Some thoughts on Barcamp, Web 2.0 Expo, Girl Geek Dinner, Berlinblase
This has been some crazy week for me. Starting last Friday, there has been no day, and no evening, without some kind of web-related event: Barcamp, Girl Geek Dinner, Web 2.0 Expo. And all the events surrounding those, like Pitchparty, LateCrunch and of course the “official” Web 2.0 Expo party. Which is why I took a break this morning and went to go see the least webby thing I could think of: The Pergamon Museum, Berlin’s archaeological highlight. Nothing gets you back to the ground like some huge chunks out of historical buildings dating back to A.D. times. That, and some sleep to get over the sleep dep.
So why am I writing all this? Partly to have a decent wrap-up for all the things that happened on the web and off. Partly to look back on what happened and what I found remarkable. Also, I think criticism is important, but so is paying respect where respect is due. So this is highly subjective, you might have had a very different experience at the same events. (If so, please share!)
I had a great time connecting face-to-face with all these folks I usually interacted with primarily online. (Only occasionally did I encounter awkward conversation like: What’s your name? Who are you on Twitter? I think I’m following you!) This is what community events are so important for: To get folks together in the meat space. It really makes a difference. There’s so many projects, startups and cool folks around, we should try to get all of those groups connected even better.
So here are some thoughts on the web events themselves.
Barcamp Berlin 3: Deutsche Telekom Berlin HQ by Heiko Hebig
Barcamp
Barcamp Berlin 3 was only my second Barcamp, but sure not the last one. It was huge (some 600 attendees per day), so I guess not everybody got to contribute, and in the Deutsche Telekom Berlin HQ, which doesn’t exactly seem a natural match. Traditionally, DT and bloggers aren’t exactly on the best terms. So this might actually be the real historical legacy of this Barcamp: It became clear that both sides actually can get together to organize kick-ass stuff. While during the first hours or so the blogger crowd and the on-site security and staff seemed to give each other suspicious looks, by the end of the first day everybody got along great. Respect to the DT techies and community guys to blend into the crowds. That’s no easy feat (what with German bloggers being traditionally very critical and outspoken) and it worked a charm. (By the way, wireless held up, despite basically everybody running at least one mobile device. Need to say more?) The location worked fine, despite some minor sound problems: Some of the workshop rooms were divided by dividers rather than walls, so you could regularly hear the neighbor session. Oh well, if that’s the only problem!
Girl Geek Dinner Berlin by Andrea Vascellari
Girl Geek Dinner
Nicole and Michelle were kind enough to invite me to my first Girl Geek Dinner (short: GGD). (Thanks!) Even though Nicole stressed that the event is neither just for girls, nor just for geeks, nor does it include dinner, it was great being there. What a difference it makes to have a web event with more than 50% women! Also, it’s fun to have to be invited: Guys may not enter without an explicit invitation by one of the female attendees. It seems like there should be more girl geek events, which is also what was discussed in a Web 2.0 Expo workshop on gender in Web 2.0 careers (I liveblogged). If you’re female and work in the web industry, do organize meetups. If you’re male, do encourage your girl friends and colleagues to overcome to attend web events, even if it can easily seem intimidating for the first time.
Blogger roundtable at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin by luca.sartoni (licensed under CC: some rights reserved)
Web 2.0 Expo
Most surprising was Web 2.0 Expo Berlin. I said before that I enjoyed last year’s Berlin web season around W2E, but many, many others disagreed. (Disclosure: I was there on a media pass, both years, so I was very well off there and got great support.) The main points of criticism were: Location (ICC sucked), catering (somewhat meager), attitude (seemed arrogantly organized), atmosphere (seemed like a replay).
So what was the surprise? To be honest, basically everything. It was great, from beginning to end. Except for really minor mishaps (at some point, free coffee was limited, which was fixed right away; at peak times wireless was slow) everything worked perfectly fine. The location great (BCC at Alexanderplatz, right in the heart of the city), it was small and cozy and had a kind of 60s retro charm that’s hard to describe, but really works. The food was yummy. The atmosphere was intimate and familiar. But the point that I’d like to stress most is the different attitude O’Reilly and TechWeb showed.
