Category: Live Blogging

When I go to a conference, I usually take notes. Here they are.

Lift09 — Change — Patrick J. Gyger — Science Fiction and the Future [en]

Lift09 021 - Patrick Gyger Amazing stories (pulp magazines). Looking into the future. Thirties. This is when SF started becoming a genre.

SF starts creating a new 20th century. SF zeitgeist, science programme. SF moves over to other media: films, radio.

Commercials start using SF backdrops for all sorts of commercial goods. Up to the 60s, the future is used to promote goods.

What will the future be like? (based on SF, predictions)

Home of the future. Revolutionary transportation. We’ll all have flying cars! But actually, flying cars did exist, in the twenties (René Tampier). <–photo–>

Despite the real flying cars, they remain in the realm of imagination, they are still an object of the future.

SF plants the seeds of dreams and desire. It has to stay in the realm of imagination. There is no place for the flying car in the present, because it is an object of the future, by definition.

Some objects have made their way from SF into our world.

– wrist pager / wrist phone
– cybernetics, artificial limbs (cf. Kevin Warwick last year at Lift08)
– robotics
– communications, videophone (Skype)
– jetpacks (want to see your neighbour soaring above your head in the morning, off to work?)

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Failures — or not there yet:

– invisibility doesn’t really work
– cryogenics (not too good)
– teleportation for transportation — we’re not there yet
– time travel

The future did not take the shape of our SF dreams of the past. *steph-note: not altogether surprising imho, as SF is really talking about the present*

Right now, we live in Utopia in the Western world — we don’t feel the urgency to dream up our Utopia. Some technology utopias have been realised, but have not brought what we hoped from them.

We also live in Dystopia — aware of the dark sides of technology.

“We live in the dreams and nightmares of our grandparents, at the same time.”

Belief of the grandiose views of flying cars: machines, not politics, will produce beneficial social change. We don’t believe that anymore.

Lift09 Workshop: Where will you work tomorrow? (Pierre Belcari) [en]

Workshop information. Watch the video.

Developing environments. Different solutions available at the moment in Europe. Evolution of the workplace.

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Where do we come from?

Office: individual offices, cubicles, open spaces

Hoteling: book work spaces when you need them, inside the company.

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Companies might try to encourage people to telecommute: save money on space, and improve work-life balance.

Evolution of technology has made evolution of the workspace possible.

Working from home? social interaction is lacking.

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Coworking: Gathering of people working independantly but sharing values and costs. Synergy.

*steph-note: I talked about eclau and Coworking Léman here.*

Xavier: FRIUP incubator. Very different from a coworking space. Very startup-minded. Need to leave after one year. Have to present a project to a committee who will decide if they can benefit from the incubator.

Nicolas: on the road.

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Somesso – David Terrar: Building Sustainable Corporate Web Communities [en]

From James Govenor on Twitter: Network value is how many opportunities people create for you when you’re not there.

Why build communities: tons of reasons.

An online community is a group of people joined by a common interest.

What motivates people?

  • they can express themselves
  • they might be after support
  • listening
  • sharing
  • recognition
  • power
  • the culture of the organisation

To build a community, you need:

Community manager: important to get the personality right. He/she must act as the host.

Technology for community is important, but social infrastructure is more important.

Somesso Startups [en]

  • Kyte: is kyte still a startup? Nokia are using Kyte as an internal video tool.
  • Amazee: social collaboration platform
  • Cassiber: idea management software, ranking ideas and feedback
  • shiftTHINK: social network data analysis
  • Zemanta: blog assistant, context recommendations when blogging
  • Headshift: (when did Headshift become a startup? I love you guys, but you’ve been around too long to be called that, imho.)
  • Nimbuzz: aggregating VoiP, IM, chat, presence
  • Winkwaves (via skype):
  • Mediaclipping (via skype):

steph-note: no offense, but after Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, I think I’m sick of hearing about startups. We seem to be going over and over and over the same things again. Of course each one has a unique twist and looks cool, but there are so many of them and none really stand out or jump at me in a “oh my god this is what the world needs” way.

steph-note: good job with the questions, Peter!

Somesso – Thomas Power: Shedding light on social networking for your business [en]

James Moore: The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems (recommended reading)

steph-booth: he just said “web 3.0” — this looks bad

Ecademy.

Startups, self-employed, corporate refugees.

History of the social media space: web 1.0: stuff steph-note: sixdegrees.com, geocities

“Find me!”

The internet is about managing people.

Web 2.0 is all about managing people. “Join me!”

Now, “Web 3.03: “Follow me!” steph-note: I am strongly against using “web 3.0” for this kind of stuff. It’s still web 2.0

Lots of tools emerging to help you manage your “following”. steph-note: I agree, but it’s still web 2.0

Socialmedian — calling it the cleverest thing after Twitter. steph-note: need to find some time to go look at it again; having a thought right now though: reading what your friends are reading is taking us towards homogenous thinking, where’s the diversity? — I agree of course we need those filters and use them myself, but there are implications.

steph-note: I agree with the “Find me, Join me, Follow me” analysis but there is not use trying to stretch parallels with web 1.0, web 2.0, and a bs web 3.0

A definition of network value: how much people talk about you when you’re not there.

