Less than a week to Hack Day!

With only a few days to go now until Hack Day and my free time evaporating like lead on the surface of the sun, I thought I should duck back online briefly and give you guys an update on what we’re up to.

Firstly, we’ve got a Hack Day backnetwork set up and running. A backnetwork is a site where people who are coming to the event get to generate their own impromptu social network, meet each other beforehand, chat and find out information about the event. It’s also a hub for aggregating content around the event, including blog posts and flickr images.

If you’re coming to Hack Day, then you should be on the backnetwork. If you don’t think you’ve received an invitation then check your spam filters today and if you still can’t find anything, then IM me on plasticbagUK (AIM) or tom.coates (Y! messenger) and I’ll resend your invitation out to you. Please remember though, I probably won’t be free enough to chat. Please don’t think I’m rude if I run off screaming after a few minutes. This whole thing is quite time consuming.

Next up, the band! On Sunday night we’ve got an exclusive performance by next big thing The Rumble Strips. They’ve been described as one of the bands to watch for 2007 by the BBC and are currently touring the country as one of NME’s hottest bands of the moment.

If (like me) you’re too old and unhip to know the band particularly well, then you should probably start off by visiting their MySpace page, their last.fm page and maybe buying a couple of their bouncier singles at 7digital.com or on iTunes. With any luck you should be able to tell your friends that you were there when it all started.

On the other hand, maybe your friends should be there too! If you’re coming to the Hack Day, we’ve got a bonus for you. You can invite up to three of your friends to come and see the band with you! From 7pm on Sunday those friends will be able to join you inside the venue at Alexandra Palace and experience the band with you live in concert. I’m quite happy about that. To get them to come, you’ll need to join the Backnetwork. There’s a part of the site called ‘Party Invites’ and that’s where you put the names of your friends!

Now, to the other communities that you should be joining or keeping up with. Alongside the Backnetwork we’ve set up a Flickr group. There’s already an active Facebook group up and running. Obviously the Unofficial wiki still ticks along nicely. And there are presences on Jumpcut and Upcoming. I think we’re trying to get something cool going with Instructables too, but I’m not so sure about that one yet.

What else do I need to tell you? The tags we’re using for the day mostly will be hackdaylondon. If you want to tags stuff on Flickr using machine tags then the correct term is upcoming:event=173371. That’ll do for now.