Month: February 2008

Stalling [en]

[fr] Trop à faire. 5 jours avant mon départ pour près de 4 semaines, et les priorités sont toutes conflictuelles. Aaaah! (Mais bon, je me connais, je vais m'en sortir.)

Gosh, I haven’t published in ages. Scary. I’m stalling. Too much to do, too little time, not sure where to start. Well, life is deciding for me, because I have 5 days left before departing on a nearly 4-week trip, and there is only so much one can do in 5 days. So, some news and some thoughts.

  • Going Solo: things are good. 25% of tickets sold in less than a week. Video of my speech finally made it online. Don’t miss Early Bird price until March 16th. In one word: register. Reminder: stay up-to-date on Going Solo by subscribing to the Going Solo blog or the Going Solo Twitter feed — much better source of news than CTTS.
  • 5 talks/things in less than two weeks. A talk for parents of teenagers in neighbouring France Thursday evening. A session at WebCamp SNP. A panel to moderate at BlogTalk. Co-hosting a core conversation at SXSW and moderating another panel (both multilingual stuff). I should blog about these more in detail. And more importantly, I have quite a bit of homework to do to prepare the four last ones. And I’m a bit anxious about how moderating panels will go — never done that before.
  • travel: Cork (Ireland), Dallas-Austin (Texas), San Francisco. That means I need to sort some stuff out before I leave for nearly a month (clean the flat, do some paperwork, pay bills, see people). I’m going to have to pack <shudder> — and I still need to unpack. I’ll be in San Francisco for two weeks, so maybe I want to organise a dinner or something there. I’ll be distributing Going Solo moo cards all along my journey. I’m apprehensive about all this travel. I don’t want to go. I want to stay here, curled up on the sofa, with the cat purring next to me. But I’m looking forward to seeing people I like.
  • work to do for Going Solo: not the least, unfortunately. Sort out the programme. Get back to all the people who sent in speaker proposals. Get sponsor/partner documentation and contracts sorted out so that the partners waiting in the lobby can be let in. Promote, promote. Worry about WiFi a bit more. Happily, video filming, venue set-up and design, and some offline promotion do not depend entirely on me. Prepare a “dossier de presse”. Finish rounding up media partners. Promote, promote.
  • blogging: posts piling up in my head. About books I’ve read or am reading: The Paradox of Choice, A Perfect Mess (got a post brewing about GTD and messiness), and The Black Swan of course. Need more time to read. More time to write. Can’t keep up.
  • misc: photos to upload, podcast to edit, other sites to update, e-mails to answer (I’m far from zero right now), plants to water, a life to live…

This roughly sums up where I’m at right now.

Time to Sign Up for Going Solo [en]

[fr] Ça va commencer à être le dernier moment de vous inscrire pour Going Solo, si vous voulez profiter du prix de lancement. Aussi le dernier moment pour en parler autour de vous! C'est possible d'acheter des billets plus tard, bien sûr (et ça fera plus de sous pour l'événement si vous vous enregistrez plus tard) -- mais bon, ce serait dommage de laisser passer le délai.

Je ne serai pas dans le coin pour vous le rappeler à nouveau (serai offline jusqu'à la fin du week-end), donc c'est maintenant entre vos mains. Si vous connaissez des communautés de freelancers qui peuvent être intéressées par l'info, ne vous gênez pas pour la communiquer plus loin. Il y a quelques bons articles en français couvrant Going Solo -- fouillez dans ma collection de liens ou bien sur Wikio.

…and plug it. Earlier Bird prices (300CHF) end this week-end, I wouldn’t want you or your readers to miss them (well, I’ll get more $$ for the event if you register after the deadline, but I’m thinking of you too, see).

I’m really happy about how this is going. Much coverage (in four languages so far! want to add yours?) and a very encouraging number of registrations.

I’m going to be offline from tonight to the end of this week-end, so I won’t be around to remind you that time is slipping away. It’s in your hands now! If you know of any freelancer community who might be interested in the news, please pass it on to them. I’ve spent my last three days actively promoting Going Solo all over the place (I should write a blog post about it, because I think it’s an interesting case study on how to do the whole “social media” stuff right — at least, I hope I’m doing it right!) and I’m just “out”.

