Here's my recap of Mashupcamp. My definition of a mashup hasn't really changed since the camp has ended (for some reason I thought that it would). I would define a mashup as a webpage consuming non- native webservices (sprinkle liberally with googlemaps) which may be screenscraped or proxied.
One notable mashup that was missing was greasemonkey! I think that is the epitomy of mashups, yet it wasn't mentioned much at all.
This was an "unconference", so not much was organized beforehand with respect to the sessions. The self organizing aspect of the conference went pretty smoothly. The idea was to get together people who were doing mashups, have some people possibly be creating mashups at the same time, and share experiences. At the end of the camp the best mashups were voted on. Only one of the top 3 used google maps!
Podbop.org won first prize (a Sun Server hand delivered with a Jonathon Swartz appearance, and some quip about mashups finally realizing the 30 year dream of "object reuse"). Adrian Holovarty won 2nd prize (I gave him my vote) with one of the granddaddies of mashups, chicagocrime.org. He won an imac. The 3rd place winner was flyspy, a site that predicts prices for flights that looked pretty nice. All of the top 10 vote winners won a copy of Visual Studio 2005, which was kind of ironic given that most (if not all of them) were LAMP applications.
It's always nice to be around smart energetic people who are doing cool things. You get inspired by what they are doing and inspired by them and their nifty hacks. I'm not so sure I like the "camp" style conference. I've commented on my issues with "camp" previously, but that was more tongue in cheek. The free form structure might be good for foocamp or barcamp that have a wide range of issues to discuss, but the mashupcamp sessions were very limited in scope and they didn't really branch out too much it seemed.
I enjoyed learning about microformats, and Adrian's demo of Chicago Crimes was cool. I also attended a security session, which was similar to other BOFs on security I've been in. The old rehash that there's a lot of insecurity (no real treatment on how to deal with it). One session on "How to make money with open source" really had little to do with open source at all. The firefox session was interesting from a roadmap perspective, and that there were a few microsofties there (who commented that IE 7 isn't really going to add features per se, but focus on being more standards compliant, which is a good thing. They also admitted to developing on firefox because it has better tools that ie!).
As a techie I would have like more hands on sessions like "how to use googlemaps", "how I screen scraped this site" (including code), AJAX showdowns, architectural issues of mashup based sites. The second day had a few hours of "speed geeking". The idea is that everyone who is demoing is given a table and has to demo in 5 minute durations. That went pretty well, but went on a little long. The best part, as is usual for most conferences, was meeting new and interesting people. (Or people that you already knew through the net).