Everyone’s Blogging

These slides from the training session for the Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce last week. Let me know if you want us to come to your event or run a bespoke event or Masterclass.

More details on our Social Media for Good course soon (looks like next date will be Oct 3 in Brighton).

Covers a bit of an introduction to social media and blogging, plus some questions to get you thinking about your own context, opportunities and challenges.

Some good thinking in the room and animated conversations. Quite a few organisations ready to get blogging and exploring integrated social media in more depth.

A few of you made pledges are you walked out the door about your goals and intentions, so let me know how you get on!
Thanks to all for your warm feedback and to those who helped make it a positive event, especially Lorraine Bell (BCP), Tania “Radiance” Fullerton (Brighton Steiner School) and Fay McDonald.

Resilience or “Trapped in First Life”

I’ve just finished my BarCamp2 presentation, all about resilience when the power goes off. How do we build an ad-hoc communications system from the common component we have lying around? And can we make a local internet without needing more than a few laptops, WiFi/WiMax routers and a few antennas.Here’s the presentation as a PDF:  Resilience or “Trapped in First Life”There was an interesting discussion.. Some key points:

• The difficulty of getting stuff configured. Are we really all that capable at solving networking problems and making stuff work under some pressure?
• How do we practice to test if it works?
• Can we use the One Laptop Per Child as nodes
• We needed this for Hack Day last year :-)
• Running a bunch of servers at home use a lot of power. Replace them with laptops.
• Can we demo/test some of this stuff out at another BarCamp? Could we build a solar powered, operating private Internet at BarCamp.

So, going forward, there is some interest. Next steps? Some research on the idea, I guess. I’ll publish more here under the Resilience category.

Live video from BarCamp Brighton 2

Barcamp Brighton 2

I’m spending the weekend at BarCamp Brighton 2.

We’ve just been milling around at the grid and have just started talks. First up for me, I’m enjoying Dirk talking about Accessible Javascript.

Widgety Goodness Highlights

What a great conference Widgety Goodness was. Congrats to Ivan for pulling it off, from idea to hundreds of people showing up in six weeks or something.

It was good, really good. I got to spend a day with the concepts and details of widgets. I had the sortof skeleton of an idea of what the whole widget thing was about, and then spent the day really adding flesh and ideas to that ever so slippery widget concept.

And some neat and interesting ideas have come out of it all too. Here’s a few of my highlights and thoughts:

Physical Widgets

Russell Davies helped fill in my Amazon wish list with a couple of real-world widgets. Real physical things that talk to the internet and physically exist in the real world.

Firstly, the Wattson which is a sexy-looking real-world implementation of the Viridian Energy Meter proposed by Bruce Sterling in a design competition in, gee, about 2000. This idea here is that if you can see your energy consumption via something sitting on the kitchen table, you might just go and turn off some more lights and appliances on standby. I want one of these.

And I’m still deeply intrigued by the Nabaztag WiFi bunny.

Platforms

There was a lot of talk about widget building, distribution and management platforms. All good stuff. I think some of the vendors did a bit much spruiking their own stuff rather than addressing the big questions, but you get that. It was good the the full lifecycle was represented, and I was delighted to see a lot of talk about metrics around widget usage rather than simply downloads, placements and impressions. This is getting towards the behaviour-based or participation-based metrics we are starting to get out of our scouta media recommendation platform.

Distributed Rights

Great to get into a discussion about content ownership among microsites and widgets. Who owns the data you put in a comment field? I hope we can get something together to come up with a simple way to represent terms and rights next to every input box. A litle rainbow of colours or something. Thanks to Kris from js-kit for originating that discussion.

Freshness and humility

These days, I value more and more the people that are brave and real enough to accept and talk about their mistakes and what they don’t know:

• Google can’t be as cool as their speakers always say they are. Sorry, but I just don’t buy the perfection. It just seems arrogant and unreal.
• If you are a widget platform vendor, I’m happy enough for you to tell me once that you have the best platform. But please don’t do that for half an hour. Move on. Tell me what you are worried about, or confused about. I want to find the human becoming in what you are doing.
• Will McInnes filled the room with fresh Oxygen with his presentation about Nixon-McInnes evolution into a social media agency. I like the humility, I like the experiment. And thanks for the name-check Will!

Just being there

Gee conferences are marvelous things (though the afterparty++ hangover wasn’t). Just getting out there and sharing. Wow. In the day I threw a couple of new ideas out there, worked a couple more through with people during drinks, and chatted probably complete nonsense well into Friday morning.

The value and power of getting together face to face to share and work on stuff is remarkable. Nice one, Ivan.

Pipes to the rescue

I’ve always though that Yahoo Pipes was a pretty cool thing. I’ve done a lot of work inside Scouta working with incoming and outgoing RSS, and the idea of doing ‘arithemetic’ on feeds is intriguing.

So, a problem just came up: for Widgety Goodness, we wanted to feed in all posts about Widgety Goodness and Widgets and Brighton into the WG07 backnetwork, but backnetwork would only accept tagged posts from registered bloggers that have activated their accounts. That limits the amount of blog articles that can be seen in backnetwork, which is a shame. Here’s how I got around it:

1. I constructed some searches in Google Blog Search for appropriate keywords
2. For each of these blog searches, I got an RSS feed, and then fed them into a Yahoo Pipe Fetch Feed block
3. Made a Union of these feeds
4. Sorted by ascending publish date
5. Removed duplicates
6. For each item in the resulting aggregated feed, I added the tag to the item.desciption with a Loop/String Builder
7. Fed the resulting into backnetwork, via a new user created called WG Feed.

Because backnetwork will aggregate all tagged posts from participant’s feeds, these posts now appear in the backnetwork Posts page.

It works nicely. One little issue is that all these posts show up as authored by the WG Feed user, but clicking through to get the full article goes to the right place.

Look at the pipe on Yahoo Pipes.

Widgety Goodness coming to Brighton

There’s been a commotion around the office for the last couple of weeks — as Ivan brings his Widgety Goodness conference to life — Brighton, December 6th.

Widgets matter. As Tom Coates was saying at d.construct this year, your product must be more than your website. Widgets are one of the big ways to spread fingers of your product into many corners of the online and mobile world.

Lib is working on the Widgety Goodness backnetwork, helping to bring people together online before the conference itself and using the back network to richen delegates’s experience on the day. Altogether shaping up to be something quite interesting.

More info about the conference and registration over on the Widgety Goodness website and blog.

Men’s Yoga

Assuntina over at yogabrighton.net is running a Men-only Yoga class on Monday nights in Patcham. I’ve miseed the first couple of weeks, but I’ll be there.

It is sounding great from the comments here.

drinks at office Friday 28th 5pm

We’re having our first OpenBeer drinks at the office, 50 Providence Place on this Friday 28th Sept at 5pm.

Come over and share a beer and chat or network or just look out the window.

See the event on upcoming.

A Place Called Providence

We’ve started a group blog for our co-working office space in Providence Place.

It ought to be a laugh and give a bit of a sense of the round-the-table conversation we enjoy. Check out aplacecalledprovidence.com.

Next Page »