Today I filled in to host a panel on European Social Media at SXSW. And boy, did I enjoy this session – the audience just rocked. Needless to say, my colleagues and buddies Igor Schwarzmann (@zeigor) and Kevin Dykes (@kdykes) and I had a a great time.

There’s a number of points that I’d like to share with you.

First: Thanks to Robin Grant for for thinking of me after realizing he couldn’t make it over to Austin in time for his own talk. (I wasn’t expected to speak at my first SXSW…). Thanks to the audience, all of whom were great & enganged & shared great stories. Thanks to my co-panelists Igor and Kevin for helping out on such short notice (they had hardly 24h advance notice). And a big thanks also to all of you who pitched in with ideas, stats, links and kind words when Robin and I asked for input as a last-minute preparation for this panel. (This was truly a crowdsourcing effort.)

It’s great to see such a diverse audience like the one in this room, full of the smartest people, a lot of whom are doing business of sorts with or within Europe. I learned a lot from their stories and examples, and I hope the conversation won’t stop here.

But there’s content I’d like to point out too:

Hackerspaces. Someone in the audience talked about a hackerspace she’s involved with in Tokyo, and she made some great points about the connection between social media and the hackers & other early adopters. And it’s true, social media seem to be driven strongly through these techno-philes. I assume this is because there’s a global communication sphere where techies world-wide can connect and share stuff easily. But what roles do hackerspaces play? This should be interesting to research. (Would love to continue this discussion – sadly I was too slow to talk to her, so you read this or know who she was, please ping me!)

Conferences. One question was what the Euro equivalent to SXSW is. Igor and I had discussed this before. I haven’t been, but PICNIC in Amsterdam would probably be close in that it attracts a similar set of folks and also has a strong tie to music. But of course there are other conferences well worth checking out. Depending on personal preferences: reboot in Denmark is a not-quite-annual conference; smaller than SXSW, but absolutely great. It’s not commercially run but a labor of love, so expect a different tonality. The annual meetup of Chaos Computer Club between Xmas and New Years in Berlin is the place to go if you’re into hacker culture. re:publica is where the German bloggers, hacktivists and NGO folks meet the social media crowd. If you’re more into professional agency kind of events, Next (Berlin) might be for you. There’s plenty of smaller, one-day or one-evening events like Ignites, TEDx or similar events (disclosure: I’ve been involved in some of those recently). This list is nowhere complete, so please share more conferences in the comments.

Marketing. When asked for global brands successfully engaging in social media campaigns in Europe, all three of us struggled. Someone pointed out that Dell and Walmart have been doing well; besides that, there’s not all that many overseas campaigns that stand out that any of us remembered. Temporary lapse or serious issue? Hard to tell. There are of course examples of big global brands engaging in European countries via social media, like Mercedes Benz and their (very successful) corporate blog. I’m not aware of any Zappos-like story, though. With smaller companies and particularly startups it’s an entirely different story of course. These folks know how to engage their audiences. This is where it’s happening.

Who should I be watching? We were asked which European social media mavens to follow on Twitter. This is a tough one as two filters were requested: They should be blogging in English, and with a strong focus on social media (not their hobbies or lunches). In another crowdsourcing effort, a few names popped up. and then some more. I’m adding some right now. (Full disclosure: most of those I’ve worked with or am friends with, or both):

• Igor Schwarzmann @zeigor (Ketchum Pleon)
• Kevin Dykes @kdykes (atvibe)
• Johannes Kleske @jkleske (Neue Digitale/Razorfish)
• Robin Grant @robingrant (We Are Social)
• David Noel @david (Soundcloud)
• Matt Gierhart @mattgierhart (The New Celebrity)
• Stephanie Booth @stephtara (freelance consultant)
• Nicole Simon @nicolesimon (freelance consultant)
• Caroline Drucker @bougie (Tribaspace)

Startup culture. This is a hot one and has been discussed for a long time. Europe isn’t Silicon Valley. (Then again, Ohio isn’t Silicon Valley either.) There’s not the same culture of accepting failure at least in Germany, and where you have a strong system of social welfare people maybe don’t have to hustle just as much as where there isn’t. On the other hand, as someone pointed out, this also leads to higher standard of living in Europe (on average, particularly for the not-so-privileged). There’s a lot of assumptions in this statement and it’d be another discussion altogether. However, I think we all agreed that having a less-developed startup culture is not simply a lack of passion in Europe.

