It’s that time of year again, when various tech, design and entrepreneurial professionals meet up for a weekend of knowledge sharing. The rules are simple – anyone can come (it’s free), and everyone participates in some way (giving a presentation or demo, helping someone else, getting involved in a code sprint, etc.) It’s a great opportunity to meet a ton of brilliant people and learn something. And drink a lot of beer.

Check out a video from last year’s BarCamp, and get involved here.

We’re heavy in another development phase of our social networking tool, which means lots of iterating through screens and lots of back and forth with the team. Since I’m in Chicago and everyone else is in New York, we needed an easy way to share screens. Historically we’ve used between 5-10 comps per screen (showing each state) and a corresponding epic length email that I have to then explain again in its entirety. We could have used Webex or something similar, but the clunkiness of it made it more trouble than it was worth.

And then came acrobat.com and it’s beautiful ConnectNow tool. It’s painless to share my screen with anyone – all I need is a free acrobat.com account. My audience just needs to point to my custom URL in their browser – nothing to sign up for, nothing to install (other than Flash 9) – it’s fast, has minimal lag and is simple enough for anyone to use. It even comes with a conference number for private, instantaneous conference calls (also free.)

We’ve been using it for about three weeks now with increased regularity (four such meetings took place yesterday.) When it takes literally 15 seconds to set up a meeting and get everyone in the room, the inertia of collaborating more closely starts to evaporate.

Very strongly recommended for anyone who works with distributed teams. I’m amazed they aren’t marketing the hell out of this thing – it absolutely blows WebEx and friends out of the water.

It’s crazy – my first experience with it was actually a couple of days before we had met up in Colorado for lunch a while back. Within a day of putting his first artists up I received an invite from someone completely unrelated to Backstage or Grant – the system did exactly what it advertised. Imagine my surprise when I discovered he was behind it.

Grant understands the concepts of social proof and permission as an asset better than most. More importantly, he’s always operated with a unique mix of purpose, integrity and insane attention to detail, which I’m sure have made the artists he’s working with extremely happy.

It’s really cool to see old friends’ hard work starting to pay off. Congratulations man…you deserve it.

(note: there’s an XBox in the household now for those of you who like that sort of thing…)

After weeks of delays, I’ve finally managed to cobble together the beginnings of my first WordPress theme. I’m calling it “Grace“, which is fairly ironic given the state of the files right now. You can read about it, download it, kick the tires, etc. at the following URL:

http://grace.sean-johnson.com

As you use it, I ask for your patience as I continue to tweak things, fix bugs, and do other necessary housekeeping on the theme. I fully expect it to break and cause problems, and I’m certain there are conventions I’ve violated and code that is missing or broken. Let’s call this a “beta”. If you see things that need to be fixed or have suggestions for improvement, please let me know via email or the theme’s blog. I’ll try to respond as quickly as I can.

I appreciate everyone’s patience and enthusiasm, and I hope the final product doesn’t ruin that for all of you. Enjoy!

The best part? The site lets people vote on the sites based on design, code, and semantics. The invalid sites did just almost exactly as well (2.00 average score for non-validating vs. 2.23 for validating) and the top two vote-getters don’t validate.

Chris, your cause is far from over. Evangelize away (and If I’m not POSH, please let me know how to improve.)