Month: June 2005

Podbot Video

Post ImageIf you haven’t really checked out the Podbot website, you definitely should! One of the things you’ll find is a collection of video that we recorded throughout the creation process. Some of them show us talking about what we’re learning, and others are more fun, like the Podbot driving over Micropets.

One really excellent video is Andrew’s Closing Monologue, in which he offers some comments on the project after we finished. And if you’d rather stick to static photos instead of video, you can check out my Podbot Photostream over at Flickr.

Read: Podbot Video

Julie Leung's session at Gnomedex

Post ImageI think I know why people like Julie’s talk so much. Unlike most speakers, Julie tells a story more than she does just talk. And she does so in such a way that it is very compelling! As she talks, she shows a slideshow of images up on the screen. The photos have very interesting perspectives and subjects – some are of family, some are landscapes, and others are closeups of objects. The images serve to provide humor in some places, and reinforcement in others. Above all, Julie is an excellent speaker. She knows just where to insert the pauses, or place the emphasis.

Julie talked about blogging and some of the social concerns you might have. For example, Julie posts a lot about her family, but she has chosen not to post pictures of her children’s faces (and thus, Gnomedexers are asked to follow this rule). She has an entire theory about blogging, and how it can be socially beneficial. Here are some of the things I picked up:

  • Bloggers generally do not practice narcissim, but rather create opportunities for the sharing of ideas.
  • It’s okay to post something private or personal, because by doing so you can educate and encourage others. The example she gave was how she posted about her brother passing away.
  • Julie says its about the chronicle. Writing the story so that it can be remembered and shared. Humans enjoy stories from a very early age, and have been creating the chronicle for centuries.
  • Blogging can help us find out who we are and what we’re meant to do.
  • “If you’re willing to make what’s private public, you can plant the seeds of new ideas.”

I really enjoyed Julie’s session; it was definitely as good as people made it out to be (she delivered a very similar talk at Northern Voice in February). If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend attending Julie’s session.

Read: Gnomedex

Back to 'conference normal'

Well it’s back to business as usual when it comes to conferences.
Dickson and I just got here, about 45 minutes late, just in time for
Julie Leung’s session. It just wouldn’t be a conference if we didn’t
show up late at least once!

Seattle Trip Day 3

Post ImageDoesn’t seem like the third day already, but I guess it was, and it went quite well! The conference started today, bright and early at 8:30 AM. We got there a little early (which is abnormal for Dickson and I at conferences) so we were able to get the Podbot up and running. It is definitely the kind of thing where people can’t help but look.

We spent most of our day in the main auditorium, as that’s where all of the sessions were being held. I have never seen so many laptops in a single room before. As a result, the Internet access was virtually non-existent, having been easily overloaded with people uploading and downloading. We drove the Podbot around a little, but couldn’t do too much as the wireless kept cutting out. We only managed to get one thing uploaded at lunch.

In the afternoon I ran into David Geller showing off his Segway, and being the nice guy that he is, letting people give it a try. So, Dickson and I got to try the Segway, and I must say, it was really very cool! It took a few seconds to get used to it, because it seems awkward when you first get on, but once that was overcome, it actually felt quite natural. I was really impressed!

After a quick trip back to the hotel and a bite to eat at McDonalds, it was off to the networking event being held at the Seattle Public Library. The building itself is really beautiful, it was definitely an excellent choice of venue. Tonight was where the Podbot really got to shine! The wireless worked good, and we we ended up recording quite a few episodes. It was neat because we’d record with someone, then we could immediately show them that it was up on the website, and tagged at Podcast Tags. Everything worked smoothly, and it was really quite cool.

In case you’re wondering, the picture for this post is of the Podbot sitting on Robert Scoble‘s red couch. You can see some new Podbot pictures from today here, and you can check out some general pictures Dickson and I took at Gnomedex, including some of us riding the Segway, here.

