Rob the Geek

The following are the session notes I took during this years Auckland Barcamp

• Session 1: Seadragon & Data Visualisation
• Session 2: Doing Less. Using SaaS and API’s to automate your workflow
• Session 3: What next for Digital TV in NZ
• Session 4: Open Data in NZ – Where we’re at, and Where to next
• Session 5: What do you want from your Telco / Service provider?

• Five Minute Slots
  • Pacific Fibre
  • Day without Media
  • Is EVAL evil
  • Interclue
  • Judson Steel
  • Augmented Reality

• Session 6: Ragtag Leadership: How organisations need more Captain Mal and less Captain Kirk
• Session 7: Getting the most out of Home Tech – Gadget stories and Connectivity nightmares
• Session 8: Social Good: Using your TechFu

continue reading…

Honestly, this is brilliant – while the clip itself has been mashed up to cover everything from Hitlers replacement motorbike to his choice in gaming consoles, this subtitling by Laurel Papworth (original article) has a bunch of agencies across the ditch resorting to ad-hominems – a classic sign of “oh-bollocks-what-do-we-do-now”.

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.

What. an. event.

There is simply too much to type to do justice to what I got out of last nights event, so I’ll post this entry as it is, unfinished, but linking to some of the cool stuff which was discussed…

Keep up with the tweets surrounding the event here – and I’ll be summarising my notes over the weekend.

For now, check out this vid which was shown as a segway between speakers…

Awesome

Here’s a great presentation by Joakim Vars Nilsen on the Power of People (why empowering people is key in marketing).

There are more than a few companies who could benefit from watching this deck – and it doesn’t (really) matter what size your business is, the principals remain true, it’s just the speed of uptake which will be the variable.

Discuss.

Yesterday Alain E. posted the following comment on my Twimailer article

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.

Photo Credit: USFarmer / Redman

Since moving from the R&D field into the amorphous world of IT security, I’ve been trawling the web to find good resources to add to my list of feeds and help me learn more about what we do as a collective, and how those stories are sold to the non-security folk.

It was with some interest that I clicked the  link “IT security vendors worth following on Twitter“ when today’s Network World security email arrived in my inbox. The article itself makes for some interesting reading, as does the Über list of IT and Network companies using Twitter.

For myself, I’m currently struggling with the streams I already follow and, while applications such as TweetDeck allow me to create groups of twitterers, the sheer volume of tweets I deal with day to day has convinced me to cherry pick some of the selected “best of” tweeters for inclusion on my watchlist. They are as follows:

• Cisco
• Juniper
• Verisign
• McAfee Avert Labs
• Kaspersky Lab
• Kaspersky ThreatPost Blog
• Graham Cluley
• Mikko Hypponen
• Patrik Runald

And of course, you can always follow me on Twitter as @NZRob

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.

Twimailer demo from jon on Vimeo.

To date, I’ve been managing my followers by:

• 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:

• Juha Saarinen
• David Farrar (and on KiwiBlog)
• Russel Brown
• NME
• Nat Torkington
• Brenda Wallace – here, here, and here. Here, Brenda compares the coverage between TVNZ and TV3
  
• IT Gen
• Lynne Pope
• Peter Dunne – MP
• Bevan Rudge
• Maurico Freitas
• IP World
• NZ Herald
• Read Write Web
• The Guardian UK
• Copywrong Song (YouTube) (CFF)
• BoingBoing
• ZDNet Australia
• NetGuide
• The G33k Show & Kangaroo Court
• Owned
• BGeek.net
• Wikipedia
• The Register
• Ben Kepes
• Mark Harris
• The Opinionated Diner
• NZ Herald – Cartoon
• Flying Kiwis
• TUANZ

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:

• ProjectX
• They Work for You
• Janet Mazenier – Artist

And it’s been on the radio:

• Radio Wammo
• Radio New Zealand

And the telly:

• TV3 News (from around 4:00 mins) and here (where they get things very WRONG)
• TVNZ (Website) and an article here

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.

I was discussing the consumption of information with a colleague this afternoon as he was telling me he, like I, has just started adding a bunch more RSS feeds to his reader in an effort to access different thinking above and beyond what we traditionally follow (i.e. dropping some of the IT specific feeds in favor of very different material, sciences, architecture etc.)

With this in mind, I thought I’d take a snapshot of who I follow on Twitter to see where my (apparent) interests currently fall – it makes interesting reading, at least I think so. If you’d like to do the same, try TwitterSheep – a link to my current cloud is here

I’ll make an effort to link to snapshots over time to track the changes.

Parachute, a New Zealand Christian Music Festival held at Mystery Creek, Hamilton, New Zealand, has recently finished and, while our church had its share of musicians playing at the event, I started receiving a fair number of followers during and after the event – even without attending, or referring to it. It would appear that the power of the social net is such that, by association, newcomers to a community will seek out others to follow and often it’s solely the adjacency to someone they currently follow that you will be selected as a person of potential interest.

One of these people is Vaughn Rivett who took the initiative to create a twitter identity for the event and used it to post information and public service announcements over the weekend. Vaughn has recently published an article on his blog outlining the process and what happened which makes for some interesting reading. I’ve already posted a comment suggesting the inclusion of hash tags for next years event, but click over there and make your own comments as to how he (and the organisers) could embrace the social web to gain even more traction for next year.

Since Vaughn started following me, we’ve had a bit of back and forth starting from an issue I was having posting a comment on one of his other articles, moving on to the fact I own a EEE netbook and resulting in him using some of his business contacts to actually find me a car charger that I was looking for prior to Christmas (and as a result, being able to help some other EEE owners looking for the same). Again, the social web strikes, connecting two people who didn’t know about each other until a few days ago, and resulting in unprompted offers of assistance to solve a problem.

Edit: As I drafted this article up, Vaughn has tweeted out (using a suggested hashtag) a request for retweets to do just this.

Awesome the speed of the web isn’t it?