Barcamp Leeds 2009 highlights

June 1, 2009

I really enjoyed my day at Barcamp Leeds, part of LSx 2009 – Leeds’ second web festival.

Photo by Nik_Doof under Creative Commons license

Having turned up meaning to talk about kids and code (see separate post) I also ended up reprising The History of Leeds: What Every Geek Should Know, fortuitously followed by Jon Eland on Exposure Leeds‘ vision for Leodis.net, a massive online photographic archive digitised with lottery funding by our local council.

Mohsin Ali, just back from Where 2.0, had also picked up on the growing interest in using old photos and maps as part of mobile, geolocated services. Old is the new new, apparently, especially when it’s out of copyright. I can’t wait to play with this stuff in the cities where I spend my time.

Matt Seward of Kilo75 was thought-provoking on the Art of (Digital) Conversation. So many brands still seem to be stuck in a monologue when dialogue is the order of the day. I can’t help wondering though, whether people really want conversations with brands at all. Surely the only authentic conversations are those with the people who work for brands, not the brands themselves?

Dave Mee’s Merzweb was a revelation. From his associated blog post:

While it feels like our online lives are unprecedented, at least from a technological perspective, they’re not, from an avant-garde art perspective. From the 1920s to the 1950s, a sadly neglected artist from Hanover, Kurt Schwitters, derived his own practice that has earned him accolades from being one of the first multimedia artists, to a pioneer of collage and objets trouvés. I’d like to afford him a new title; Patron saint of the Social Web.

I recently attempted my own One Song to the Tune of Another, so I admire the skill with which Dave weaves together the threads from separate decades and separate media to show that we’re not that different from our forebears.

And how could I forget Microsoft (criticism), John Leach’s latest addtion to the Ukepedia? Seven down, just 2.8 million articles to go :)

There was more, much more, than I’ve written up here. It was a privilege to see a great set of talks in stimulating company, with as many sessions again that I would love to have attended, if possessed of the power to be in two places at once. In particular, I’m sorry to have missed my former colleague Dean Vipond on A Tactile Experience of Digital Music, Sarah Hartley on Blogging in a News Organisation and Emma Bearman’s Cake and Culture. Maybe next time!

Thanks as ever to the organisers, Imran, Linda, Dom and Tom.

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Posted by mattedgar

Telco Too Point Oh

October 10, 2006

I had the privilege to take part in last week’s Telco 2.0TM Industry Brainstorm in London – an excellent and thought-provoking two days, and the programme for the next event looks just as enticing. It’s all now being written up on the obligatory Telco 2.0TM Blog. I hope I wasn’t one of the participants who gave the impression that advertiser inertia would be an excuse for operator indifference to new models. That’s certainly not true.

It’s great that some of the basic ideas around communities and context are becoming buzz words throughout our industry, but I find it disappointing that we can only talk about these by creating a false opposition against supposedly closed operators, totally uninterested in customers and their communities – the so-called “Telco 1.0″ (guess no one’s claiming trademark rights over that one!)

Having worked indirectly and directly for ISPs and MNOs for nearly 10 years, I can safely say these have been hot topics inside the operators since the days of dial-up modems and monochrome mobiles. We’ve been rolling out high-bandwidth, always on networks and subsidising costly multimedia devices with just this stuff in mind. It’s nice to see the rest of the content ecosystem finally catching on ;)

One other feature of the conference attracted attention: every table had a couple of wifi-enabled laptops through which we could submit comments and questions on the session.

I have to say I found the technology-mediated version less interactive than the old-fashioned convention of putting up your hand to ask a question (is this consigned to the deeply unfashionable world of Conference 1.0?). It meant that instead of responding to unpredictable questions, speakers could skim through the questions and pick the ones they wanted to answer.

As Edward Tufte points out in his treatise against Powerpoint, innovations in presentation technology generally favour the speaker, not the audience. Someone in the conference world tell me there is a better way, please.

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Posted by mattedgar