Category: Conferences and event reports

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Interactive Media Mobile Picnic08

Picnic08 – The Internet of Things

Picnic is a large ‘creativity’ conference held annually in Amsterdam. I’ve been here as a guest of n8 talking about the notion of ‘open museums’.

Here is another set of notes (with only a minor cleanup for the sake of timeliness).

Day Three was full of clashes and I was out at Westergasfabriek terribly early in the morning – even before the free (sponsored) barista coffee opened. But getting in early meant securing a table and laptop power outlet to catch some of The Internet of Things workshop.

The notion of the ‘Internet of Things’ was best summed up by Rafi Haladjian from Violet who are best known for their Nabaztag, the Internet enabled rabbit. He described how technologies always become pervasive starting out as highly expensive and shared by many (clock tower), to then being shared by a few (expensive private clock), before becoming personal (pocket watch), commodified and generic (the disposable digital watch), and then making the leap to becoming pervasive (even your microwave oven and TV now has a clock). The Internet is in the ‘personal’ stage with the mobile web and the iPhone – where the Internet is available pretty much everywhere in the highly developed world. The big shift will come when every device that has a microchip in it is also connected ambiently to the Internet – so rather than having special devices to access the Internet, all our devices connect to the Internet and to each other. At this stage the Internet is not a ‘separate place’ as in the 80s/90s conceptions of ‘cyberspace’, but is fully integrated into everyday life and you no longer go out of your way to ‘connect’ – you just are.

We are already seeing examples of this.

Oliver Christ from SAP talked about some of the megatrends affecting the developed world. The ageing society that we are going to find ourselves in means that healthcare will no longer ‘scale’. Pervasive technologies will become essential to keep citizens out of institutional healthcare for as long as possible by allowing connectivity to health care professionals all the time, ambiently. Need to change your medication? Your pill dispenser will already have downloaded the next prescription from your health consultant and sent back your bio data to them. This is also going to be driven by an increasing service economy – moving form selling products to solutions (Christ gave the nice example of moving away from selling drills to selling ‘holes’ which is typified by SaaS but is not just limited to the technology sector).

We are also seeing the possibilities of pervasive computing with car to car communication in some new models of car. Here cars communicate silently with each other to alert drivers of hazards up ahead, using data sourced from cars already ahead of you. Not only this, because your car is silently communicating with others on the road without your intervention, better decisions about speed, tyre pressure etc can be ‘assisted’.

There are already examples of ‘pay as you live’ insurance schemes which offer significantly discounted premiums and policies if you allow yourself to be tracked and thus assessed as to exactly how you behave rather than the current inaccurate ‘modelling’ applied at the moment. Norwich Union in the UK offers a policy which uses your car’s GPS data to calculate your risk level (and hence premiums) based on when, where, how fast, and how frequently you actually drive.

All this is becoming possible because the ‘data input’ and ‘data collection’ of pervasive computing no longer need to have the enormous costs associated with them of previous times.

Joe Polastre from Sentilla spoke of how “the internet is lonely” and wants more devices connected to it. Looking at the car industry he showed how already car manufacturers are providing the capacity for your car to email its vital signs back to you periodically to tell you how healthy it is, and how this lets you track fuel efficiency and on road costs more effectively. Polastre used the example of WalMart’s detailed energy auditing to show how pervasive monitoring was able to make enormous reductions in energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and expenditure. For example by being able to identify the particular section of the store that was using the most energy (the lighting section) and make adjustments to operations (replacing all the bulbs in the sample lights with energy efficient bulbs) they were able to save $6m per annum. Likewise the simple act of painting their store roofs white in some states, WalMart saved $30m per annum.

All this relies on pervasive low cost measurement systems. Polastre then went on to discuss the enormous energy reductions able to be made in the industrial processing sector – copper and aluminium production etc – because of better monitoring equipment.

The final part of the Internet of Things demonstrated a number of RFID devices that are coming on to the market – Tikitags, the Mirror – and others. The Mirror is the latest from Violet/Nabaztag which is an RFID reader. It comes with a set of Ztamps which you can attach to anything at all to connect them to the Internet and build a suite of customisable interactions. With them and the Mirror you could have your umbrella tell you the weather forecast for example. This was very nifty and showed the massive drop in the cost of RFID technologies.

