The following is intended to be a summary of various links covering Barcamp Auckland 2010 as my notes only capture what I was able to attend.
Much of the discovery was done via a twitter search, so I’m not expecting it to be an exhaustive list – please let me know if I’ve missed anything so I can update to include you [Note: I'm using your shortened links wherever I can to retain your ability to track clicks, so let me know what links you'd rather I use...]
Thanks once again to Ludwig Wendzich@Ludwigw for doing the hard yards to make it such a successful day.
Barcamp Auckland is an annual gathering of developers, designers, start-ups and social-media types. It’s a full day event held in an ‘unconference’ like style, where the attendee (see my attendee & interested folks list on Twitter) set the schedule – and people turn up to discuss topics which interest them.
The following are the session notes I took during this years Auckland Barcamp
Disclosure: I have met and spent time with Laurel during a workshop a few years back and was well impressed then, as I have continued to be as I’ve followed her commentary on all things social media. For those interested, I’d recommend following her posts, and subscribing to her podcasts.
As I gear up for this weekends unconference, I’ve been looking through my Delicious bookmarks, specifically on things around Education, which is one of the sessions I’d like to run, if nothing else – to get a different perspective from that discussed at this yearsBaaCamp where I was part of a similar session.
I came across this video, speaking to the one way approach many educators are taking to using the Internet as a resource. The presenter has written a supporting article (PDF) where he explains the different roles students can take to build engagement, and to collaborate with their global peers
Food for thought – and a definite starter for our discussions at TelecomONE this weekend – how can we as an industry help support our educators and their students to become part of the global voice of learning?
Below is the Tag cloud for the start of October 2009, based on the keywords in the biographies of the people I follow on Twitter. I created an earlier snapshot of this in February – it’s quite interesting to compare the two.
The embedded video came across my Twitter feed this morning (thanks @rgoodchild) under the heading of ‘The Perfect Geek Rapper’. Now while m0serious may not be in the same league as NerdCore rapper MC Frontalot,his material will still coax a smile from those of us who have an interest in site design, UI and Ux – as well as imparting some good coding behaviors…
Slap on your headphones and have a listen:
Peace out yo… (Man, I’m soo hip and street and stuff… *makes complicated gesture with fingers*)
It is like Topify.com before less interesting. And in addition their twitter account is not even working. I personnally tried both and prefer Topify (first because their have a much nicer site) because their emails are better and allow follow back right from the message. In addition, I had too many down time with twimailer…
To be honest, I’ve not had any issues with the [Twimailer] service to date, but this comment sparked my interest – which peaked when I read this article on Read Write Web. It appears that Twimailer has been sold (for a somewhat paltry sum) to an unknown, who is in turn trying to flick off the service to another buyer less than a week after acquiring it.
As a result of this article, I have gone into my Twitter settings, changed my email back to the one used prior to the Twimailer service AND changed my password. I’d suggest that others do the same.
It may seem a little reactionary, but as I use my identity not only for my private tweets but also in support of my work, the potential threat of hijack is too high a price to pay for continued support for a service which has failed to inform its network of some pretty key changes in it’s organisation. Sorry Twimailer, it’s over between us, I’m moving on – and trying Topify
So my thanks once again to Alain for peaking my interest, and to the guys at RWW for keeping across these technologies – these are the reasons that you get my subscriptions to your Twitter and RSS feeds.
Ben Young wrote an article which appeared in today’s Herald entitled “The 12 Hour Startup“. Essentially, it promoted taking time out of working in your business, to spend time working on your business… and it attracted an interestingly one sided range of responses.
I was so disappointed in the views which were pitched in response, that I felt compelled to try and answer some of the commenters and provide a little balance. My response is copied below:
It’s with some hilarity that I am reading the comments on this article – the vitriol is palatable and the underlying understanding is verging on infinitesimal. There was so much negativity that I felt compelled to post something myself in the interests of balance.
@Ben10
1 – No, a decent IT department will appreciate that Facebook and it’s ilk are part of what Gen Y employees expect to be able to do, it’s where they connect with others and how they gain feedback for issues that they may well be trying to solve for their employer. If you truly believe that full control over what employees do on the web is possible while still retaining employee goodwill, then you may need to realign your naivety.