Cultural differences. This can’t be stressed enough: Europe is not just another USA. Europe isn’t even Europe, so to speak, but a large number of individual countries. Or as David Weinberger would put it: Small pieces loosely joined. One example I like to give is the role of personal branding. It’s almost a mantra in the US that it is important to build your personal brand. In Europe, this won’t get you far. In Germany or the UK pointing out your successes is – except when done very tactfully – considered boasting rather than legitimate communication. It’ll put people off. Culture clash, anyone?

Bloggers. Blogging isn’t really a major force in Germany (even though there’s some great stuff), but it is in France. (It’s different in other European countries.) Why is this important? You might want to reach out to bloggers, but on different terms. Since hardly any German bloggers make a living doing so, financial incentives are hard to use. Still, if you talk to them you might build long-lasting, productive relationships. If you offer them money per blog post, you might just have made a new critic. Be tactful and work with locals.

Details, details, details! Europe isn’t the US. Don’t take your assumptions for granted. Two small examples: In Europe, weeks start on Mondays, not Sundays – make sure to reflect that in your online calendar. In Germany, credit cards aren’t as ubiquitous as in the US or Sweden: they’re more costly, and the card carrier is liable for credit card fraud. (If someone uses your credit card in a fraudulent way, it’s nowhere guaranteed that you’ll get refunded, and it’s a bureaucratic hassle.) Keep those things in mind and work with locals. It’s all very doable, you just have to pay attention.

Europe is worth your effort. Speaking of cultural differences and boasting vs building your brand: I completely forgot to point out some strong points of Europe, and why it’s worth your efforts anyway – way worth! You can draw from a huge, diverse population and different backgrounds. Distances are small and it’s easy for EU citizens to move between countries without much paperwork. The market is huge (bigger than the US) both in terms of population and economics. In the web industry, and depending on your exact focus, competition might not be as tough in the US (yet). Plus, it’s pretty damn nice over there ;) Take Soundcloud as an example: Founded by a few Swedish guys in Berlin with a very international team. They picked the right time and the right folks from the right places and built a service that just rocks. European privacy or labor laws aren’t in the way if you don’t try to just copy & paste a US model but work within the different cultural, legal and economic framework.

To wrap it up, Robin Grant has put together a blog post with plenty of statistics about the European social media sphere. This is a great place to start looking for some basic info.

Alright, that’s my two cents for the moment. I’d love to continue this conversation with you. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch, here in the comments, via Twitter (@thewavingcat) or email (peter@thewavingcat.com).

And again, thanks!

At a recent meeting, Trebor Scholz, curator of the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing list (IdC), host of collective.net and organizer of the Internet as Playground and Factory Conference, kindly invited me to give a brief talk at an undergrad class he teaches at the Eugene Lang College of New School University. So while I was in NYC I dropped in to discuss with his students questions of crowdsourcing vs wisdom of the crowds. Also, I had the pleasure of learning a lot about Wikipedia from Joseph Reagle, who wrote both his PhD thesis and a book about Wikipedia, and talked about leadership in the Wikipedia context. (Great stuff!)

For completeness’ sake, here’s my presentation, but it’s really quite basic:

I need your help. A few hours ago I was contacted by Robin Grant of UK-based social media agency We Are Social, who told me he could not make it to his own talk at SXSW this Saturday, and could I step in. Speaking at SXSW seems like a pretty big thing to me (hey, it’s SXSW!), so I was hesitant at first, but of course curiosity won in the end. So I’ll be filling in for Robin at this talk:

Lost In Translation: The Nuances Of European Social Media ( Saturday, March 13 at 12:30 PM).

The original announcement:

Europe is ahead of the US in terms of the consumer usage of social media, and yet little attention is often given to the nuances of what is on one hand is the world’s largest economy and on the other a collection of 48 countries with very different cultures.
Find out why the blogging scene in Paris is 2 years ahead of the US, the Brits are all a Twitter, the Dutch prefer Hyves to Facebook and the Germans will take any chance to give brands a hostile reception in social media.

For obvious reasons I have no time to really prepare anything, but I’d love to take your collective knowledge about European Social Media into the conversation. Now here’s what I’m asking you: send me your inspiring examples, stats, ideas and thoughts on the topic. Whatever you see fit, let me know about it, and I’ll try to work it in. Help a fellow geek out!

Best way to get in touch about this is via email (peter@thewavingcat.com) or Twitter (@thewavingcat). Thanks, thanks and thanks!

Just a brief status update – I’ll be at SXSW Interactive from Friday to Tuesday. If I don’t reply to any of your emails or calls, please bear with me.