Nokia is soon releasing a new phone which will have ‘near-field communication’ capacity built in, giving another way to interact with the growing ‘Internet of things’.

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open content Picnic08

Picnic08 – Open Musuem (more)

Picnic is a large ‘creativity’ conference held annually in Amsterdam. I’ve been here as a guest of n8 talking about the notion of ‘open museums’.

Here are some more notes (with only a minor cleanup for the sake of timeliness) which were taken during the Open Museum sessions on Day Two. (More notes on the rest of Picnic still to follow)

Following Jelmer Boomsma, a representative of Hyves talked about the collaboration with Musuemnacht and what Hyves stood to gain from the project. I had to pop out for an interview for most of the presentation so I don’t have any notes of particular import for the session.

However following Hyves, Dick van Dijk from the Waag Society, an organisation that operates a little like a new media incubator, gave a demonstration of some mobile, location-aware projects they have been working on. Interestingly the projects have been less about the technology and more about ensuring that the broadest possible groups of people engage with the content. Titled “Connecting: People, Stories, Places”, these projects reminded me a lot of the ‘digital storytelling’ movement – ordinary peoples’ stories made more powerful through their own voice, and through making connections with others. The location-aware aspect of this work fell mainly into the ‘city tour’ model of mobile heritage but where walkers were taken on a particular personal journey – the digital story.

The day concluded with an insider’s perspective of the ‘Slash/Slash generation’ (mainly young people who are, for example, dj/fashion designer/artist/permaculturist – coincidentally this is applies to almost everyone I know!). Nalden, one of the Museumnacht community, and now one of the most prominent young bloggers in the Netherlands, talked about his motivations and actions online and how in his view of the online world, heritage content competes for attention with music, fashion and entertainment. This was an good way to end the day even if I could see others in the audience finding Nalden’s youthful enthusiasm a bit hard to take – because it clearly demonstrated the need for museums to open up simply to maintain relevance over coming generations.

All in all the Open Museums part of Picnic was one of the most successful ‘Picnic Specials’ along with Surprising Africa. The attendance was solid and the ideas discussed traversed the different interpretations and permutations of ‘openness’ – from reaching out to non-traditional museum audiences, to inter-institutional data sharing and co-creative visitor interactions.

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Copyright/OCL open content Picnic08

Picnic08 – Open Museum part two

Picnic is a large ‘creativity’ conference held annually in Amsterdam. I’ve been here as a guest of n8 talking about the notion of ‘open museums’.

Here is the next set of notes (with only a minor cleanup for the sake of timeliness) which were taken during the Open Museum sessions on Day Two. (More notes on the rest of Picnic still to follow)

Following my presentation, Fiona Romeo from the National Maritime Museum in London spoke. Fiona began by reminding us that often by themselves museums (outside of the art museum world) often hold incredibly banal and mundane objects whose significance is only apparent when placed into a particular context. This poses enormous challenges for museums in a digital environment that offers the user/visitor the opportunity to actively decontextulise objects (especially when browsing collection databases etc).

Fiona then detailed her recent work mapping some of the NMM collections to draw out the stories associated with objects – something that works incredibly well when the objects collected pertain to navigation and voyages of discovery.

For the NMM, the opportunities for collaboration lie in working with ‘data artisans’ outside of the sector to reveal new stories and ways of seeing our data. To this end she discussed the NMM’s work with Stamen in visualising the language of memorials – a quite poetic and revealing presentation of otherwise rather dull data; and also some of the object licensing to game developers Six To Start who make alternate reality games (and for whom some of the NMM’s maps and objects were a fantastic and uptapped resource).

Fiona emphasised that we under estimate the worth of our own data – we should ‘love our data’. It is rich and interesting even if we see it as incomplete – and by connecting with such ‘data artisans’ in the commercial and creative sector, we may begin to see for ourselves, new opportunities.

