a personal blog about technology, communications and other stuff that interests me
High Road’s resident telecom and wireless PR experts Sarah Spence and Jo-Anne Stayner are hosting a webinar on best ways to get exposure at this important industry show. Brad Smith of Wireless Week will join them to provide insights and guidance from a media perspective. The seminar is on August 9th at 1 PM EST. Go here for more information and registration.
Statscan today realeased the findings of a survey on “The Internet and the way we spend our time”. Most of the findings aren’t really surprising. But I found it interesting that heavy users watch about the same amount of television as non-users. So the Internet isn’t really replacing television as a favourite past time. I must be an exception.
(via The Star)
I am on vacation in Germany to watch the soccer World Cup. Back in July.
World Telecommunications Day is now World Information Society Day “to help raise awareness, on an annual basis, on the enormous possibilities that ICTs can bring to all economies and societies and explore ways to bridge the digital divide”.
“ICT can change the face of the poor dramatically. ICT can be visualized as Aladdin’s Lamp in the hands of a poor woman. A digital genie can leverage her energy and creativity to lift her out of poverty at the fastest speed.”
Professor Muhammad Yunus, Managing Director of Grameen Bank, Bangladesh, and recipient of the 2006 ITU World Information Society Award.
Boarding the cluetrain is one thing. Getting your clients to board another. And then there is the whole matter of staying on. A couple clicks from now you may find yourself behind it, watching its taillights fade. Then you turn around and there it is again, about to run you over (“We are watching. But we are not waiting”). This whole 24/7-participatory-attention-intention-economy-slash-Me2-revolution can be scary. But it doesn’t have to be.
That’s why it is always good to talk to people who’ve been riding the cluetrain for a while. Last week David Crow (bio) came to High Road for a lunch discussion. We had a great discussion about blogging, Web 2.0 and his adventures in unconferencing. Thanks again, David!
Since David started TorCamp/BarCamp/DemoCamp in Toronto, the number of DemoCamp participants, for example, have increased from 26 in December 2005 to 151 in March 2006. Clearly, David and his fellow organizers are on to something.
Based on all the grassroots enthusiasm out there, the mesh conference in Toronto seems to become another success story; one blogger suggests that it may have even helped push the professional event management firm for Syndicate Canada to cancel their conference.
The same principle that has made blogging popular and forced traditional media to incorporate new online features into their offering, also seems to change event management: the participatory model has become a hit. While I doubt that the old top-down organization of conferences will die out any time soon, it will make other tech conferences continue to re-think their approach.
Many bloggers, including David, have debated what makes a good conference and what makes un-conferences different or better, so I won’t repeat it all here.
But during our discussion David mentioned the rise of sponsorship and support enquiries for BarCamp/DemoCamp [Disclaimer: High Road offered to host one of the Barcamp/DemoCamp events]. It will be interesting to watch how much – if any – ‘commercialization’ they will agree on and what kind of changes Barcamp/DemoCamp will undergo when continued growth turns this startup idea into a mature event series.
‘Commercial grassroots’ events are not necessarily a bad idea. The key is the participatory element where people can help decide what they will see and how they get the most out of a conference. The mesh conference, for example, has a blog and – thanks to David – a wiki where people can provide their input and exchange ideas and information before the conference.
The new model is all about participation and engaging in conversations, and that includes new approaches to conferences. As long as long as particpation means more than banter between soap boxes, and those conversations actually contribute to better outcomes, I’m all for it.
Simplicity is the theme of this year’s Festival Ars Electronica which is held from August 31 to September 5 in Linz, Austria. A blog about the festival program will be launched in May. Last year’s festival featured 450 particpating artists and scientists from around the world, and 33,000 vistors came.
The challenge of the future will be to make complexity comprehensible and manageable. Thus, simplicity in a positive sense means developing intelligent strategies to facilitate access to technologies, to make them more convenient, and to enable users to see what actually happens with the information moving through them.
Gerfried Stocker, artistic director, Ars Electronica
What do you think about blogs and wikis?
I think, in principal, it is good because people share information and share knowledge, which I think is always good. The question is, however, what is the quality of all this knowledge? This is something I watch from a distance. Somebody has to be accountable. If it becomes too much into the areas where it is critical for customers, then I think it is better that they rely on the office resources.
SAP CEO Henning Kagermann in The Brains behind SAP (via CNET News.com)