@fnid ... anyone who's been to burning man more than a few times knows this idea of isolation and 'noone watching' are an illusion, and gave them up a long time ago. The appeal of burning man is Radical Self Expression, for some that's tech driven for others its not, chose your own way.

Just FYI, there's a "reply" link below each comment to avoid this @-symbol pseudo-threading.

It appears that not every comment may have the reply link for some reason.

I believe that comments at deeper levels (more than 5-6 levels) have the reply link not show up for a certain amount of time, which is a relatively recent change. Even for those, I've found that if you click on the "link" link for that comment, you can usually find the reply link on the resulting page, if that makes sense.

Link to API docs: http://earth.burningman.com/api/docs

This is cool for the technology, but part of the appeal of burning man was its isolation. You were there and nowhere else. You were concentrating on your surroundings and immersing yourself in the art and the culture and the environment.

Of course another part of the appeal was that no one was watching. With these technologies, that's no longer the case. The isolation is gone. The appeal is waning.

I think it probably doesn't make sense to go to an art festival with 50k people that is covered by most major news outlets if you're looking for isolation, but I do understand your viewpoint. There is something special about being immersed with the community and artwork, but in my opinion, earth.burningman.com makes that better, not worse.

The BM-API is designed to add to the art, not take away from it. It's all about remixing and reusing to create something new and unique. How about that for radical self expression?

I have mixed feelings but I still contributed a couple of apps :P