To take the kind of flak these guys got last year (and that was frankly quite often really low and unfair) and be open and good-spirited about it takes some (for lack of a better term) balls. The O’Reilly and TechWeb crew around Janetti Chon, Jen Pahlka and Brady Forrest was great. The blogger outreach program was a huge success. When the Berlinblase crew and I were liveblogging a keynote session and mentioned some wifi problems Jen was on the spot within mere minutes trying to see what she could do to fix everything. I almost felt bad for demanding such amounts of attention from those folks. But it’s something the blogger community here appreciated highly. Allow me to quote Johannes Kleske’s thoughts on Berlinblase:
What a difference a year makes. Following the communication of Techweb and O’Reilly in the last weeks you could really hear them making a huge effort of doing it right this time. I mean they could have easily said “Screw you, guys, we’re going to another city where people actually appreciate what we’re doing.” But instead they came back and asked for a second chance. And this time they are not bringing us “the gospel of Web 2.0″ but are doing a lot to empower the European web community.
All that just to say: Thanks, and we’d love to have you back next year. Srsly, dudes ;)
Which brings me to my last point: Berlinblase.
Berlinblase Moo cards by dotdean (licensed under CC: some rights reserved)
Berlinblase
Exactly one year ago, at Barcamp Berlin 2 and Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 07, Berlinblase was born as a tumblog and content mashup that aggregated everything related to the conference. Ever since, the project has been bubbling on low hear, so to speak. (Apologies for the puns that don’t really translate: “blase” means “bubble”.) For this year’s Barcamp and Web 2.0 Expo, we re-activated Berlinblase, relaunched the website, and got organized. We really wanted to cover the events up close, from the inside and on peer-level with the community. For all those who were there and wanted to have one central location for the coverage, and for those who couldn’t be in town. So we mashed up tweets, videos, blogs (both regulars and live ones), photos – you name it, we got it.
We did this for fun and out of passion, but the feedback we got was overwhelming – both in quantity and quality. (Thanks, everybody!) So many folks approached me over those few days with kind words, project ideas and invites to other conferences that we really didn’t know what to say. (Again: thanks!) We don’t know where this is headed, but it’s been a great ride so far. We started this more or less for fun, but it seems like there is quite some demand for on-site, insider coverage. Get in touch ;)
Also, it’s time for some really warm and fuzzy thanks and hugs: Nicole Simon was deeply involved in all of this: Barcamp, GirlGeekDinner, Web2Expo, you name it. Without Nicole, it seems, a lot of this wouldn’t have happened the way it did. Tobetop and Kai Uhlemeyer, who rocked the Barcamp. (You guys deserve some extra sleep, that’s for sure!) The same goes for Nicole Ebber, Picki, and the rest of the Barcamp orga team. Jen Pahlka of Techweb, Brady Forrest or O’Reilly and Janetti Chon, who did an awesome job at Web 2.0 Expo. Not only did everything work out extremely well, it was great fun to work with you guys, too. Stephanie Booth, you were great. (And sorry for the lack of soup!) Thanks Maureen Jennings of O’Reilly for the great press support, it was a pleasure. Also, thanks to all of you who agreed to sit down with me, or Berlinblase, or the Blogpiloten crew for interviews.
All of you guys did an amazing job. Thanks, a lot! Hope to see you soon, on one continent or another.
October is web season in Berlin (come & play!)
Just as last year, this October Berlin will be home to a whole bunch of great web events. Most notably, O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo will be in town, and no doubt will attract all the movers and shakers of the Web 2.0 world. Last year it was a blast. (One of the fun things: Asking Tim O’Reilly how he’d tell his mom what Web 2.0 is, a video that also was featured on the expo frontpage for quite a while. Here’s how.)
Also, BarCampBerlin goes into its third round. If you haven’t been to a BarCamp, put your name on the waiting list right away, I promise you won’t regret it. Where Web 2.0 Expo is all business, BarCamp is all about community. It’s just so much more intimate.
The awesome folks of Pl0gbar will organize another Pl0gbar (19 Oct), I already reserved the whole upper floor of Sankt Oberholz, Berlin geek crowd’s favorite coffee shop. Just follow the glow of the white Macbooks.
