Category: social-hardware

Keeping very busy

So after Edinburgh (which I still need to blog at some point soon) 2 weeks ago and this weekends BBQ party for my new flatmate we're into a new busy work week. Things are crazy because my travel across London is futher hampered by the 3 day tube strike. Now some of you may say, but Ian your on a scooter. Well trust me I tried to get through the Blackwall tunnell today at 10am and it was packed. Every street I turned down was full of cars, so in the end I took a different route through old street and clerkenwell because angel was so hell-ish. it took 25mins just to get from Kings Cross to the A40 fly over because of the amount of traffic. And what is it with car drivers who block the way so not even cyclist get through the narrow gaps? Does it make them feel better or what? Sometimes I feel like raising my legs up and kicking off their side mirrors, or rolling up next to them and shouting get off your mobile phone!

Anyway, tomorrow I'm off to York for a conference titled Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 in which I'm talking at on Thursday afternoon. In the usual way, I'm tweaking slides to get the most impact for the different audience it will be.

Then on Friday I'm at D.Construct as one of the official sponsors of the conference, so make sure you come by and say hi at the backstage stand. Although I expect most of the time it will be used as a meeting point for interviews during the day. At night there is the d.construct party which is sponsored and run by BBC Backstage and Yahoo! We worked hard to get such a good venue and hopefully enough food to feed the very hungry conference going crowd. There will be free drinks via Yahoo of course. Its going to be a good night and a excellent end to the long day at d.construct, but for those who want to make it extra long the club will open till about 2:30am, so don't rush off back to London if you can help it.

I expect a lot of people to stay around because of course on the weekend is BarCampBrighton. I'm really excited because I'm hoping to chill out and go to sessions and not get involved in the arrangement at all. They also seem to have got it to a decent size of about 80 people and done the overnight. I'm getting a little tired of barcamp's which do one day or don't have sleep overs. I think its essential to the experience and yes I know how hard it can be to do sleepovers. But the thing is you just end up with a un-conferene which is cool but you miss the bonding part. Anyway, thankfully Brighton is a whole weekend, complete with sleepover.

After that weekend I'm going to need to take some time off to chill out, but otherwise I'm off again near the end of the month. This time I'm off to Boston for TTI Vanguard Wealth of Networks conference, thanks to work. No I won't be talking except to ask questions and maybe offer a slightly different view on things which come up. Have you seen the line up? Wow, this is type of thing I would pay for on IT Conversations. Not only is this a conference but they have lunches and dinners together so you get a full day of excellent mind filling conversation.

For the rest of the year, I got to take a couple of holidays one somewhere sunny (Stowe Boyd, suggested Portugal in October), although I may end up going to South of France. I've commited to going to Berlin in November for Web 2.0 open europe which looks good. I'm also helping out where possible with that event, Boagworld 100 and I expect we will run another Backstage Christmas Party (details are secret right now). The last thing to add is that I'm still trying for BarCampLondon3 and who knows what might happen…

I keep meaning to screenshot my dopplr map or using their new api apply a map to my blog. I did however make the brave move of making my calendar publicly available via Plaxo. Oh one last thing, did I say I won a competition recently?

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Booktour.com and geekdinners

Book Tour. Where authors and audiences meet

I was listening to Technation on ITconverations today and Moira Gunn was talking to the guys behind booktour.com. It sounds fantastic, and really useful for getting guest for future geekdinners. But what suprised me was the fact Chris Anderson was behind it too. Hummm, I wonder if his experience of selling the Long Tail around the world might have convinced him that this would be a good idea? Also I wonder if last year when we had that geekdinner for him (within 7 days of him saying yes by the way) could still be good memory for him? That night we had about 140 people turn up and Chris was really looking forward to chilling out with Geeks after a quite aggressive book tour. He stayed pretty much till the end and signed books with a huge smile on his face.

Who knows maybe one day we will get the likes of Steven Levitt, Malcolm Gladwell, Stowe Boyd and Joi ito

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Backstage in Edinburgh for TV Un-festival, 25th August

Post it notes heaven

Following on from Hackday we've been planning something a little different at Backstage. This time we're getting involved in the Edinburgh TV festival and putting together a special event right out of the BarCamp book.

This year the MGEITF (Media Guardian International TV Festival) has spawned its own fringe event, the TV Un-Festival. This day-long event which takes place on Saturday 25 August will centre around the clash of the well established TV world and the constantly accelerating Internet world using the unusual un-conference format, where the cost of entry is participation.

