rate of about three or four a week, so I have set my blog to moderate comments until I get back. So if you leave a comment and it does not appear immediately, please bear with me. Anything legitimate should be dealt with by the start of next week.
This is the twenty-fourth Faith Camp and my twenty-second.
Normally I stay in a tent on the showground, but this year I’m in the hotel — the Sleep Inn at the Peterborough service station on the A1.
It does have some advantages. I get a good night’s sleep, I don’t have to share the showers with five thousand other people, and there’s a wi-fi access point, so I can blog. It also means that I don’t have to put up with being out in a tent if there’s a thunderstorm at night, which usually happens at least once during the week nearly every year.
However, when all’s said and done, I think I prefer my tent.
The big problem is that the hotel is pretty isolated from the camp life on the showground. The thing that I love about Faith Camp is that it’s a time when we meet up with old friends, make new friends, and generally have a good time all together. A mile from the showground on the other side of the motorway, it’s a bit awkward. Besides, sleeping on hard ground (or an inflatable camp bed), fitting your shower time round everybody else, night-time thunderstorms, and being well and truly off-line is half the fun of it.
A new feature of Faith Camp this year is a daily video report from around the showground, which is shown on the screens at some point in the main meeting every evening. Pastor Colin introduced them last night, saying “Apparently, the in word is ‘blog’. So here is our first video blog.”
It’s a great idea, though perhaps a slight misunderstanding of the word “blog” — which actually means an online diary that allows readers to post comments. A bit like my own website, for example. Purists such as Robert Scoble would add the requirement for RSS feeds, trackbacks and pinging blog search engines such as Technorati, though in practice, not all blogs do this. Then again, I guess we could stretch the definition a bit just for Faith Camp. There aren’t likely to be that many people going online on the East of England Showground during the week, after all.
Update: They’ve put the videos online. Lovely. I think that qualifies as a blog now.
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Posted at 13:03 on 30 July 2007.
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