Of course, there’s more, like the Facebook Developer Garage, EduCamp (organized by Steffen Büffel), Girl Geek Dinner (organized by Nicole Simon) and, last but not least, a TechCrunch Meetup (from what Mike Butcher told me, Thursday the 23rd is the most likely date).
A good overview of the activities can be found on BerlinWebWeek.de. (Hey, they even have the fancy cover flow thing going on!)
I’d love to meet up if you’re in town, make sure to say hi! Also, feel free to connect on any of these channels:
- Twitter: thewavingcat
- email: peter@thewavingcat.com
- web2expo Crowdvine
- Dopplr
On a side note, a few friends and I will kick off a little side project I cannot talk too much about just yet. Just two hints: Remember (ironically-named = “Berlin Bubble”) Berlinblase, a spontaneous mashup of all things web 2.0 to cover the expo? (Links: Tumblog, video, Twitter.) Well, let’s just say we’ll try to push that a little further, plus are gathering a fun little geek team to rock SXSW as well. (Sponsor applications will be accepted soon.) Stay tuned.
Update: Got no Web 2.0 Expo Europe conference passes yet? As part of a blogger outreach program, Cordobo/Andreas has a registration code that’ll give you a 35% discount.
Next-generation content management for newspapers (is in the making)
Steve Yelvington helps newspapers get the web. Newspapers have a hard time adapting the new ways of the web, what with all this user-generated content, changing consumer habits and dropping sales. It’s a huge cultural problem – traditional vs new vs social media – too. (And it’s not that newspapers, their editors or their management are stupid. Of course they aren’t. Still, they struggling.)
Working with Morris DigitalWorks, Steve is working on a next-generation news site management system. Quite a claim to fame, but both his track record and the few details he already shares back it up. So what’s different here?
We’re integrating a lot more social-networking functionality, which we think is an important tool for addressing the “low frequency” problem that most news sites face.
We’re going to be aggressive aggregators, pulling in RSS feeds from every community resource we can find, and giving our users the ability to vote the results up/down. We’ll link heavily to all the sources, including “competitors.”
Ranking/rating, commenting, and RSS feeds will be ubiquitous. Users of Twitter, Pownce and Friendfeed will be able to follow topics of interest.
We’re also experimenting with collaborative filtering, something I’ve been interested in since I met the developers of GroupLens in the mid-1990s. It’s how Amazon offers you books and products that interest you: People whose behavior is the most like yours have looked at/bought/recommended this other thing.
That’s music in my ears. The whole thing is based on Drupal, which has always been strong on community features. Here, it seems, the whole platform will be aimed at creating mashups, drawing in RSS feeds, pushing them around and spitting them out. In the end, you should end up with a pretty lively site full of both professionally produced and user-generated content and commentary. Of course, by providing both input and output channels for RSS feeds, the data isn’t restricted to just the website, it lives on beyond, way in the cloud.
And the best thing: Usability-wise it’ll be aimed not at techies, but at editors. No major coding necessary:
Open tools and open platforms are great for developers, but what we really want to do is place this kind of power directly in the hands of content producers. They won’t have to know a programming language, or how databases work, or even HTML to create special presentations based on database queries. Need a new XML feed? Point and click.
That’s great news, and certainly a project to watch closely. Can’t wait to see the launch. October it is.
(via Strange Attractor)
Note: So far, the CMS code hasn’t been released under a GPL, but they’ve pledged to do so. All in good time.
Image: Howard Beatty by Flickr User Ann Althouse, released under Creative Commons (by-nc)
Ubiquity brings text back to browsing, let’s you mash up everything
Fresh from the Mozilla labs, Ubiquity looks like one of those plugins that might seriously change the way we do stuff on the web, or rather: in our browsers. It’s a new user interface that comes as a Firefox plugin, and it allows you to “ask” your browser for stuff by text. Sounds kind of… lame, or old-school? Maybe. But seriously, in this case I don’t think it is. I haven’t found the time to check it out more thoroughly, but take this video as a token; I’ll take it for a spin asap.