Next thing I need to concentrate on is polishing up a press and partner package (pretty PDF with all the relevant information neatly tied up together). Next week, when I come back.

I’m now wondering why I’m posting this on CTTS rather than the Going Solo blog — I should probably cross-post it later. Opinions on that welcome. (I’m again stuck in a “where do I blog this?” phase).

Pas Superwoman! [fr]

[en] I'm postponing the blogging seminar (similar to the surprisingly successful one I gave at LIFT08) I was planning to do at the end of this month. I can't both promote Going Solo and this seminar correctly at the same time -- there aren't enough hours in the day and I'm not Superwoman. If you're interested in such a seminar, get in touch -- and when I have enough interested people I'll set a date. In English or French!

Contrairement à l’image que certains me renvoient, je ne suis pas Superwoman. Et souvent, j’ai les yeux plus gros que le ventre.

Tout comme j’ai mis le projet “livre” un peu sur la touche pour me consacrer à des activités plus directement lucratives (vous savez que ce n’est que l’appât du gain qui me motive), je me rends compte que je n’arrive pas à faire la promotion de Going Solo (les inscriptions sont ouvertes, profitez du tarif spécial de cette semaine de lancement) et faire également la promotion du cours d’initiation aux blogs que je comptais organiser le 26 de ce mois.

Vous noterez donc l’usage subtil de l’imparfait dans la phrase précédente, qui vous indique que je reporte ce cours. Comme je l’ai déjà écrit ou du moins dit, les personnes qui vont s’intéresser à ce cours ne sont probablement pas des lecteurs de ce blog. Cela demande donc que je fasse de la pub plus “active” que ce dont j’ai l’habitude — et en ce moment, j’avoue que promouvoir Going Solo me prend toute mon énergie (je passe les négociations avec les partenaires, un nouvel afflux de demandes de conférences, voyages prévus et conférences à l’étranger, sans compter que je n’ai encore quasi rien blogué au sujet de Going Solo en français, bref).

Donc, plutôt que de faire les choses mal, que de persévérer à vouloir maintenir une date parce que je l’ai fixée, je préfère carrément la faire sauter (parce que, regardons les choses en face, avec le peu de pub que je vais pouvoir faire, le cours ne sera pas assez plein, et je vais devoir faire sauter de toute façon).

Sur le concept, par contre, je persiste et signe. Mon workshop à LIFT (exactement la même chose, mais en anglais) a suscité un nombre tout à fait satisfaisant d’inscriptions et de participants (pas forcément les mêmes) — d’autant plus pour une conférence branchée “technologie” comme LIFT — et la formule a parfaitement fonctionné. Retours très positifs de la part des participants (même ceux qui n’avaient pas amené leur ordinateur, un comble!) et une invitation à donner ce genre de séminaire à la Réunion (j’y réfléchis sérieusement, ça peut être sympa d’allier le profitable à l’agréable).

Voici comment on va procéder (j’ai mis à jour la page des séminaires pour refléter ça): les personnes intéressées me le font savoir. Je garde une liste de ces personnes. Quand il y en a assez pour organiser un cours (disons, 6), j’organise. Et pour ceux qui auraient des besoins urgents de cours de blog, on peut toujours s’arranger.

Sur ce, la Pas-Superwoman va aller s’occuper de sa pile d’e-mails, et se nourrir. A plus, et n’oubliez pas de promouvoir Going Solo autour de vous. Si, si — ça me rend grandement service!

About Missing Videos (Open Stage, Friday) and Expectations [en]

[fr] Certaines vidéos de LIFT, dont celles des open stage, n'ont pas pu être montées en live. C'est un peu compliqué pour finir tout ça et les mettre en ligne, et on ne saura pas quand ce sera le cas.

Update: the video of my open stage speech about Going Solo is online now, thanks Laurent!

I posted this note on the LIFT community blog at Laurent’s request (he sounds a bit swamped right now) to give some info about the missing videos. I’m cross-posting it here, mainly for the few personal thoughts at the end of the post.

A few of us Open Stage speakers have been wondering why our videos weren’t online. Let me state first that it is not a conspiracy of some kind or an indication that community-chosen presentations might be less regarded than “invited speakers”. If you look at the videos on nouvo.ch, you’ll see that Kevin Marks is the last recorded speakers — all those after him are missing too.