2 – So, if your company cannot sustain 12 hours a month, how about a quarter – I don’t believe the time frames were prescriptive, feel free to adjust to what suits your business. Your risk tolerance may be too low for significant change – that may suit your business if you are not seeking to change anything, but those who DO change and invest in a culture where change is both welcomed and expected will be better suited to adapt to an increasingly agile market. You may find this article helpful.
3 – Another all too common mistake. You confuse management with leadership. They ARE different things and your hierarchical world view is sadly showing.
@internet biz guy
Again I’d challenge your assertion this is ‘bogus’. Great ideas come from such brainstorming and the medici effect of gathering ideas from a wide range of sources (and levels of employees, to reinforce the counter to @ben10 #3) has been around since the 15th century, far be it for someone *young* to dare to reassert such thinking! As for a bio, I used Google and some other online resources to find out about the author.. surely as an internet biz guy you did the same?
@Derek
A 1:10 ratio of ideas to successful launch is actually quite high, if you’re looking for innovations rather than adjacencies and/or improvements that is. Phil McKinney (innovation lead for a fairly large company) discusses these ratios and strategies at length, if you *are* interested, a good place to start is here
@xavier money
“Employees are by definition not great inventors or entrepreneurs” By whose definition, yours? Are you attracting the right people to your company as employees then? There are very few people who know your products and company capabilities better than your employees and your customers. If you are not prepared to leverage these people as a resource then, well – you may well end up working on the same thing for most of your life. Actual real life entrepreneurs will begin, build and sometimes sell off a large number of businesses in their time. Branson would be a good example of this, a wide range of companies under his tutorship. Steve Jobs would be another who as leveraged adjacencies and diversified, rather than sticking to one idea and focusing on it for a lifetime. I guess peoples measures of success vary.
In the interests of disclosure, I am not *that* young, but I am marginally under 40 – please feel free to use the period of my existence to judge the usefulness of my response if that’s what makes you feel comfortable in your world view.
What I have learned from the experience is there is still a marked lack of confidence in ‘young’ people with ideas, and there is still a lot of traditional thinking out there. It will be interesting to see how the adoption curve plays out for these people.
Edit 08 April 2009 – Twimailer has recently been sold, see here for my impressions as to why this may no longer be a safe service to use.
After a weekend-worth of new followers of my Twitter stream, I’ve decided to try out Twimailer – a service I was made aware of last week by my friend Simon who gave it a fairly good review.
Below is a quick overview (via Vimeo) of what it does, I’ll be trying it out over the next week or so and report back on how useful (or not) it has been.
tagging incoming messages with “is following you on Twitter” in the subject line
Intermittently reviewing the folder containing these tagged items, opening each email then opening the followers twitter link in a new tab, and archiving the email so I know it’s been dealt with.
I then had to review each twitter page to see if they had a useful and interesting bio, and tweet stream – or if they were a follow-whore who simply sends spammy links.
The problem of late has been that of volume – I’ve had so many new followers that this approach is not scaling – enter Twimailer, which does the review stuff for me and allows a one click follow.
Edit: 25/03/2009 – Sucess! this is one service which has made by Twitter managment one heck of a lot easier. I’d recommend it to all keen Twitter users for managing their follow/follow back notifications.
You may have noticed a number of avatars turning black since the start of this week, this blackout is only a part of the actions planned during the recent FooCamp to draw attention to New Zealands impending copyright law changes.
I’m going to use this post to bring some of the commentary on the subject together, for more detail – follow the links below:
Stephen Fry even joined the fray blacking out his avatar, changing his bio and posting updates such as this one [image] – once he joined in and linked to a story covering the blackout, that was it for the hosting site… for a few minutes at least, he did apologise… and got some coverage from the NZ media about it (and on Stuff).
Even some NZ businesses and websites have joined the campaign:
Just to be clear, I am not advocating stealing copyrighted works, the reason I created this post is that I (personally) believe that S92 has a number of fundamental flaws which require attention now, rather than a retrospective patch up job.
For an interesting perspective on copyright and why some people may feel they should ignore it, check out this article (hat tip @Titine)
Also, an interesting result from some digging around ARPA by Simon Lyall can be found here. Joining the ‘interesting’ articles, is this one which outlines Clare Currans view on S92 even down to the view that “there are significant issues with the controversial Section 92A” and this one from Tony Millett of the LIANZA’s Copyright Taskforce.
Juha has also published an interesting article summising the RIANZ responce to the industry TCF here.
Yesterday Alain E. posted 