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Update: I’ve been testing Ubiquity for a few days now. First of all, it’s becoming more and more clear to me that a smart, language-based interface like this can be extremely powerful. The whole idea of on-the-fly mashups is pretty amazing. That said, it has a long way to go, just as it can be expected from an early prototype. (Ubiquity is a 0.1 alpha version.) The interface isn’t too powerful yet and doesn’t always get what you enter, emailing can be a bit awkward at first. However, the potential is clear from the very beginning. As of now, it’s something for what Robert Scoble calls “the passionates“. If you consider yourself a more settled down type of consumer, then you’d better wait for a while. If you’re one who enjoys tinkering, then what are you waiting for? Go get it and take it for a spin!
Web 2.0 Summit 08 shares web 2.0 lessons learned with the public
This year’s Web 2.0 Summit is a who is who of the internets. What I find particularly cool is this year’s theme: Sustaining, applying and expanding the web’s lessons. The summit won’t be just an insiders’ game, but instead aims at spreading the love knowledge with the less focused, more mainstream crowds.
This is really important. Something I see on a daily basis (both in my work as a consultant and as the private favorite geek for friends and family) is that there’s quite a disconnect between those who work for the Internets and those who just use it for day to day stuff.
The two groups are, roughly, those of us who meet up regularly at conferences, Barcamps and web mondays, i.e. the inner circle of usual suspects, the web family, are on one side, checking out and breaking every new service, every closed alpha or beta, tweaking and hacking and mashing upstuff, are one side of the medal. The rest, those out there who use hotmail or t-online for email, the wide public, has (understandably) not the time, nor the nerves to deal with all those buggy new gadgets and widgets and services and whatnot.
To bridge that gap and to share the lessons learned, is part of our responsibility as early adopters, I think. And it’s easy, too. (Your task for the day: Explain one useful web 2.0 tool to a close friend or family member, and how it will give them a real value. Deal?)
Web 2.0 Summit 08 will do just that, but on a huge scale. It’s some of the brightest, most well-connected folks on the web, and they’ll share what they know. Here’s the speaker list. It’ll be grand.
(via BoingBoing)
Tooltips for syncing slides and video
VCASMO is a pretty neat tool to sync video and slides. Just sayin’. VCASMO syncs videos fromm youtube or similar sources, and slideshows from slideshow.com. It’s a great little mashup, the results can be embedded either 440 pixels wide (as seen above) or 850 pixels wide:
Then there’s the Adobe Air based service Parleys, which looks very slick indeed. I can’t seem to find the embed code, so I can’t really tell if it’s embeddable. Here’s a demo. (Here’s a quick run-through of Parleys.com’s publishing tool.)
Omnisio actually looked the most promising, judging by the user interface and overall smoothness. It seems, however, like Google has aqcuired the service and is integrating parts of it into YouTube, namely into YouTube annotations. Sadly, that means you cannot create new slideshows with Omnisio. Also, the annotations seemed to be the most annoying part in the demos I watched. (I turned off the annotations after a few moments each time.) Let’s see where we’ll see Omnisio again:
Update: The latter two services were added after the initial publish.
Protect your tweets – or don’t
Recently I proposed to add a little Twitter feature, namely an indicator for why you protect your Twitter feed. (Why is this important? To prevent social awkwardness.) Tapio picked up on this issue and asked (among others) me:
You folks out there must have come across that situation: a new follower request comes in, you don’t know the person, what do you do? Simply deny? Feels impolite, doesn’t it? So here’s a meme: Why do you protect your Tweets (or not)?
Well, I’d love not to have my Twitter RSS feed indexed: So my 140 character ramblings wouldn’t be archived by The Google & co. On the other hand, all the cool mashups and extra services like FriendFeed wouldn’t work with Twitter, either. But so far, I figured the following: I’ll keep my Twitter feed public: That way, feed aggregators work, and it’s easier for new and old Twitterers to follow my tweets, i.e. to get in touch. To prevent awkward moments in the future, I’ll simply not write what I can’t stand by; and not post anything while annoyed. Both of which I guess are kind of good guidelines for any kind of communication anyway.
So back to Tapio’s meme: I’m curious, why do (or don’t) you protect your Tweets? Let’s hear from Markus (Twitter, blog), dotDean (Twitter, blog), Felix (Twitter, blog) and Michelle (Twitter, blog)
ePolitics: What’s happening right now?