I’ve asked Laurent about this (believe me, he’s heard about it enough) and what has happened is that some talks were not edited live — so it seems it’s a bit of a struggle to get it done / retrieve them / put them online. We unfortunately don’t know when they’ll be available. I trust, however, that the recordings are safe and will not be lost.

This kind of situation is really annoying. As a speaker, who was relying upon this video, I feel extremely frustrated — and also a bit mad at myself, because knowing how important this recording was for me, I should have planned for a fail-safe and got somebody to do some dirty shooting “just in case”.

As a conference organiser, I dread that I’ll find myself in this situation at some point — it’s almost inevitable. When you announce something, even if it’s something that you’re giving graciously, people come to expect it and rely on it. And when things go wrong and it doesn’t happen the way they hoped, they react badly (me included) — when they probably wouldn’t have said anything in the first place if they hadn’t been expecting it.

I know Laurent feels bad about this, and they’re doing what they can to find a solution — amongst the myriad of other post-LIFT things they need to deal with.

I'll be Speaking at Singularity [en]

[fr] J'ai accepté de participer à la conférence Singularity, la première conférence online de grande envergure. Ce sera les 24-26 octobre 2008.

Aral Balkan introduced himself to me at LIFT08. He’s organizing Singularity, the first large-scale online conference in the world. He asked me if I would be willing to speak there, which I gladly accepted. Looks like I’ll be in good company!

The conference will take place in October, 24-26th. Book the dates, already!

Singularity?

Going Solo Registration Open! [en]

[fr] Il est maintenant possible de s'enregistrer pour la conférence Going Solo, le 16 mai à Lausanne! N'attendez pas, et profitez du prix spécial durant la première semaine de mise en vente. (On veut encourager les gens à s'inscrire tôt, donc tous les moyens sont bons, vous voyez ;-)).

Here we are… the moment everybody (I hope!) was waiting for: Registration for Going Solo is now open, with a special discount for everybody during this first week: 100 CHF off the Early Bird price!

You can head straight to the registration form if you don’t want to lose a second (which I’m sure you don’t).

Questions? You’ll probably find the answers on the Going Solo site. If you don’t, leave a comment somewhere and I’ll do my best to answer!

Going Solo banner.

From LIFT06 to LIFT08 [en]

[fr] Un petit coup d'oeil sur les différences majeures entre mon expérience de LIFT06 et de LIFT08, à deux ans d'écart.

As I said in my open stage speech, two years (and a few days) ago I was sitting in the CICG conference hall, but things were very different from today. LIFT06 was, if I remember correctly, my second conference. I’d been to BlogTalk2 in 2004 and met a few people there (live-blogging already!). So, in 2006, there were very few people at the conference which I had actually met. I knew Lee Bryant. I knew Martin Röll. I knew Laurent Haug. I knew Björn Ognibeni (I think he was at LIFT06, but couldn’t swear it). I knew a few local bloggers, and some people from online. (My memory is a bit fuzzy.) But most of the people who make up my network (both online and offline, personal and professional) were not part of my world yet.

LIFT06 is where I met Robert Scoble, Bruno Giussani, David Galipeau, Euan Semple, Hugh McLeod, and a bunch of others. It’s where I got to know Anne Dominique Mayor (we both sat down smack in front of Robert Scoble by pure chance, because we were going for power sockets — that’s how I met him), and she has since then become part of my close circle of friends. LIFT06 felt a bit like San Francisco felt a year later: my online world had suddenly materialized offline.

Retrospectively, I’d say that in 2006, I was introduced to people, but that today, in 2008, it is people who introduce themselves to me. It’s not as clear-cut, of course, but it’s the general trend.

At LIFT08, I’ve lost count of the people present whom I’ve already met. There are almost too many for me to say hello to each one. I’m holding a workshop, and giving an open stage speech, so I’m much more public — more people know me than I know them.

It’s a bit scary. I don’t know who I want to spend my time with anymore, for one (old friends? new, unknown people?) — and my brain just can’t keep up. I forget who I’ve met. I try giving Going Solo moo cards to old friends more than once. I feel like I’ve become a networking automaton, and I don’t like it. I’m not good at faking it, I’d rather tell people that I’m over-socialized and that I have trouble processing all this.