Paul Keller from Kennisland talked about ‘museums, fans and Copyright’, arguing that one of the things that is currently paralysing museums in taking advantage of the new collaborative opportunities of digital is this perception that ‘new business models of unimaginable wealth’ are just around the corner. Of course this is totally unrealistic – the bags of money don’t exist – and as a result we get a situation of ‘rights stagnation’ where the museums digital assets are locked up.

Of course, fans are already bypassing museums to take advantage of digital. Paul gave the example of Bittorrent communities whose collective collections of Dutch documentary films are more complete, more accessible, and of a higher quality that those preserved (and inaccessible online) by the Dutch National Film archives. The official film archives are paralysed by ‘getting permission’ while those who want access now just bypass them completely.

Stepping back from the obvious IP issues here, Paul gave another example of an amazing searchable video archive made by two Germans. 0xdb uses the data from video torrents along with their subtitles (sometimes fansubbed) to create a wonderful full text search of around 6000 movies. Whilst downloading is not allowed the metadata and rich content is astounding.

Jelmer Boomsma from n8 gave an excellent run down of the collaborative audience development strategies of the Amsterdam Museum Night. The Museumnacht is a good example of making museums more accessible to wider audiences and Boomsma’s presentation looked at how, in just 3 years they have transformed their strategies to make the Museumnacht reach even wider audiences and build strong participatory cultures around them.

In 2005 Museumnacht was seemingly successful. 26,000 visitors across all the museums in the one night, and a 94% ‘very satisfied’ audience. But there was one problem, the average age of attendee was 37 years old. Now n8 new that young people were interested in museums and culture, just that the event wasn’t appearing on their radars, so rather than take shortcuts and underestimate the intelligence of the audience (a dance party in every museum, or free beer etc), they focussed on redefining what the Museumnacht event was and who it was for.

Over 2006 and 2007 the print campaign began to be supplemented with an extensive and diverse online campaign where they gave the audience the tools to become ‘an ambassador’ for the event itself. They instituted competitions to design the campaign materials, design a Museumnacht t-short, as well as ways to build your own programme for the night and then share it with your friends and even make your own audiotour.

They worked with Hyves, the largest social networking site in the Netherlands (well outranking Facebook and MySpace), and trialled a customised banner advert. This failed and despite 160,000 page impressions it only generated 80 click throughs! So instead they worked with Hyves to set up a Hyves Group to enable 2 way communication, perks and discounts and importantly the tools to share with other Hyves users. In 2006 2% of their traffic came through Hyves, and in 2007 this was up to 8% and capturing 20% of visitors aged 16-24.

Now the new Museumnacht site is incorporating an Opensocial-style set of logins whereby many of the social networking and sharing functions will be available to any network user and also remove the requirement of a separate Museumnacht website login.

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Geotagging & mapping Interactive Media open content Picnic08

Picnic08 – my presentation in the Open Museum sessions / Open Museum part one

Picnic is a large ‘creativity’ conference held annually in Amsterdam. I’ve been here as a guest of n8 talking about the notion of ‘open museums’.

Here is the second set of notes (with only a minor cleanup for the sake of timeliness) which were taken during the Open Museum sessions on Day Two. (More notes on the rest of Picnic still to follow)

Open Museum was billed as “a one-day marathon focussing on the idea of an ‘open museum’, a public institution that engages with its environment. Inspired by the great Stedelijk director Willem Sandberg, the Open Museum symposium looks at how museums in the 21st century can learn from media, and how media can learn from museums”. Organised by n8 who run the annual Museumnacht (Museum Night) in Amsterdam, this was an action packed 6 hours of presentations, which, because it was nestled in amongst the rest of Picnic, drew a very diverse and interested crowd. As a result the Dutch newspapers, the local blogging community and others have covered it in good detail.

The sessions kicked off with Michiel van Iersel from MuseumLab taking a run through the history of museums arguing that museums have always had to adapt to changing times and that, on the whole, these changes over the centuries have transformed museums for the better (at least from our current viewpoint) into more transparent, open-to-all institutions that are even opening sub-galleries in airport lounges (see the Rjiksmuseum at Schipol Airport). Michiel’s introduction placed a necessary historical backdrop behind the day’s proceedings – ensuring that we didn’t get too caught up in the emperor’s new clothes.