Read: Pictures

Tomorrow's Open Source

Post ImageSome notes on the open source session hosted by Matt Westervelt, Asa Dotzler (Mozilla), Scott Collins, and Matt Mullenweg (WordPress):

  • Asa: “Open source is changing things, and open source itself is changing.”
  • Asa seems to think that we’re starting to see open source projects be chosen on quality rather than simply because it is open source or free.
  • SpreadFirefox is an example of handing over control of the brand and marketing to the product’s users who are generally more honest and passionate about the product. Scott points out that Firefox is something of an anomaly, there is no plan to enable the same effect with other products. According to Asa, it comes down to the testimonials.
  • Matt M. explains that WordPress is a great example of a community driven project, because it is improved by the people using it, resulting in a much better end product. Instead of developer driven development, you have user driven development.
  • The ad that ran in the New York Times for Firefox didn’t really create a download spike itself, but the associated media articles that covered the event sure did, according to Asa.
  • Scott makes a good point, IMO, Firefox had a really great head start to becoming successful, something that other open source projects can’t match: it exists in a market that was dominated by a single product so consumers were eager for something new, it was incubated by a company with financial backing and a team of programmers to ensure it reached the “it works great” level before being cut loose, and it is a product that people use everyday.

And that’s all I got from the session because after that last point I went to ride David Geller‘s Segway. More on that later!

Read: Gnomedex

Today's Citizen Media

Post ImageThere was obviously lots to talk about in this session hosted by David Geller, John Battelle, and Dan Gillmor, but I took one specific thing away from it. Dan Gillmor, in answering a question posed by Darren Barefoot about how the average citizen can become important enough when big media is around, said that what we’re talking about is “mass media” and NOT “mainstream media”.

For some reason, that statement really resonates. Mainstream is quite relative when you think about it. If you read a dozen different publications every day, that’s mainstream for you, even if no one else reads the same publications. Mass media is a much better way to describe the organizations that normally come to mind – the big newspapers, television and radio stations, and websites.

When you think about it, the defintion makes a difference when you try to figure out how joe average can make a successful podcast. It doesn’t matter if that podcast becomes “mass media”, what’s more important is that it becomes “mainstream media” for a group of people. If you’ve got something you’re passionate about and something you want to say, and there are people who want to listen, I’d define that as success.

Podcasting will almost definitely become another technology used by mass media. What will truly decide whether or not it has staying power, is if podcasting becomes mainstream media too. And based on the growth we’ve seen so far, I think it’s a safe bet.

Read: Gnomedex

Tomorrow's Education

Post ImageHere are some notes on Kathy Gill and Paul Vogelzang’s session on tomorrow’s education:

  • The premise here is that students at the University level are still working with newspapers, and old media, and don’t get the connection when someone says “Flickr.” Maybe in the US it’s different, but in my experience, University students are pretty cutting edge.
  • Of Kathy’s students, juniors and seniors in Communications at the University of Washington, 11% had never heard of a blog, and only 7% had heard of Flickr. Only 11% were regular blog consumers.
  • According to Kathy, the most common place to find blogs in education today is in English classes. This is not surprising to me, the fit is so natural.
  • Blogs give instant gratification, something that “cannot be undersold” when you’re talking about University students.
  • How are blogs being used in education – media literacy, managing course content, helps make sure students have read their readings, can be used for collaborative editing, facilitates user-centered learning.
  • Some tips: use common tools for all students, specifiy a minimum post size, provide guiding questions so that students have a starting point, make sure comments are enabled, make sure a marking guide is well defined.
  • Kathy says that online education (distance learning) 2.0 is coming, and it will shake up the current educational institutions.
  • According to Paul, the US federal government is looking at blogs and podcasts as a potentially useful technology. He was forced to read at the start of his talk however, a small paragraph explaining that the government does not current do any blogging or podcasting.
  • RSS makes a lot of sense for government, the biggest reason being cost savings. RSS allows rapid information dispersal at relatively low cost. And, it fosters good social interactions with citizens.
  • In particular, the Treasury Department is trying to get more stuff online, and RSS will be key in that effort.

A bit of a shorter session, and definitely felt a little rushed.