I’m writing this from New York, more concretely from a friend’s apartment where I have access to wireless. It seems there is still not one decent prepaid or other short-term data plan for cell phones in the US. (Hint to all providers, and most importantly to my new provider O2: Offer flexible roaming packages – one month US data flat for $39,99, one month France data flat for €29,99 or whatever. Just do it!) So I’ve been hopping from wireless to wireless and cafe to cafe for the last few days. Again, if I don’t reply in time, you know why.

I’m really curious to experience my first SXSW – everybody I talk to tells me it’s one of the great conferences. Since the schedule is totally packed and so many parties required to RSVP long ago, I’m not even going to plan it out in detail. Instead, my travel buddy Igor and I will be going with the flow.

What I’m particularly interested in is to talk to US startups who’re interested in coming to Germany, and of course to fellow geeks, and just hang & geek out.

If you’re there and would like to meet up, I won’t make any promises as I’m expecting it to be rather chaotic. But feel free to ping me anytime so we can see if we can make it work! Best way is probably through Twitter (http://twitter.com/thewavingcat) or email (peter@thewavingcat.com).

Architect Keiichi Matsuda ’s take on augmented reality. I wonder what this would look like with a decent ad blocker?

(via)

Update: Thanks for KoopTech for pointing out what the video looks like without the augmented reality layer:

Monday night Matt and I hosted Ignite Berlin as part of the Global Ignite Week. I had a tremendous time there watching all these really smart people give rapid-fire talks of five minutes each. (Thanks folks!)

You can find all Ignite Berlin talks on IgniteShow.com or jump straight to the videos below:

• Edial Dekker: Stop creating, start collecting
• Ahmet Emre Acar: Lessons from a Caveman
• Markus Andrezak: The Why and How of Kanban
• Philip Steffan: Personal Fabrication
• Igor Schwarzmann: What’s so smart about cities?
• David Bausola: Bot personalities for Social Media Streams
• Josh & Sabine Devins: Lego Manhunt
• Luis Berríos-Negrón: The Turtle
• Isabel Drost: Scaling machine learning with Apache Mahout
• Jay Cousins: The World is our Wiki
• Robert Boehme: A Part-Time Scientists perspective of getting to the moon!

By the way, the video above shows my friend Igor Schwarzmann talking about smart cities, here are the slides to go with his talk:

It’s on! We just posted the speaker list and schedule for Ignite Berlin. And after reading the proposed talks I have to say I can’t wait to see them this coming Monday.

Here’s the list of speakers:

• Edial Dekker: “Stop creating, start collecting”
• Ahmet Emre Acar: “Lessons from a Caveman”
• Markus Andrezak: “The Why and How of Kanban”
• Philip Steffan: “MakerBot”
• Igor Schwarzmann: “What’s so smart about cities?”
• Luis Berríos-Negrón: “The Turtle”
• Josh & Sabine Devins: “Lego Manhunt”
• Isabel Drost: “Scaling machine learning with Apache Mahout”
• Jay Cousins: “The World is our Wiki”
• Robert Boehme: “A Part-Time Scientists perspective of getting to the moon!
• Dave Haynes: “Everybody can be a Music Maker”

For some links to go with that, check out the brief speaker profiles on the Ignite site. Also, remember to sign up on Facebook and follow @igniteberlin on Twitter for updates.

And a big thank you! to the speakers and talk proposers!

A brief announcement for the user experience experts out there: UXLx is a unique three-day User Experience event set in sunny Lisbon, Portugal on May 12-14 2010. This year’s speakers will include Steve Krug, Jared Spool, Peter Merholz, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Saffer, Donna Spencer, Dana Chisnell, Brian Fling and Bill Scott. It’s really quite an impressive line-up, particularly for a European event.

Organizer Bruno Figueiredo kindly offered to give my readers a discount, and I’ll gladly pass that on. If you enter the discount code “GMN2010″, you’ll get 10% off your ticket (in addition to other discounts like the early bird).

I’m not primarily a user experience guy, but even I’m really tempted to go. And I’m not just saying this because there’s still ice on the streets in Berlin…

We’ve been discussing the unholy trinity of GPG – Google, Privacy, Germany – a lot recently. And by “we”, I mean in one swoop all the web scene, Germany and the media here as a whole, but also my friends and I. (One of those friends works at Google, so we can bounce ideas off each other.) That is to say, these issues are discussed on many levels right now, and there’s no end in sight. Still, it’s time to share a few thoughts – less to explain anything (I don’t think I have many answers) than to order my own thoughts and learn about yours. It’s all a bit rough and unpolished – my apologies.