The highlights from the TV Un-Festival will be presented at this special event, giving everyone a chance to speculate on the future of TV, online entertainment and cross platform narratives.

This year the TV Un-Festivial hosted by Backstage.bbc.co.uk and guided along by the fabulous Suw Charman, aims to explorer the clash with in a series of free formed sessions similar to BarCamp known as unconference style. Everyone will be able to participate by using one of the free 30 minute slots which will be available.

So between the lines, this event will take the essence of barcamp and un-conferences and put it in area which is usually about formal sessions and structure, the Edinburgh TV Festival. We're not using the same venue because that would be far too frantic. But we're not far from the other venue and people who come to the un-festival will have access to the festival on Saturday night and Sunday all day for free. Hows that for a great deal? The ticket for this years festival is over 400 pounds but the TV festival recognise they need more diversity in their audience and have put their money where their mouth's have been. This also easily covers the price of going to Edinburgh and checking into a hotel, which I know if bloody hard at this very moment. I also wish I'd told people a lot earlier but we need to get the correct sign off from everyone involved

So who will be there? is what I keep being asked. Well we have a list of names on the site but generally we have a selection of established names like the BBC, BT, etc. Then we have some more internet based startups like Blip.TV, Joost, etc. I then invited a load of dark net people like Ian Clarke who wrote Freenet and is currently working on Thoof. On a slight tangent we have the Hon brothers who work for Mind Candy and built Perplexcity. My thinking is that Cross platform narrative runs right through this un-festival and that's why I'm interested in getting the ARG people and Video game people also in the same room with more traditional online video people. Last but not least I'm really keen to get Videobloggers and TV hackers together in the same space too but this looks to difficult due to the total lack of cross over between each area. So anyway you can see its going to be a very diverse event.

If your interested and I really think you should be, Signup now and we'll see you in Edinburgh.

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Plaxo 3.0 beta. I actually quite like it

Ok so I'm not going to do some complete review of Plaxo 3.0 beta, but I'm seeing some interesting new features being added to the next version of Plaxo.

The first major change is Open ID support. Now to be fair this adds to the already AOL login support on top of standard Plaxo login. So now there's 3 different ways to log into plaxo. Unfortually its not that simple because the Plaxo clients seem to only support the previous types of logins. But then again, how would you do Open ID in a desktop application? On the plus side you can attach your Open ID(s) (yes multiple open ids) to an existing plaxo account or start a new one in the same way.

There's this new feature called Pulse which is like a life stream from all your contacts. How it seems to work is Plaxo looks through all your contacts and finds all the blogs, flickr feeds and amazon wish lists attached to that contact then display them in your pulse section. This is very much like the activities part of facebook and like that there is no rss feed of the aggregate results which is a real shame.

The last major change is Calendaring sharing. Which for me does away with the major advantage of upgrading to Outlook 2007. Instead of subscribing on the client you can use Plaxo's inbuild ical client to subscribe to ical feeds and other types of feeds. This actually makes mores sense that telling your laptop to update that feed every hour. My only problem is it won't subscribe to my friends ical from upcoming, which is a pain. You can also make your own calendar sharable as a ical feed (either full or just free/busy time can be used). So in actual fact this would have solved me and Sarah's calendaring problems. We could have both gone back to Outlook 2003, although I have to say I quite like 2007 and since I've stopped using the ical options, its a hell of a lot more stable. Could the endless calendar

Plaxo already had a developer API for years and a whole of host of goodies like the ability to export and import almost every type of file including Mozilla's LDIF format. But finally a minor addition is… sync to Google Calendars. Yes now you can sync them up and Plaxo also added Linked in support (premium only right now), Windows Live and Hotmail syncing. Now if they would just add sync to Thunderbird and Facebook, then I'd be really happy.

Generally Plaxo just needs to open up a little more by adding back the ability to export data (without switching back to the previous version), work more on their mobile options (please give us over the air syncML support) and keep adding more sync choices. I do for some reason trust Plaxo a lot more with my data that Facebook or even linkedin. Plaxo has always been good about not mining my contacts for data to be used in advertising or anything sketchy like that. However Plaxo isn't facebook and this pulse addition is worrying that they will try and follow suit. I mean it kind of makes sense because they have your contacts already but I don't want to be too social about my private data, thank you very much.

Will all this help more get into Plaxo? Yes I think so and to be honest I just signed up to their premium trial because of useful services like duplicate watching and linked in support. If I stay on beyond the free trial is questionale but worth exploring non-less.

meta-technorati-tags=plaxo3.0, plaxo, site, syncml, mobile, calendaring

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Events i’m going to this month in London

Here's a quick guide of some of the things I'm doing this month in London. Hope to see you at one or more of them.