I followed Michiel with a rapid fire look at the potentials of an ‘open, collaborative museum’ online. In this I argued that in the digital environment, museums that do not take advantage of the opportunities to connect with other institutions (at the global level) and their publics (at the hyperlocal level) are not only missing out on many opportunities, they are at risk of being leapfrogged in relevance by other institutions or even informal organisations. Online, a singular collection of objects is now rather meaningless and the digital space opens the necessity to connect collections internationally. By the same token, online social media offers the opportunity to connect with and engage with local communities in ways previously only theorised about in the scholarship of the ‘new museum’.

Openness is a way for museums to be seen to be ‘creating new value’ from the old – and to assert their relevance in stimulating new creativity, economic and cultural production. Museums can collaborate with the community to improve findability through tagging of various kinds; and make discoveries, create communities of interest around their collections and in so doing improve their research and collection data.

With each other and other sorts of knowledge providers, museum openness can create richer value for researchers, scholars and even general browsers by connecting collections and research with broader context and richer resources elsewhere – moving from being a singular ‘destination’ to simply a high value node in a knowledge network/web (I equated this to the function of a reference librarian).

Finally I posed the absolute necessity for openness for museums to make the most of location-centric possibilities. Without openness none of the problems of location-centric data will be solved, nor will their promise be reached. In the location-centric space, a single collection is meaningless and is a missed opportunity – only a multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary approach will get anywhere near delivering the necessary user experience to make this meaningful. Think of the current situation much like a tourist map that only shows one chain of hotels on it . . .

I concluded with a series of questions aimed at framing the rest of the day –

1. do audiences really want openness? do we expect to much of them? (early adopter tech communities are far from representative of our audiences)
2. where are the new models of rights and IP needed to sustain openness (I posited CC Plus as one option)
3. how do we build new forms of reputation and trust? (especially within museum with scientific research staff whose reputations rely upon currently closed academic research forms)
4. how do we sustainably support the social needs of communities? (I pose that we should look to the existing structures we use to support offline volunteers etc)
5. how do we transform business models in the sector to encourage institutional collaboration?
6. how do we encourage collaboration between our online and our gallery spaces?

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Interactive Media Picnic08

Picnic08 – the first report from the conference with fake sheep and wifi donkeys

Picnic is a large ‘creativity’ conference held annually in Amsterdam. I’ve been here as a guest of n8 talking about the notion of ‘open museums’, or as my presentation was called “Sorry we’re open: the open, collaborative museum“.

Set in the reclaimed grey zone of Westergasfabriek, Picnic08 was quite a remarkable thing to behold. On arrival the place looked more like a rave than a conference – in fact the venue is used for huge parties as well. There were fake sheep stationed around the place, the opening ceremony featured a donkey loaded with a video camera, laptop and wifi leading a brass marching band. On day two I was greeted by people dressed up as poodles and crawling around on fours. And, the picnic’ theme extended through to the ‘discussion’ sessions having the speakers seated at a picnic bench on stage.

Here is the first set of notes (with only a minor cleanup for the sake of timeliness). More to follow.

Charles Leadbeater opened the event with a brief introduction to the opportunities of ‘collaboration’ now made possible. Much in the vein of his We-Think book, he sees great potential in a change he feels we are only in the first decade of. As he says, “there are another 50 years to run . . . we’re only 10 years in”. Using the metaphor of pebbles and boulders on a beach, Leadbetter sees the mass creative production of YouTube as millions of people placing pebbles on a beach that previously only supported the boulders of mass media. For this collaborative creativity to have maximum effect it needs to be understood that “diversity drives this sort of creativity”.

Could we imagine learning, politics and media that was “with you” rather than “at you”? How do we get to the “with”?

Clay Shirky’s keynote problematised Leadbeater’s high level optimism.

Managing communities around social objects is hard. These are design problems that plague everything from Flickr to old style forums. If the computer is a box then lots of ‘features’ and complexity matters, but if the computer becomes a communicative/social device then simplicity matters because ‘synchronisation between the mental models of the users’ matter more (communication intent is foregrounded).