Comparisons between networks are kind of pointless — they’re all countries in their own right.

Communication style is what makes us like a platform better than another.

4 colours for people/communication types. Important to take them all into account when communicating.

Thomas views subscription as taxation (“country” metaphor). 80% taxation revenue, 20% ads. The paying users are probably the best users of the network. He can’t wait for MySpace and facebook to introduce taxes/subscriptions.

Somesso: Opening Remarks (Arjen Strijker and Susan Kish) [en]

[fr] Mes notes de la conférence Somesso à Zurich.

I’m at the Somesso conference near Zurich today. Most of the usual suspects are here, and some others — about 50 people in the room at my last count. Wifi has just been made available to us, yay! (And it seems pretty quick, too.)

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I’ll be taking notes as I can during the day. As always, my notes run the risk of being imprecise or even outright wrong at times, but I do my best!

Arjen Strijker

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how can companies make best use of social media?

2 keynotes, then five companies will tell their story. Plan: 2/3rds speaking, 1/3rd questions.

Conference set up in less than five months.

Susan Kish

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Why?

Social media is fundamentally transformative (social is human, media has been here for hundreds of years) — some of the technologies we use have been able to transform the way we communicate. “When we change how we communicate, we fundamentally transform society.”

What?

What is social media, and how is it being used? What works, and what doesn’t? What has long-term impact? How do we know it’s not just a fad?

Where?

Where will we be in 5-10 years? which technologies will still be there, and which will not?

Somesso – Julie Meyer: Value Creation through Social Media for Companies [en]

[fr] Mes notes de la conférence de Julie Meyer à Somesso.

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From the Digital Island (that’s what it felt like 10 years ago) to Entrepreneur Country (what it feels like today).

Entrepreneurs are not the problem, it’s more the financing.

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steph-note: ouch, lots of text on the slides and talking very fast& taking photos again

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Julie used to work for PR, and used to think that the job of PR was to hold up the mirror to the company, and that the company should have no contact whatsoever with the exterior — completely invalid thinking today.

Marketing trumps technology.

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steph-note: sorry, too many words too fast and too packed on slides, tuned out

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Spinvox: didn’t create the technology, but created the business model (like Skype).

Big problem in the startup sector: founders can’t make it to CEO steph-note: agreed!

Realising what ecosystem you’re in, whether or not it is to disrupt it.

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Somesso – Frans van der Reep: From survival of the fittest to survival of the most cooperative [en]

[fr] Notes de la présentation de Frans van der Reep à la conférence Somesso.

steph-note: oops, he’s speaking German. Phew, switching to English :-) — these are my scribbled notes, inevitably imprecise, of Frans van der Reep’s keynote at the Somesso conference.

We have to invest in our ability to observe, see, understand. Frameworks have shifted.

Geography class, flying over countries with our eyes closed. If we turn the map by 45 degrees, our knowledge disappears. Similar to being invited to the blackboard in front of the classroom. The ego also comes in, not accepting that you don’t have the answer. People try to get an answer, so they don’t ask questions where they don’t have an answer.

This map-shifting is what corporations are going through now regarding the internet.

We need people who are capable of shifting and optimising their viewpoints, and who are willing to experience new viewpoints => we need new frameworks.

These frameworks (some of them) are what Frans will present in this speech.

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We’re going from top-down to bottom-up, and from push to pull.

Change is coming so rapidly.

A year doesn’t have any commercial meaning. It’s long. => we go from marketing to sales. Example of a company who have no marketing, they just put clothes in shops, leave them 3 weeks and see what sells (remove or add).

Social media makes everyone a salesperson, whether you like it or not. => what are you good at? what’s your personal value? what’s your business? It’s always been like that, but the internet is pushing it to the front of the scene.

Old, top-down, push:

  • European Ruling
  • Top-down ICT Planning
  • Marketing
  • Politics
  • Innovation planning

New, bottom-up, pull:

  • private initiatives
  • prototyping
  • sales
  • referendum
  • linux/wiki/csn

We don’t want courts of justice to be bottom right in the box, or it will be lynching in the marketplace. But they’re coming down a bit.

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Next slide: 4 ways of organising a company.

Two axes: simple => complex and dynamic => static environment.

If you look at companies, management and control is not necessarily worse an option, but it should be used where it is a solution to a problem. One way => all ways (top right, where the social media stuff is — complex and dynamic).

9% of companies are one-person companies in the Netherlands.

Different worlds, to be used when it makes sense. eg. journalists are in the “all-ways” world, but printing and distribution in the “one way”. No value in putting a company only in the one-way world.

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If you don’t adopt the internet as a tool to create transparency, it’s far too expensive to& (?)

Accept multiple viewpoints.