  • Geekdinner with Brady Forrest at Ye Olde Cock Tavern
    This is going to be a great geekdinner, Brady is a big figure at all O'reilly conferences. He's usually the one asking the tricky questions and chairing the biggest names. Well this time around he's on the hot seat.
    • XSLUG July Meet at the Business Lounge, in Bush House
    In the 3rd XSL user group meeting, we've decided to discuss pipelines in front of a computer instead of at a pub. The BBC will be hosting this small event in Bush House. I'll be explaining why Pipelines are very cool and should be used for anything slighty complex. I'm going to recommend reading Jenni Tensions paper from Xtech 05 first.
  • MOO's Hot and Sticky Summer Party at The Ambassador in Exmouth Market
    Not quite sure whats going to happen on the night but Moo.com are launching stickers which hopefully will be very cool. More details on their blog
  • MiniBar July in Corbet Place, off Brick Lane.
    Its Minibar again, usual Friday night get together, should be cool.

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D.construct tickets now available

Tickets for the popular web deign and development conference, dConstruct 2007, go on sale on Today (10th July) at 11am (about the time I post this hopefully). Tickets usually sell out very fast. So what you waiting for? At less that 100 pounds for a Friday conference in Brighton you can't go wrong.

Don't forget to hang around for social events on Friday night and BarCampBrighton on Saturday and Sunday

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twitter + delicious + im = Pownce?

I've been avoiding Pownce since hearing about it on Diggnation a while back. A whole heap of invites have been sent to me but I've resisted till I got one from Sheila. I started writing reasons why not to use Pownce but then changed my mind about writing a rant back and decided to actually try it out first before blasting it.

So you can see from the title I think Pownce is basically a combination of twitter/jaiku, delicious and im. This is no bad thing but… what I think is bad is the closed network aspect of it all. This all leads back to a comment I got back from Regular Jen about Facebook.

Also good to hear that Facebook won't become the main 'hangout' for Geek Dinners, as I know I won't be dipping my toes in their shark-infested site again. I still am not clear on why a Facebook Geek Dinners group is necessary, but I hope you find it useful and wish you the best. /images/emoticons/happy.gif

And you know what shes right. I forgotten why I use to hate these non media social networks. Closed networks. I signed up to facebook because they started to open up with a 3rd party API and the sheer pressure from friends. Pownce on the other hand has none of these and yes its early days, I can't get over the simple combination which to me has no benefit except speed and convince over the larger combination. Yes it has a public timeline like twitter so you can tune into someone elses public recommendations but for f-sake delicious has had this ability for years. For example I send links to some delicous friends using the syntax or machine-tag for:username. Once you've done that you can link to anything including binary objects. Some would say the problem is that anything you recommend appears in your own bookmarks. So what? Anything you recommend should be good enough to keep.If not then use email, im, twitter, jaiku, etc, etc. What about privicy? Or like Jen you want to opt out?

Anyway this is really about Pownce but social networks for the sake of social networking. Something I've forgotten…

And at that I'm unsubscribing from Pownce now.

updated

Is there no end to this madness?

Pownce Invites For Sale On eBay  —  Proving that everything has a market, invites to Kevin Rose's P2P service Pownce are up for sale on eBay.  —  Bidding on Pownce invites start at 1c with buy it now prices at $5.  —  It wasn't that long ago when Gmail invites were available for sale on eBay

meta-technorati-tags=pownce, delicious, twitter, jaiku, im, email, facebook, ebay

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London Geekdinner Facebook group

Geekdinner london logo

After some minor issues with Facebook networks, I have finally sorted out a global geekdinner group on facebook. You can sign up here or search for geek dinner to find the girl geekdinner group along side the geekdinner group.

As you may have noticed in some of the blog comments else where (Regular Jen) not everyone could sign up to the previous group because I left the default network of London instead of setting it to Global. This was stupid because I even after I knew the problem I couldn't change it. So please makes ure you're signed up to the correct group (the one with the geekdinner logo not the red x).

I do make the joke that everyone is on Facebook but I won't be using Facebook as the official way to tell people about events and news. As Regular Jen points out.

