Man, I hate hearing about an awesome conference just after the thing’s wrapped up. So it is this week with PaperCamp, which went down in London on January 17th. Here’s the description of the event from its own webpage:

What is PaperCamp?
A get-together for a day to talk about, fiddle with, make and explore what’s possible with paper based on a blog post
(http://magicalnihilism.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/papercamp/) where a lot of people seemed enthusiastic about the idea. PaperCamp is a ‘fringe’ event to BookCamp, in London’s Kings Cross on the 17th January.

What will happen at PaperCamp?
Well, as it’s a ‘___Camp’-type thing, that’s largely up to you… we’ll have a room, and a grid of timeslots for you to fill with talks, activities, discussions of your making. However, to frame that a little, the original thought behind PaperCamp was ‘hacking paper and it’s new possibiities’. We do have one thing organised – a ‘keynote’ if you like from Aaron Straup Cope from a little site called Flickr and more importantly, http://www.aaronland.info/papernet/.

Whether that’s looking at material possibilities of paper itself, connecting paper to the internet and vice-versa with things like 2d-barcodes, RFIDs or exotic things like printing with conductive inks… it’s about the fact that paper hasn’t gone away in the digital age – it’s become more useful, more abundant and in some cases gone and got itself bionic superpowers…

As I say – it’s up to you what you want to make of it, please bring to the event half-formed thoughts, ideas, projects you’ve done or anything you would like get others exposed to, or even hacking on. These can take the form of straight-forward talks, or, things you want other people’s brains and hands to help with… please bring them… along with Paper, pens, RFIDs, soldering irons, Heidelberg Lithos or any other equipment or materials you will need. We will just provide chairs, tables and a projector…

Even just reading that description, my mind is officially blown – and that’s nothing compared to reading Jeremy Keith’s liveblogging of the event.