Linus’ law – “Many eyes make all bugs shallow”. The best example of this is Pluto on Wikipedia. Wikipedia gets better because it is arguemntative. There is no ‘hive mind’ here. What happens is a very small groups cares much more than everyone else. What Wikipedia does in this instance is allow broad participation rather than apply traditional managerialism that, in the name of efficiency, drops off 80% of the users who only minimally participate (80/20 rule), keeping only those who ‘most participate’. But now in the digital space there is no need to optimise like this and lose so many but instead allow a lot to contribute a little.

But then there is “the Gallileo problem” – the semi locked article. Essentially this is the manifestation of a 500 year old flamewar involving the Catholic Church. This indicates that it is probably necessary to stop thinking about ‘users’ in the generic and start to consider users an inevitable unequal and unequally motivated. This then allows systems to build in defense mechanism to allow the head users to fight off the tail users when necessary – much like governance in a democracy.

Shirky then moved on to discuss the unequal participation and unequal motivations behind Aaron Koblin’s Ten Thousand Cents. This is a collective art work created by 10,000 ‘workers’ on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.


Ten Thousand Cents from Ten Thousand Cents on Vimeo.

Now just who were these 10,000 ‘turkers’ who co-created this art? Koblin’s own research showed that turkers’ return rates and time spent ‘working on creating the tiles of the art varied greatly. Chinese turkers comprised 90% return visits, 24 mins; Egypt 97% return 32 mins; whilst turkers from the USA were only 17% return visits and spent far less time, 3 mins, ‘turking’.

This revealed enormous different global motivations for participation. 10,000 cents, 10,000 ‘turkers’ meant that the distribution of labour was global and what 1 US cent ‘meant’ varied greatly. This spontaneous division of labour, voluntary, but different motivations. Spontaneous division of motivation – some are doing it for love and other are definitely doing it for money.

This makes planning and predictability are incredibly hard to forecast. In these social collaborative spaces you cannot ‘recruit’, only ‘invite’ – and it is this that makes it incredibly difficult to handle – especially for large established organisations.

Shirky then closed by posing the questions as to “why is almost all online collective action about ‘stopping’ things”? Perhaps we need a new governmental license model like GPL – rather than the heavy ‘incorporation’ model – which makes ‘group collaboration’ legal and thus able to get things like bank accounts etc. He then showed some inital attmepts to get towards this through virtual companies (Vermont), Community Interest Companies (UK), MeetUp (USA).

Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist working at Intel gave an interesting talk titled ‘Secrets and Lies’. This explored the challenges of identity, reputation and trust online (and offline).

Bell explained that lies are at the basis of everyday life. They come in many varieties and even the strictest religious codes don’t blanket ban all variants. For children lies can be play, boundary testing, working through rules and identity. For adults and lies can be a conscious prevention of ‘reality’.

Secret knowledge is essential rituals. And in many cultures always something is held back. But now we have taken our lying online and we now are forced to openly operate between a cultural practice (lying is everyday) and a cultural ideal (lying is bad).

With the changing online environment we also find new ‘technologies of lying’ emerging. Tracking services are defeated by new alibi services, cellphone tracking is defeated by the phones being left in a drawer at work. The problem is is that whilst people know how to lie but our devices don’t know how to.

Data trails, location aware, satellite navigation don’t know how to lie when you need them to. Governments, regulators, companies, researchers can, potentially ‘know all’ and this is not optimal. For example all our devices know I was at Picnic all the time. THe RFID in the conference pass tracked me, uniquely, through the space and captured all my interactions.

So technology needs to bring back the imprecision, blurring of truth that we as a society need to function. What are the implications, then for e-government? Reputation indices? where does secrecy fit?

(part two of my notes will be posted soon)

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dConstruct08 User experience

dConstruct ‘Designing the social web’ 5 Sept 2008, Brighton UK

dConstruct in Brighton this year was held in the full glory of an English beachside summer – sleeting rain and gusty winds. Inside the Brighton Dome, 700 web geeks gathered to hear what ended up being quite a mixed bag of presentations from speakers about various aspects of ‘designing the social web’. Light on the technical detail, all but Tantek Çelik, focussed predominantly on the psycho-social aspects of the social web.