First, let me throw in a few factors, unordered but all relevant to the discussion:

Google has been criticized a lot in Germany for several reasons, most dominantly privacy, market domination and their mantra “don’t be evil”. Privacy has been a big issue in German media. Social Networking (most notably Facebook and the local clone StudiVZ as well as Twitter) are lagging behind the US, but are gaining traction quickly. The European Parliament just rejected SWIFT, the EU’s bank data exchange with the US. There is a very active web scene here. In the federal election campaigns in fall 2009, the government introduced de facto web censorship (framed as child abuse protection, but ridiculously badly implemented), but put it on hold recently after all experts were up in arms about it. PR agencies abroad seem genuinely scared of bloggers in Germany. There is a small, albeit very critical blogosphere. (There are probably more factors to be taken into account.)

All that just to describe the overall climate when it comes to discussions about the web in Germany. The discussions are led in a somewhat odd triangle of privacy protection, gadget lust and technophobia. (Although this could be framed differently, too. Feel free to do so.)

The main arguments are:

# Biggest Player: So in all the discussions about privacy and its protection online, Google is the most obvious target as it’s the biggest player. Google’s market penetration here is comparable to the US, that is to say that both the search and ad market are dominated clearly by Google. In my personal point of view, that doesn’t justify using Google synonymously with privacy abuse, but it sure feels like this is happening. It’s how media work, though: you need to put a name to a problem, or you can’t really discuss it.

# Privacy Abuse: Take email: I’m fairly certain that my privacy is violated more often and more strongly by all the other local free mail providers (GMX, web.de etc). Certainly you get a lot more spam there, less convenient search and not even the official mantra of “don’t be evil”. Like Google, these companies have to serve their stock holders in the first place. One fair point here: Google is bound by US law, so instead of one, there are at least two governments that could potentially enforce access to my email – Germany and USA. That, plus a number of recent privacy screw-ups like with Buzz, have made it clear that Google isn’t infallible. However, to Google’s defense, I don’t know of any incident where they maliciously gave out user data like Cisco, Yahoo or other competitors.

# Centralized Power: The most valid point I see is that against centralized power. My email, calendar, shared docs all live in Google’s cloud. One of my majors in college was political science. One thing I learned there that too much centralized power is always a bad thing as it opens the door to abuse. This is the one thing I really don’t like about Google: Too much personal information is stored there that should be on some secure server that only I could access. We all have the choice to do just that, but it comes at a price that’s so high that we can’t really pay it: We’d need special skills, a lot of time, and we’d face security risks if we tried to manage mail and calendars ourselves. I certainly wouldn’t know how to do it. And just putting my mail on another company’s server wouldn’t really seem more secure either. Today, I trust Google with my information, and their services are by far the best in the field. But what will happen when the management changes one day? So this point is a strong one.

# Overall Sentiment: Once the criticism train is rolling it’s hard to stop. Both media and consumers in Germany see Google as a synonym for the points mentioned above. So much so that media often attack Google for what sometimes seems like a reflex rather than research. The latest example: At transmediale10, the artist group FAT Labs pretended to have secretly equipped a Google Streetview Car with a GPS and tracked it while it was shooting footage of Berlin’s streets. And the media largely bought the story, buying into the David vs Goliath angle without further research. The list of media who seemingly believed the FAT Labs announcements included heavyweights like Boing Boing, Gizmodo and the Huffington Post as well as a number of German outlets. (Over at Blogpiloten.de, one of our authors mentioned it too, although cautiously.) To cut a long story short: The kind of paranoia at work here can easily develop a strange dynamic of its own. Which brings us to the next point…

# Lack of Control: Publishers are probably the most influential group at work here, but there are others too, who fight Google for pushing ahead with their own (ie Google’s) polices. This is understandable as we see a very powerful player who’s governed mostly by private interests and another country’s laws. This goes for both business and private contexts: Where we aren’t in control, we feel uneasy. (Except when talking about Apple, it seems, but that’s a whole other story.) Personally, I feel that Google is way more open and transparent than most private companies, and stick to technical standards much more. However, the basic issue is a valid and important one: Users need to be in control of their data. Today, that’s hardly the case. (Facebook, Twitter, Apple: I’m talking about you, too.) What this argument also does, though, and here’s the big risk: It provides cover to more selfish arguments, like the publishers. In their case, Google’s book scanning project is a threat to their old business model, so they try whatever they can to keep Google and other competition out. In this case it’s all just framing for their own political and economic gain under the cover of concern for the public good.