My LIFT08 Recap [en]

[fr] Un récapitulatif de ce qu'a été LIFT08 pour moi cette année. En gros, expérience très positive, mais un peu comme une déferlante. Trop de tout, mais c'était bien.

LIFT08 was great, but overwhelming. I think I’ve used this word a couple of times already to describe it. I’ve been thinking a lot these last months about my “conference experience”. I’m not quite a conference butterfly never touching the ground between them (expression stolen from Tom Purves), but between FOWA, Web2.0Expo, BlogOpen, ParisWeb, LIFT, and the upcoming BlogTalk and SXSW, I’m spending a significant amount of my time preparing for, attending, or getting over conferences.

I plan to write a bit about LIFT08 first, and then come to more general stuff about these “tech” conferences and the worlds revolving around them — but you never know which way a blog post might decide to take you, do you? (I can already see I’m going to write it differently… fasten your seatbelts. Actually, I’m going to write separate posts. Or this one is going to turn into a 10-page essay. And nobody wants to read 10-page essays, do they?)

So, what do I take away from LIFT08 — knowing that this year, I’m looking at things through an event organiser’s eyes?

  • Many hats: I’m a live-blogger, I’m a “speaker” (workshop, open stage, and an informal discussion), I’m a friend, I’m a freelancer on the lookout for new gigs, I’m promoting Going Solo, and looking for anything or anybody who can help me put on a great event. Too many hats.
  • Live-blogging: I’m not happy about my job as a live-blogger this year. I think I was too stressed by my many other hats to really concentrate well on what I was doing. Also, as I had a press pass for it, I felt under pressure to do it seriously. Lots of partial notes, not “live” enough, didn’t tag my photos (help me!, and lots of talks I skipped. I want to post some slideshots still, and notes I took during the workshop with real live teenagers (e-mailing first to make sure I won’t publish stuff that might get them in trouble). I’ll write a summary post with links to my notes.
  • One track: really really great that there was only one track (as in, no separate rooms, no choices to make in the programme). Just sit down somewhere and the choices are made for you. Thanks for having the courage to make those choices for us, Nicolas and Laurent.
  • Water: bottles are really better than fountains. I’m not going to walk around with a glass, and I always forget to bring a bottle with me. I didn’t drink enough. Not sure Going Solo will be “as I’d want” in that respect, though we should have big bottles of water on the tables in the conference room.
  • WiFi: up and down, of course. Why does conference wifi always have to be so wobbly? There’s room for some serious analysis and reseach about that, in my opinion. Getting wifi for Going Solo is one thing I really worry about. There will “only” be 150 people there, but still… Given my track record for criticizing, I’m going to be lynched if Going Solo wifi fails.
  • Videos: great videos, but. No permalinks to each video (I e-mailed Nouvo about that). Also, some organisational (?) glitch which prevented the open stage talks from being edited and uploaded at the same time as the other videos — as an open stage speaker who was relying on that swift publication, I find it very frustrating. The tapes are safe, Laurent tells me — but had I known, I’d have asked somebody to quick-and-dirty shoot and upload to YouTube.
  • Content: I think the two-many-hats problem prevented me from fully getting all I could out of the various talks. I’ve also noticed a shift in content (the audience reflects this) from “more web” to “less web”. It’s a good thing, because it broadens my mind, but it also means there is less pointy stuff I’m directly fascinated with. (Don’t change anything guys, though, I like being stretched.) Maybe this had an influence on how easy (not) my note-taking was.
  • Speakers: at one point I started wondering if it was a new trend for speakers to read their talks. Please don’t do that! It makes it very hard to follow what your saying. Lots of really great and entertaining speakers, and general level was very high (despite the reading).
  • Food and drinks: nice! nice! yum! No breakfast though, I missed that. And also, no orange juice during the breaks?! I didn’t find it if it was there. Not everybody drinks tea or coffee — and I had a really hard time finding the tea.
  • People: lots of them, lots. My “conference experience” is changing, as I said above, and I need to blog about that.
  • Intense: LIFT is intense. Great people everywhere. Great talks you should meditate upon during a month.
  • LIFT experience: I was too busy running around to enjoy all the “offline stuff” LIFT08 offered, and I really really regret it. I didn’t even get around to having my own handwritten font made, and didn’t send anything to the editor of the not so empty book (I blame the wifi — it was just too much effort to send an e-mail). I really think that the not so empty book should go and tap into technorati and flickr tags to steal content which has been published online. I had my photo taken though… not sure where it is now, however.