The conference opened with Steven Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good For You) comparing the similarities in the way in which data visualisation combined with hyperlocal amateur knowledge helped prove the source of the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho, London with the new opportunities that are emerging with social mapping and visualisation technologies in the present. Johnson ‘s 2006 book The Ghost Map is a detailed look at the cholera outbreak and the second half of his talk focussed on his own social mapping project Outside.In. Currently US-only, it is very similar in style to Everyblock, bringing a personal hyperlocal focus to news, people and events in local communities. As Johnson says, usually you care most about things that happen within a small radius of where you are right now – 1000 feet/350 metres – and so Outside.In and its services like Radar use geolocation to deliver this information to you as it happens. He contrasted his service, which parses social media like Twitter and place-centric blogs, with the more obvious (and I would add, easily ‘monetized’) geolocation services which already exist around restaurant reviews and local businesses. Johnson was an engaging speaker but his US-centrism/universalism did emerge at times – and his postulating that Brooklyn contains four of the top ten US local blogging neighbourhoods also seemed to colour his perspective (Johnson lives in Brooklyn).

Next up was Guardian columnist and gaming academic Aleks Krotoski. Aleks was very engaging and energetic, pacing up and down the stage, waving her arms animatedly whenever possible as she explored some of the things that web designers could learn from game designers and vice versa. Her social psychology research around gaming has looked at the different models that game designers use to keep players engaged over long periods of time – the ‘stickiness’ that web designers long for. Of course, as she pointed out, game designers can play the niches and their proven publishing-style business model gives them a distinct advantage over the web where most web applications needs to appeal to a far broader audience and have very few proven sustainable business models (advertising and . . . ). In the controlled systems of games players can be given ongoing ‘carrots’ to keep them engaged and willing to move on to the next level/challenge, and even in immersive sandbox environments like Grand Theft Auto the player is made to ‘invest’ significantly in their game experience – enough to keep them playing for long and repeated periods. Games also can operate as ‘enabling systems’ whereby social value is emergent through community building, storybuilding, and even extends to the obvious player communities around World of Warcarft or in simpler terms the creation of game FAQs, walkthroughs etc. Closely related are what Krotoski termed ‘psychological systems’. These operate around relationship building in-game and also frequently leverage the ‘collecting urge’, and increasingly the generation of in-game assets (see Second Life). Krotoski closed by postulating that a lot of what we see in the next generation of games around at the moment – the social gaming of the Wii and NDS, the online/offline mix that Little Big Planet and Spore are going to offer – might have had their genesis in the long-lost Sega Dreamcast and for reasons of platform competitiveness and industry secrecy, many of the opportunities that the web has explored have been late to rise in the gaming world. On the flipside, the web could learn a lot from the engagement models of the gaming world.

Aleks was followd by Joshua Porter. Josh’s recent book Designing for the Social Web is a quick reference set of design patterns that explain some proven methods for building engagement and community when designing social sites and applications. Josh’s presentation was a little disappointing in that although he presented a series of design patterns and techniques to exploit users’ cognitive biases, he was light on evidence, and like Steven Johnson made some terrible US-centric/universalist statements about behaviour. The biases he focussed on were;

– representation bias – making highly visible the behaviour you wish other users to have on your site even if this is not typical of other users. eg. Yelp’s ‘featured reviews’ and Freshbooks’ ‘what our users are saying)
– loss aversion – the couching of desired behaviour in terms that avert loss or risk.
– ownership bias – reminding users that they should care because it is ‘their’ stuff. eg. Flickr’s use of ‘your’ in all their UI

His presentation drew extensively on the June 2006 article Eager Sellers, Stony Buyers by John Gourville, which explores techniques used to convince customers to change their behaviours etc.

As the first question from the audience asked, only half jokingly, “Isn’t this evil?”.