The catch, as I see it, is that you still have to be a member of Facebook to view it. That is not what I would call open… it is open to members of Facebook only. That’s fine and fair and there is no reason to hold back from creating such a group, however, it absolutely divides the followers of London Geek Dinners (and London Girl Geek Dinners). You now have a group within Facebook and ‘the rest of us’

Total agreement and I expect to be using some sort of aggregation to allow good communication between the different spaces. This isn't the first time I've had this problem. It would be very easy for me to stop using our tradional geekdinner blog and setup some group on upcoming and urge people to use that instead but I don't. Instead I prefer the older comment system on the geekdinner blog and then allow sign up on upcoming.org. Ideally I would aggregate the upcoming results via there API back on the geekdinner site but this will all make sense hopefully in the near future.

I want to address something Jen talked about in the same post.

Making something very clear: this isn’t about London Geek Dinners, but the recent LGD Facebook group creation solidified a feeling I already had forming in my subconscious about Facebook dividing people. I posted about Facebook last week. I caved to social pressures and joined the service. I wish I hadn’t. I have only me to blame for that (well, and Facebook. Bastards. /images/emoticons/happy.gif.
What I hope I’ve brought forward more than anything is that every time a link is posted to a page within Facebook to the world outside of Facebook, that link (and its poster) excludes people. The ‘welcome’ page non-members get is a stark, uninviting login screen with no other content— it’s the equivalent of a giant, muscly body guard outside an exclusive club’s door. You aren’t welcome to the content within the Facebook walls unless you give up something in return, and in this case, it’s your data. Forever. I have never felt so unwelcome on a site. Even without the information brought to light by the video I linked to in another post, I felt this way.

This is not the way to start or nurture relationships. It’s high-level data mining wearing a social network cloak and at the same time subtly creates social outcasts out of the ones who want nothing to do with it.

I joined it and now I can never truly leave. Sounds dramatic, but Rachel called Facebook a new Hotel California. She’s right you know

 

 

 

I hate social networks for the sake of social networking, this includes Facebook. Facebook is the new roach motel as one of the gilmor gang use to say. I like Jen resisted till the bitter end but once they included a developer API and I started to see some applications being built I signed up.

I heard rumors that the facebook guys didn't sell to Yahoo because they are working on a operating system or something. Well currently you can certainly see how once your in facebook it would be easy to ignore most of the net if your thinking that way already. Its like the portals of the late 90's but with social networking layed through-out it. This may be all good for most people and at this very moment just about bearable for me too. I still can't find a way to put my blog rss into my facebook profile for example and I'm a sucker for owning my own data.

I think Facebook is almost unstoppable without some radical game changing from someone else. I'm hoping that other thing is open and decentralised (the first person to make the concept of FOAF work or the concept of FOAF work will bite a huge chunk out of Facebook) and puts a end to facebook but till then i'm forced to use it because thats where the attention and people are right now. Sad but true.

Please note I haven't mentioned Plaxo 3.0 or Plaxo Pulse which I'm sure will come up when I decide to do a post about lifestreams.

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London Geekdinner with Julie Howell

This time a local superstar. Julie Howell from Fortune cookie previously with RNIB. The geekdinner started off slowly, I was a little upset that the bar upstairs wasn't to be opened with our favorite barmaid Henryetta. Most people turned up around 7:40pm and Julie turned up about the same. Unfortually due to all the flooding in the midlands, Julie was deeply worried about her house and her trip home, so said she would leave pretty soon after speaking.

When the food came out which just on a side point was enough to feed everyone including vegans and people with dangerous allergies (see I do care and ask about you guys). i gave a brief introduction to Julie and off she went.

I don't know how she did it but she managed to cover not only her past but accessibility now and in the future. See I told you she was good. There were plenty of questions afterwards about a whole host of things to do with Julie and her job. I think we over ran by about 10mins, so I had to cut it short knowing Julie had a long trip a head of her. Actually she emailed me the next day and said she never got home till after 1am!

So it was great to hear Julie talk again, she really held the geeks attention with the highs and lows of her life. Julie also attracted a quite a diverse crowd of geeks which was great again. Even the female Aral (marion)  turned up for he first London social event. After the event a couple of the guys went out drinking to really end the evening, I made my excuses but I did hear it was a good end to the night.

I thank everyone who turned up and made Julie welcome and look forward to hearing how Brighton Girl Geekdinners goes for Julie. I was actually going to recommend Julie to Sarah Blow of the London girl geekdinners.

I'm looking to run another werewolf night in July and maybe have a special geekdinner with another out of towner in July. Details as I get them, but yes you can also join the London Geekdinner Facebook group, but for some reason its not working as expected.

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