I’d like to give an overview over the whole ePolitics space, from online campaigning to e-participation. Of course, that’s hardly possible, so I’m not even going to try. (If you have such an overview, please share in the comments!) Instead, I’ll just point out some things, projects & news that have struck me as interesting lately.
Pew Internet: The Internet and the 2008 Election
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has published a new report on The Internet and the 2008 Election (PDF here) which shows that video is gaining traction, and that Americans gather a fair amount of politics-related information online:
A record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others. And Barack Obama’s backers have an edge in the online political environment.
In other words: The web is getting more important for political campaigns. Expect more to see during the U.S. elections. Personally, I’m interested in seeing the development from here to the next German federal elections in 2009.
Google: Public Policy Talks
Google, too, is getting more and more into politics and how they’re changed by the internet. On their Public Policy Blog and in a corresponding series of talks (YouTube channel) they discuss the first 21st century campaign.
Transparency tools online
A whole bunch of tools and web projects aimed at increasing transparency and fostering online dialog is being developed as I’m typing this. Ameritocracy (my review here) is one of them that has already launched, it’s a platform for collaborative fact-checking. Zilino is still in the making (launch probably this summer), but judging from what maker Tim has been telling me, it’s going to be pretty awesome. Zilino is on twitter and of course there’s a blog, too. Same goes for the Partnership for Public Participation (PfPP), that will develop a toolkit for e-participation. Simon has updates on the project’s progress and e-participation in general. (Full disclosure: Simon and I share an office.)
Mashups and other fun projects
Different players, different approaches: A YouTube channel covers the role of Social Media and the 2008 US Presidential Election, a Google Maps mashup visualizes the 2008 US Primary Results. All the big players have their extra U.S. election pages, like Pageflakes, YouTube’s YouChoose 08 or Digg’s Digg The Candidates. SexyPolitics is proof that politics can be smart, yet sexy.
What else should be on this list? Please share, I’m curious!
links for 2007-06-20
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The Cooperation Project, a collaboration between the Institute for the Future and Howard Rheingold, proposes to catalyze an interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action. We do this by compiling and synthesizing current knowledge, mapping t
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An aspiring blogger can be overwhelmed with the vast amount of resources, tools, and advice for bloggers available on the net. While in no way definitive – there’s simply too much going on in this space to cover it all – we did our best to bring you a c
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And so as I said at the top (in my “bottom line”), I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. “Corruption” as I’ve defined
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Our goal is to make open Wi-Fi act more like a wireless infrastructure that can compete with 3G networks, except freely created and shared by the users. We want to be able to get on fast, free Wi-Fi wherever we go, so we’re building the tools to make that
Nicole Simon: A European View on Web 2.0
Nicole Simon gave a great presentation at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Topic: A European View on Web 2.0. I strongly suggest watching the slides, no matter if you’re American or work for a US company, or if you’re from somewhere else but deal with US companies a lot: Either way, she’s very much to the point.
The presentation itself is very much self-explaining, so without further ado:
Probably every non-US resident out there who’s somewhat actively involved in the web is familiar with those issues: You can’t sign up for a service, can’t buy a good, and – god beware! – can’t use the service in your local language. The odd thing is: Most netheads at some point just get used to it, and adapt to all the requirements needed to participate: We have Paypal accounts (or had them before there was a local version), order from Amazon.com (instead .de) every now and then, maybe have an American credit card. We speak English, skim NYTimes or Washington Post. I even tried to order MakeZine, but had to cancel the subscription ’cause it took more than 6 weeks to arrive. (Instead I settled for Wired, which is a steep seven times the price abroad compared to the US.) And so on.
And don’t get me wrong: I’m not bitter about any of this. It’s kinda fun, really. But you seriously can’t expect anybody to do that. Which leads to the very odd effect that the web community uses all the US services. But once our families and less webby friends catch up, they often use localized versions, knock-offs, the above-quoted successful copycats, i.e.: everything but the US version, unless it’s translated. (And translated does not just mean another language, but often different sorts of content, different style etc.)
(This, in turn, leads to a sort of digital divide within the web, what someone called a digital divide of the second order: Some people just caught up on how to use email, while others are creating their latest flickr-facebook-netvibes-twitter mashups.)
So this presentation really hit the core. Thanks, Nicole!
