This is what I do for a living. Man, it must suck not to be me.
Category Archives: What I’m doing
LeWeb ’08
I’ve missed the last couple of Loic’s uber-conferences since they morphed into LeWeb, so it’s actually 3 years since I went to the second LesBlogs. I hear that the food has recovered from the curse of the microlunch… I’m looking forward to finding out more. If you’d like to come too, you can register here.
Last time I was in Paris, I came away quite depressed by it all – it felt like we as Europeans hadn’t found our voice. We knew we had something different to offer from the Americans but weren’t sure what it was. The silliness between Ben Metcalfe and Mena Trott epitomised that. We’ve all learned a lot since then, haven’t we?
I think I’m most comfortable with it now because I no longer have great expectations of participation. I get my participative kicks elsewhere – this is big and it’s going to be like watching telly, it just is and if I don’t feel like watching every minute of what’s on stage, I shan’t be too bothered, because I’ve built my network up now to the point where I know I’ll be able to find plenty of people to hang out with, either online or off.
Having said that, thanks to the excellent blogger outreach programme, I will be there to write about what’s going on and there are some prospective super-goodies in the programme – Brian Cox, David Weinberger, Paolo Coelho, Chris Anderson and Joi Ito stand out for me – I’m glad to see that there’s a split on the second day between the plenary and “deep discussions”
And Marc Canter is running a panel on the second morning, so the book’s open on when he’ll sing and when he’ll be asleep.
Web 2.0 Expo Berlin
Poverty. Best not to think about it.
This morning in London.
Extraordinary? No.
Sad? Only if you think about it. About who she is, what she’s dreaming of, how she got there.
So, probably best not to think about it.
Taking Responsibility in Commercial Relationships
Ouch!
I’ve been trying to write something about this for a while but finding a title that didn’t mention VRM was important to me and now I’ve just done it, it looks scary but worthwhile. “VRM” (or vendor relationship management) as a term doesn’t look scary or even interesting let alone worth putting some effort into. It’s a cute shorthand, but, in my view, talking about “the reciprocal of CRM” will only work for the intersection of two groups: those who understand CRM and those who understand what a reciprocal is…
We’ll be hosting a bolt-on (starting at 12.30) to this week’s new-fangled Tuttle at the ICA in preparation for a conference (at which I’m speaking) on 3rd November: “Unlocking the see-saw” organised by the unstoppable Adriana Lukas.
I’m interested in particular in:
Why it’s time for us to take power back from vendors who’ve come to dominate and control our relationship with them.
How we can make the whole thing a lot more fun.
What successful personal relationships can teach us about improving commercial ones.
How we start to take more responsibility for our part in commercial relationships.
What freedoms we can lay claim to.
How relationships are affected by being codified into structured data.
How the social web can be used to manage such relationships for our benefit.
Which is to say, I haven’t written my presentation yet beyond those few bullet points.
Come, help us think it through on Friday.
Women in Tech Panel at Web2.0
I’m very honoured that Suw has asked me to contribute to her “panel” in Berlin on the tech gender gap (taking place on the Thursday afternoon).
Here’s the description:
“It is undeniably true that there aren’t enough women in tech, that women are not well represented at conferences, and often don’t get the promotions, rewards and acclaim they deserve. We also know that the issue of gender is not a simple one: there are complex societal and psychological pressures that influence how we all behave, men and women, and we’re not always clear on what drives us to do what we do. This participatory session will attempt to unpick some of the threads around gender and will aim to produce ideas for how we can collectively act to level the playing field.”
I have no opinion on the numbers of “women in tech” really – I don’t know enough about it at the sharp end, but I do know that I sit in many conferences listening to men (in suits) drone on, often about something that a bunch of other people have done. I find tuttle encouraging in terms of our gender mix – and there were plenty of women leading sessions at socialmediacamp last week.
But I’m also aware that these are just my perceptions and are subject to gender bias too, so I’m looking forward to exposing my views and experience to some debate and discussion that will hopefully lead to some action.
If you want to take part, of course you’ll be very welcome, but you’ll have to come along to the conference. Which means you’ll have to sign-up. And there’s no better way than to use the 35% discount code webeu08gr43 on the registration page.
Who? Why?
Walking past Elle on Wigmore Street, I actually looked in the window for once. Smack! went my gob. The turquoise crocodile skin shoes with matching belt combo hit me first, but I was equally shocked by the crazy bow ties and paisley silk jacket. Or how about that rainbow shirt?
Well Kat seems to like it. But don’t expect to see me strolling through Soho in clobber like this any time soon.
Boris haz a fear
Though apparently nomophobia is a fear of not being in mobile contact, which makes sense really as I can’t imagine Boris being afraid of nom.
External mic on N95
OK, so I thought everyone knew this already but it seems that it hasn’t gone as widely as I assumed.
I picked up this hack initially from Jackie Danicki at Qik who did a little video of it. That led me to google “external mic for N95” and this article
So in order to make it work you need an N95 and the TV-out cable (with mini-jack and three-way A/V connectors) that came with it. If you threw the cable away, you should be able to get one for a few quid on e-bay. Then you need a female to female phono adapter – the gold one in the picture below and a female mini-jack to male phono adapter (the black one) – both available from Maplin for a couple of quid each.
I use the external tie-clip mic that I’ve had for ages (again from Maplin I think and about £20) it’s one of those with a battery driven pre-amp. The mini-jack from the mic gets joined to the A/V cable as shown.
And err… that’s it. If you check out my post where I interviewed Oli Barrett, you’ll see an example of a video shot with this set up. I’ll try and do another one showing the difference more starkly, but there’s an example in the shelbinator article above.
social media camp london
I’m just writing this at social media camp in front of a bunch of people who came expecting to see something much more interesting and their being very polite.
Perfect Path 