That was a lot of points – and again, I’d like to apologize for just throwing it out there without further polishing. I think these discussions are important to have.

But here’s the thing: I think the discussion is missing the point.

We shouldn’t even be focusing on just one company, it doesn’t really make any sense. Instead, we should focus on writing a set of rules that make it clear that users need to be in control. We need to define how that can work in a global network. And we need to make sure that we don’t get paralyzed by fear of technology as that would endanger innovation. (For Google’s standpoint on this, check out Eric Schmidt’s opinion piece in the Washington Post.)

Germany needs to sort out what Jeff Jarvis calls the German Privacy Paradox. While he argues by way of a sauna (read yourself), here’s the point I found most important in his thoughts:

What’s the harm that can come from revealing something else about oneself, as adults fear young people are doing in excess in Facebook and the web? The issue, I’ve long said, is not privacy but control: We have a right to control our information and how it’s used. But all this talk about privacy could make us withhold more than ever; it could make us downright antisocial. So I’ll ask again, what harm will come from publicness? Where’s the line?

These are really the questions we need to ask ourselves. Could we try not to live more privately and in less competition from the likes of Google? Certainly. But at what cost? (Again, as a disclaimer: Personally I’m a strong believer in a sharing economy, and I live pretty publicly on the web, so I’m biased.)

My take, in a nutshell, is this: On one hand, we need to make sure to give companies (here: Google) a lot of leeway to innovate before regulating. On the other hand we need to make sure to set a framework of rules that puts the users in charge of their own data.

This is a tough balance to find, but it’s what we need to do. Otherwise it’ll be either stagnation or a privacy disaster. Both aren’t good. And none of those is better than the other. So let’s set aside our critic’s and fanboy’s hats and have this discussion, and try to notice when some industry is trying to sell us their interests as public interest. Listen to your BS filters. It’ll be a long process as technology advances, but we shouldn’t just sit there and watch, but go out and help define the new rules of engagement.

Image by nolifebeforecoffee, some rights reserved.

Lately so much has been going on in Berlin that has to do with the whole field of open design, tinkering, DIY – and last week was another highlight. I had the chance to drop in at the Open Design Workshop at Betahaus. (Sadly I could only pop in for a few minutes, but that was enough to see – among many other things – Jay Cousins cooking up bioplastics from some starch and Martin Bauer doing some serious laser cutting. Awesome stuff, all of it!) It was the latest, but certainly not the last congregation of the whole cluster of tinkerers and makers and builders in Berlin. It’s a trend that has been going on for awhile, and all over the world, but it seems that Berlin is a very fertile ground for this kind of maker culture. (We also noticed that by the massive positive feedback as we were putting together the atoms&bits Festival last year.)

The Open Design workshop was a part of Social Media Week and organized and attended by a very diverse and cool group of people, all of which are extremely fine folks (and some of which are close friends of mine, so I’m totally biased here).

These two videos emerged from the workshop:

Delivered in Beta from KS12 on Vimeo.

I can’t find a good link except a Facebook page, so here’s the list of organizers taken off the Facebook page:

• Michelle Thorne (http://thornet.wordpress.com), free culture advocate, works for Creative Commons, where she coordinates international CC activities.
• Ronen Kadushin (http://www.ronen-kadushin.com) is a designer and educator pioneering “Open Design” as a concept and also as a company.
• Luis Berríos-Negrón (http://www.luisberriosnegron.org) is an artist/architect and will contribute thoughts on his ongoing project ‘The anxious prop’
• Jay Cousins, Mendel Heit, Chris Doering (http://jaycousins.wordpress.com) are part of the palomar5 network, material specialists and upcycling pros.
• Martin Bauer (http://lasernlasern.de) is an expert at the lasercutting machine. He has used it to produce nearly everything imagineabe.
• Philip Steffan (http://bausteln.de) is the founder of Bausteln, a network and platform for tinkers to meet, exchange ideas, and build things.
• Nadine Freischlad is community manager at jovoto and involved in the open_sailing network (http://twitter.com/texastee)
• Gabriel Shalom is a filmmaker and founder of KS12 studio, currently working on the collaborative (film)project (http://www.postcardsfromberlin.com)
• Erik Nap and Arne Hendriks (http://waag.org) are representatives of Waag Society who’s hosting Amsterdam’s Fablab. Bas van Abel is representing Creative Commons Nederland, where he coordinates the open design program.

This is great stuff indeed. Props to the organizers, and thanks for the videos!