I have been to my first BarCamp and my first DemoCamp, all in one week.
Last weekend Chris and I drove to Ottawa for BarCampOttawa and I really enjoyed it. It was a great experience and I highly recommend it to all geeks. The Unconference experience was so much better than your typical sit-and-listen format.
Sessions I went to:

Jason Furlong-Aspect Oriented Programming

Aspects are a really interesting way of approaching typical code problems. Rather than using OO design patterns, you can use an aspect which modifies the generated code to intercepts calls. E.g. in Java it would modify the .class files. I see advantages of using for security and logging, but I am not sure if I would use aspects for other functionality. One concern I have is that if you write an aspect for your code and some newbie programmer has to maintain it, they might not be able to grasp the concepts of Aspects.

User Experience on the Enterprise

Interesting discussion in the kitchen on how to approach enterprise boardrooms with ideas gained from user experience. Some things we discussed:

It is important to get out of your comfort zone and try new areas/industries/technologies

build user feedback into the design phase

talk to business people in their own language

understand what business people's needs are

execs - don't want to hear about the problems, they want to hear about opportunities & solutions

gotta find a champion within a company

Helen Maskery - Usability for Web 2.0

The web2.0 part of this presentation was mostly review for me. But I picked up a few good points.

Same usability issues as before - "who are the users", "what are their goals", "what is the context for use", "what expectations and experience is the user bringing to the interaction"

We have finally gotten most users used to filling in forms and now we are changing that model

It is important to balance between standards and coolness factor (depends how business critical the application is)

user's don't know technology or user design principles

don't want to frustrate your users

35% of users actually navigate the site, the rest use searches or land in the middle of the site (I am surprised it is that high actually, I always jump to the search box)

need to bring the information to the users (tagging, etc....)

need to make customers aware of the result of an action (e.g. if I click this button does that mean I am finished, or do I get a preview)

Visual Search Demo

This is some very cool software from Idée Incthat can help companies with lots of images (i.e. photo stock companies) find images based on: colours, similar images, and/or similar layout.

Ajax

This session was a bit too entry-level for me, so I moved on and had a great discussion in the hallway with a bunch of people.

Patrick Cormier - Government 2.0 Think Tank: Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies

Patrick is working on a really interesting gov2.0 initiative to try to get web2.0 concepts into government. And he means any government, any level, any country. They are starting with the issue of trying to reduce the amount of email, by allowing civil servants to subscribe to channels. They eventually want to focus on the external side of web2.0, but wanted to pick a battle they could win first. They face some unique challenges:

constraints due to compliance to laws

blogs must be bilingual if you are interested in volunteering, check them out.

Panel/Discussion: 'What does Web2.0 mean to you?' moderated by Chris Nolan.ca

This was a great panel with around 50 people on the panel talking about what web2.0 means to them. I think it was the best discussion of the day and really showed how different people focus on different concepts within web2.0. There was some disagreement, but it was all in good spirits. I was busy taking notes.