So, still landing. See you tomorrow night in Morges to talk more if you’re in the area.

LIFT08: Kevin Marks (Google Open Social: The Social Cloud) [en]

Insert standard disclaimer about live notes.

LIFT08 168

The cloud is an abstraction, because we don’t want to think about what’s in between, or inside the cloud.

Send a message anywhere, and it’ll come out at the other end.

For Andrew Marks, Kevin’s son, the net is just part of the world. The older generation sees the net as a big cloud of poison gas. Has an impact on how we deal with the social software environment.

We assume e-mail is there and part of the web, but for the young generation it’s there to talk to adults, not really exciting. Standard boring stuff.

Their blog or their social network is “them”, but not their e-mail.

URLs are people too. Some of these pages on the internet are people. My blog is me. Links between these websites which are people are in fact expressing relationships. XFN.

Social Graph API: finds the websites that can be treated as people, and returns “me” and “friend” links between them. XFN + FOAF + Google crawler.

Problem: too many social networks!! Problem for the developers too! Need to make people sign up again, and tell who their friends are, etc…

“I want my own private island!”

The Social Graph API can help you find the friends you have on another site in the new system. Tell Twitter what your homepage is, and then Twitter will go and look up people-URLs who are linked to your homepage and in the Twitter system already, and assist you in making those connections. Finding me and my public friends on the web.

In social network land: “my friends are all here already, I’m quite happy on MySpace, don’t want to emigrate!” BUT my relationships aren’t all public, and change depending on what I’m here to do.

We put clouds around things so we don’t have to think about them. Registration, creating links between users…

OpenSocial is putting clouds around things that you don’t want to have to worry about. Take your application where the people are.

A third thing we need to worry about it: the nature of relationships. As danah boyd says, people don’t break friend links on a social networking site, except if there has been a messy break-up. Nothing less severe than that really justifies un-friending people. But when people get fed-up, they lose their password or destroy their profile, and create a new one from scratch with fewer friends. steph-note: like people used to do with blogrolls 5 years ago.

Technology mustn’t be perfect.

XFN isn’t subtle enough to render the relationships in Pride and Prejudice.

LIFT08 172

Douglas Adams: “Of course you can’t trust what people tell you on the web, not more than you can trust what people tell you megaphones… etc” 1999

The abstraction (trust, friendship, context) is in your head. It’s not explicit. The software never has a chance to understand this.

OpenSocial puts a cloud around social networking sites, the details of people, friends, etc. In the future, users could assume that your software will know about your friends, relationships, profile information. Could be implicit. In the cloud. An abstraction that any piece of software could use.

In the same way, the abstraction layer in your head provides information that you use in a way in any social software. steph-note: not sure I got that last bit right.

You can (and should) watch Kevin’s LIFT08 talk on video.

LIFT08: David Sadigh (User Retention) [en]

*Live notes of David Sadigh’s talk, possibly incomplete or misunderstood. Standard disclaimer, you know the drill.*

LIFT08 161

Who was connected to the Internet in 95?

Internet users get the same content, however they behave. But people are different! They should get different content.

– homepage bounces
– marketing and e-marketing campaigns are not well-optimized

98% of visitors leave an e-commerce site without buying.

2008: billions invested to drive more people to these websites. Lots of traffic but not enough sales. We would never accept results like that offline, why do we accept them online?

We don’t focus on user retention and customer experience.

Opportunity: sell more by delivering more relevant content.

Techniques: intentional, geographic, event, behavioral targeting. Push.

Intentional targeting example: you type “family holidays in Italy” in Google, and you get a sponsored link. When you click on it, you would land on the website but get a photo of a family instead of a boat on the sea in the header: that’s intentional targeting.

*steph-note: bunch of stuff on what is more clickable amongst certain Nespresso images.*

It’s not about clickthrough, though, but about sales. Or page views by a specific user.

*steph-note: a very quantitative approach, which is personally not very appealing to me, but which I understand is crucial for business settings today.*