Read: Gnomedex

Tomorrow's Syndication and HiveCasting

Just
listened to the “Tomorrow’s Syndication” session here at Gnomedex,
hosted by Steve Gillmor, Dave Sifry, and Scott Gatz. Here’s a couple
notes:

  • Dave Winer made the point that no one uses attention.xml, so what’s
    the point for Yahoo to support it ? (It does support attention.xml in
    myYahoo)
  • Actually this session was kinda funny because Yahoo was made out to be “the old Microsoft”
  • Basically, a major vendor won’t play ball with a technology like attention.xml on a small level simply because of economics

Yeah I didn’t take too much away from this session, but it appears
that some people did, so that’s good. As I am writing this, B.
Honeywell (dressed in a bee costume) just took the stage to explain
“HiveCasting – the Future of Communication”. Some details:

  • HiveCasting enables hive to hand communication
  • Bee communication is improved by outfitting bees with radios and antennas (some funny pictures on the screen now)
  • Then communication went one step further, by integrating a circuit board into a bee hive
  • Now there’s just a barrage of slides, I can’t keep up, but this is pretty funny 🙂
  • Ah now there’s two audience members dressed as bees, asking questions and making comments. Priceless!

Ah that was refreshing, and good call Chris, a little humor goes a long way!

Read: Gnomedex

UPDATE: Podbot @ Gnomedex

Post ImageThings are going quite well with the Podbot! The wireless network here has been kind of spotty, so at times we have lost control. We only had one problem though, someone accidentally hit the side of the Podbot when it started moving after receiving a delayed command. The Podbot survived, but one of the side panel screws popped out, so we’ll have to fix that later.

We were able to record something at the start of lunch and get it uploaded, but it’s been quite difficult to be connected long enough and well enoungh. We’ll keep trying though!

The Podbot has been featured on Engadget today, and the Channel9 team from Microsoft was here at Gnomedex recording some video, so you should be able to see it there later too.

Read: Podbot

Microsoft: Browse. Search. Subscribe!

Post ImageHere’s some notes I took from the keystone by Dean Hachamovitch from Microsoft:

  • Longhorn *heart* RSS
  • Microsoft is betting big on RSS for Longhorn. They want to “RSS everything”.
  • They are using IE7 to show off the RSS experiences in Longhorn. This is the first public demo of IE7. IE7 now supports auto-discovery of feeds much like Firefox, an icon lights up on the toolbar. You can also view a preview of the feed, complete with search-in-page functionality. You can then subscribe to the feed in much the same way as a user would add a Favorite in IE today.
  • Now they are using MSN Search to search for Gnomedex, to display that it has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.
  • Longhorn has the concept of a “subscription store” called a “common feed list”, so that all applications can hook into the same collection of feeds using the Windows API. This is the killer RSS feature for Longhorn, IMO. They are showing how this works with a new build of RSS Bandit.
  • They just thanked Dave Winer for inventing the enclosure tag. Was that necessary? You can only beat a dead horse so many times…
  • Now they’re showing how the Outlook calendar works with the whole Subscribe mentality. They visited the HTML schedule page for Gnomedex, and created an RSS feed from it. Now they have a special program that looks in the common feed list for feeds with calendar objects, and then adds them as appointments into Outlook.
  • Wow, someone at the front made a comment and just got chopped.
  • Oooh, pretty little demo of a photo blog being downloaded and the photos displayed in a screensaver complete with captions and descriptions. Very neat way of visualizing a photoblog.
  • Now they’re talking about the extensions to RSS that they are proposing. One of them allows RSS to work better with lists. Another allows a publisher to describe the content of the feed. They worked with Amazon.com to create RSS feeds out of the Amazon Wishlists as an example.
  • The specification for the Simple List Extensions is going to be released under a Creative Commons License. They played a video from Larry Lessig welcoming Microsoft into the CC family.
  • As of noon today, there will be an architectual overview document on RSS in Longhorn and specs for the Simple List Extensions avaiable on the web.
  • Schedule: Longhorn Beta 1 is set for PDC05, and will contain some of the envisioned RSS experience.
  • “This is the start of the conversation.”

All pretty cool stuff. I can’t wait to see the first beta of Longhorn, it should be pretty awesome if all of this stuff is implemented and working well.

Read: Gnomedex