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Teresa Valdez Klein is simply amazing for what she did with subverting advertising to tell people actually they are great and don’t need to conform to be great. In this Seattle ignite talk, she outlines her story and what drove her to do it. This is a must watch…
All of us have been conditioned from birth by our families, our friends, and marketers to want (or not want) certain things. And while I’m a big fan of Facebook, I have this theory that it reinforces social conditioning in some pretty insidious ways.
In this talk, I’ll explain how I used Facebook’s self-serve advertising platform to combat the social pressure cooker.
Inspirational… and bloody marvellous…!
Shes so right, being previously on the path to the dream family setup. Its hard for people to understand why you wouldn’t want what they have. Each person puts a tiny piece of social pressure on you, without even knowing it. But what really hurts is the constant hammering that your not this, your not that which advertising can deliver with sometimes devastating effects.
It take a very strong person to reject all this… But even better is when you can inspire others that actually they are great and will become amazing in there own right.
This is also why I love iamido.info…
On my way back from Makerfaire 2010 and thankfully I can decompress on the train back. The event was a hit with plenty more makers that last time. Surprisingly the event took place inside the science centre instead of millennium square which the science centre circles and was the venue of the last one. One of the downsides of the move to the science centre is the cost which was about 4 pounds per person. There was the question would
Some very cool things I saw….
Lasers! Some of the guys from the spraycan project had built a multi-colour laser out of a standard green laser, a red dvd laser and blu-r laser. Using special mounting mirrors between them all, You can see the whole lot on this forum specially setup for laser makers. Some of the others are equally impressive and dotted all over the forum. Will I make my own laser? who knows maybe some day in the future. Maybe I’ll start by strip down my toy red laser and add a couple other Red DVD lasers to a baseplate and then try adding a controller. Hummmm one for a rainy day me thinks.
Sonodrome create bespoke audio hardware and software which fit into small pocket size tins. What I like about them is the size and ability to add it to my pacemaker output. So I could live mix on my pacemaker and plug into one of these pocket size tins for some crazy filtering. Heck I can even chain them for some real fun. Talking to the guys behind Sonodrome its possible to do some stuff with wiimotes as a controller, so look out for some hacking in that area by me soon.
Sugru is interesting shame the guys can’t seem to make enough to make it into the shops.
Lastly Steampunk magazine. I’ve never really engaged with steampunk culture or anything like that. I’m more a futuristic kind of a guy in these departments, hi-tech trainers, hi-tech fabrics all dark colours. Anyway it was interesting to think about and the woman’s dresses and corsets are well something else!
Of course there was tons and tons of other things at Makerfaire but theres really caught my attention. The whole event was amazing and I look forward to 2011.
Quick heads up on where to get really iindepth information on the O'reilly Web 2.0 Summit which just finished recently. Richard MacManus from the Read/Write Web has tons of posts which seem to cover pretty much everything. His wrap up post links to everything he's written in notes.
I also have to point to Ben Metcalfe's post about his ignoyance about the people attending the web 2.0 summit. Richard also picks up on this.
Some folks, like Ben Metcalfe, think the conference has lost its edge. Maybe it has, but the Web 2.0 Summit is a different beast now than it was last year – and that's a sign of the times.
Tim O'Reilly is on the money, there's trouble in Apple land. Jason Kottke and Cory Doctorow have made the switch to the Linux flavor Ubuntu for there operating system. This follows Mark Pilgrim and there seems to be more leading lights switching too.
Sarah really hates it when I say about switching to Linux, because she knows how outraged I get about some of the most simple things. But this really makes me want to switch even quicker. I've almost pledged never to run Windows Vista on my desktop or laptop machine. I'm not going to switch to OSX because I simply love the PC architecture and freedom it brings (Although I was tempted with the dodgy copies of running OSX on a AMD PC). So I'm going to move to Linux again. This time, I'm going to take it seriously and give it time. I already had OpenSuse 10.1 with XGL running on a spare machine. But now I'm talking about slowly switching everything including my Laptop.
I have already got a small list of some problems I'll have, such as my mobile phone which runnings on Windows Mobile 2005. My PIM syncing using Plaxo, and Hardware support such as my new Camcorder and weird motherboard. But with a year to get it all going, I'm sure to come up with the answers or another way to the same thing.
Ubuntu looks the way to go, specially if I can get xgl running too.
Quoted from a internal email sent to quite a few people in the BBC World Service after Tim's invite to the BBC and his interview on Go Digital
Last week we delivered an extra edition of Go Digital through it's podcast stream, and the email response it's generated has been huge! In our last programme we featured an interview with CEO of O'Reilly Publishing and Open Source guru Tim O'Reilly and we decided to put out a tidied up 'full length' interview (17 mins) in addition to the main programme.
The response has been overwhelming, and over the weekend the programme has received around 10 times it's normal weekly email bag, without exception every response in favour of the extra content.
This demonstrates one of the real benefits of the podcast medium, that instead of simply regurgitating radio programmes for Podcast, being able to deliver something different that adds value to our regular broadcasts is something I think our audience will really appreciate.
Well this pretty amazing would you not say? I knew Tim Oreilly was a great speaker but 10x the usual response asking for the longer version or saying how great the interview was. This strikes me as a really compeling reason why podcasts work. There simply not bound to the time limits of radio and they can be super niche or serve the longtail. Actually a few of the emails outlines this perfectly.
Cameron Walker wrote,
Instead of setting the shows up to a set time, like in what your used to on Radio and TV. Podcasts can be from half an hour to an hour to 1.5hrs
Jean-Pierre Morissette from Montreal wrote,
Thank you so much for this idea. The content of this interview was so good that it was a real gift to be able to listen to it all. I call these significant moments.I opens new perspectives, new ways of looking at the world around us to listen to comments like these.
Comment from John Barton in the UK,
Just listened to the exteneded session with Tim O'Reilly.Great use of the technology. The ability to allow the speaker to extend beyond the normal programme time boundary and really get into his topic was well worth the effort. As I use a podcast agregator I got the feed automatically and was able to enjoy this bonus session without any additional work on my part. Looking forward to other extended sessions
Jim Puls from Chicago wrote
Well, I very much enjoyed your interview with Tim OReilly. I found myself stopping the podcast from time to time and backing it up to take some notes. A few months ago I didnt know what a podcast was, and now I find it enriches my life greatly. Its Saturday afternoon in Chicago, and Ive done my chores, and its time to listen to some radio … what I want when I want it. Just before Go Digital I listened to Ockhams Razor from Australia
and added in a email to myself.
As I noted in my email, you and your colleagues are carrying on in the long tradition of informing us all, and deserve our thanks for doing that.
Edwin Boatswain sums the podcast up nicely with,
Thanks for the extra content. It was a nice surpise when this turned up in the feed. I think the edited version of the interview captured his thoughts well, but it was good to hear the whole piece.
NerdTV from PBS do a simlar thing already. They produce 3 different cuts of the same interview. I download the entire show and listen to it while working but now and then glance over at the video running on my laptop. But I have never downloaded the nerdy or juicy parts cuts, i guess its not a big deal when I can simply jump around with the slider myself. Obviously the entire show isnt for everyone and a juicy cut would make a lot more sense if your only generally interested. I wonder how many people listen/watch each version?
Like one of the emails said,
While it's understandable that you have to edit down a given interview to fit into a time slot, it seems like a real shame to have whatever was left on the (virtual) cutting room floor to disappear forever. Personally, I'd very much like to see such material made available in the future (where it's deemed to be of sufficient interest/quality, of course).