In a similar vein, Daniel Burka from Digg and Pownce, presented a series of slides that explored the methods that Digg and Pownce use to encourage users to firstly sign up to their services, and secondly, participate in positive ways. Whilst visitors to Digg can always use Digg without creating an account (much like the 95%+ of visitors to Amazon who use the site for product research and as an image library for their iPod), Digg’s aim is to sign up as many people as possible. In order to do this it needs to ‘go beyond altruism’ and offer real benefits to those who do sign up, as well as significantly reduce barriers to entry, and in the case of Pownce, allow logins with accounts from other services (cf Opensocial). Burka cited Geni.com as a best practice example of encouraging sign ups – it not only shows users what they can get from the site, it also starts them off in the process of creating their family tree, and makes it very easy for them do complete their signup with a minimum of information.

Encouraging positive behaviour and deterring trolling and gaming of the system is the next challenge. Burka outlined the benefits of using personal profiles with photos to build trust amongst users, as well as tweaking text copy to break through ‘tension points’. He pointed to Get Satisfaction‘s use of emoticons as a good example of conveying mood accompanying messages as a way of reducing the chance of user comments being taken in the ‘wrong spirit’.

Tantek Çelik followed with a detailed presentation on using microformats, specifically hCard to explore social network portability. The presentation and its information about implementing social network portability with hCard is available through the microformats wiki.

The final two sessions were more conceptual and were fun. Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones of Dopplr gave an initially grating but finally witty and funny presentation on, well, Dopplr. It was much more than Dopplr, but they used Dopplr as a case study and set of examples for how it is not only possible but also highly desirable to build web applications that are about slotting into and contributing to the ‘coral reef’ of the web, rather than trying to work as a walled garden or honey pot. They paid special attention to the notion of ‘delighters’ or in their world, ‘data toys’ – surprises that make their service pleasurable and fun to use. The last session was from Jeremy Keith. In a lovely and somewhat laconic presentation, Keith exploded the notion of predictability in scale free networks , drawing on sci-fi and pop-sci respectively. It was a fitting way to end the day.

Then it was back out into the rain to the afterparty – which our party decided was a veritable ‘bbq’.

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Conferences and event reports

Upcoming talks and workshops – London, Sydney, Amsterdam, Auckland

I’ve got some new presentations and workshops coming up over the next few months. The team has been working on some great projects which all will start going public soon – some of which have had a greater level of hush hush than would usually be the case. So in some of these presentations the lid will be lifted on some new material.

As I know there are many international readers of Fresh & New, if you happen to be in attendance at any of the following then do come up and say hi (at least tweet me to say you’re in the same room!). If not then rest assured I will be blogging them to keep everyone up to speed with what is going on.

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Conferences and event reports Social networking Young people & museums

Camilla Cooke explains the Kevin07 digital campaign – notes from CCI ‘Creating Value Between Commons and Commerce’ conference, Brisbane, 2008

Here’s the second of a set of notes scribed during the main sessions of the CCI’s conference ‘Creating Value Between Commons and Commerce‘.

Camilla Cooke was the strategist behind the Kevin07 digital campaign in what she described as ‘Australia’s first digital election’. In a fantastic presentation she went through the rationale behind the digital elements of the Kevin07 campaign and some of the figures and outcomes (beyond the election result!).

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Conferences and event reports Interactive Media Young people & museums

Henry Jenkins – notes from CCI ‘Creating Value Between Commons and Commerce’ conference, Brisbane, 2008

I’ve been in Brisbane the last few days – presenting the Powerhouse Museum’s Creative Commons and public domain projects and also managed attend one day of the CCI’s conference ‘Creating Value Between Commons and Commerce‘. In amongst some truly awful examples of how not to use Powerpoint, there were some interesting presentations and papers.

Here’s the first of a set of notes scribed during the main sessions.

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Imaging Interactive Media Mobile MW2007

Mobile augmented animals – Wellington Zoo

One of the really wild things at Museums and the Web 2007 was a demonstration booth from the National Science Museum, Japan. At the booth were a series of paper pop up dinosaurs. By themselves the dinosaur popups were impressive but once a consumer grade webcam was pointed at the paper cutouts they came to life as proper 3d models on screen.

The technology was written up in their paper over at Archimuse.

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