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simple/one-way: camouflage (corporations)
complex/dynamic: stand up (what the internet encourages you to do, what the 1-person company forces you to do)

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Seen from another angle: on the left, the maintainer, who focuses on what is known. On the right, the entrepreneur, who focuses on what is not known. Shared practice vs. Next practice, and Right practice (control, hold grip) vs. Best practice (enlarge quantity).

Where companies stand in this graph.

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Teams, clans, clubs&

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Moving from survival of the fittest to survival of the most cooperative => develop the talent to spot talent is the most important thing to do.

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One size fits all doesn’t work.

Be transparent, consequent and clear in your intentions. Cooperation is a personal decision.

Comment from the floor: all this is very relevant to the current US presidential election.

Frans: the Middle Ages are a very good model to understand what is going on. Tribes, guilds, torturing and the plague are back& There is a huge power vacuum, in which the Al Qaedas fit in, that’s the political problem we have.

Charles de Neef: seems quite challenging for corporations to move into that top right square, but some big corporations have shown success in adopting the top right mindset/tools.

steph-note: no wifi (at least not working), and timing seems tight — we’ll see how it goes. I count about 50 people in the room.

LIFT'08: David Brown Workshop — Teenagers and Generation Y [en]

[fr] Notes prises lors de LIFT'08. Workshop sous forme de table ronde avec 4 ados de 16-17 ans, étudiants à l'école internationale de Founex.

*I took these notes at LIFT’08 in February, and am only publishing them now, I’m afraid!*

*Workshop notes with real live teenagers! No guarantee as to how exact
my notes are… etc.*

Panel with real teenagers LIFT08

Four teenagers from the International School of Founex

Trying to formalize things. A bunch of themes/apps to approach this session:

Social networks, IM, Music, Video/Films, E-mail, Blogs, Niche Web2.0,
Location based, Connectivity (what hardware?), Phone SMS, Own tools,
Wow and virtual worlds… Real world.

Friends/social circle, buying/e-commerce/for free,
advertising/marketing/messages, geographical distance, homework,
privacy security personal data, organising, fragmentation

Going round the room to see who is who and what their interest in
teenagers and the net is.

*steph-note: worried that the approach here might be a little too
“adult-oriented”*

Teens (seem like a highly educated, very literate bunch, critical;
international school!):

Chloe: Facebook to communicate with teachers, a lot for school. Not a
gamer, more of a social/pictures person. Maths homework via internet
(Mathletics). 2h a night.

Luisa (?): 16 — Facebook to communicate with each other, organise
meetings, not a gamer.

Elliot: not much of a computer-user, heavy mobile phone user
(text/calling), would play games (was denied electronics until he was
12). Facebook: good way of archiving who your friends are and what
they look like — good way to communicate by replying in your own
time.

Liam: typical: video games, music (not a hardcore gamer though),
Facebook to keep track of friends (social circle online and offline
overlap). Wikipedia saves your life for homework.

Elliot: FB = great way of controlling the photos of you other people
are posting on the internet.

Liam: used to use MySpace but now really identified with Emos… so.

Chloe: used to have a skyblog, had lots of french-speaking friends. In
the international world, more Facebook. Was one of the first in her
school to have FB, as one of her best friends moved to the US and they
had it there.

ELuisa: FB really helps you keep up-to-date with people you’ve met
over the summer. With e-mail, your friendship wears out.

Liam: regular e-mail is good for attachments.

Luisa: it’s weird to have your teacher as your friend. *steph-note:
they don’t want to know too much about their teachers lives*

Chloe: concerned about providing stalker material (cleaned up and
deleted many people she didn’t really know). Didn’t realise that
everybody in the Switzerland network could see all her info — changed
the setting, and is spreading the word around her, even to her
teachers.

My parents use the internet to work/communicate (use FB e.g.) so quite
open-minded. Used to ask for her e-mail password in case anything
happened, but Chloe doesn’t really think it’s necessary.

Luisa: keeping up on FB gives you something to talk about when you go
back — you’re up-to-date.

Never considered using Skyblog as public, and parents uncomfortable.
FB: more control and privacy, feels comfortable with it.

Elliot: couple of friends of mine rejected from universities based on
their FB page.

Chloe: Rumors?

Elliot: heard that some employers now demand access to your FB page
(but could be untrue). FB information is rather light-hearted, likes
and dislikes, etc — not really the business of the school or the
employer.

My question:

– how much of a threat do sexual predators online seem to you?
– do you feel that holding back personal information keeps you safer?

Chloe: not that concerned (from what I understand), doesn’t think that
holding back information keeps her safer — weirdos can get that info
anyway. *steph-note: good for her!* Weird IM people: blocks them.

Luisa: less concerned than she feels she should.

Elliot: more concerned about internet fraud. (E-bay.)

Question: buying online?

Answer: not much (trust, likes going into shops and talking to people)

Chloe: doesn’t like the idea of paying by credit card.

Luisa: amazon++ that’s ok.

Q: concert tickets

Elliot: yeah, tickets often available only online — got semi-scammed once.

(The panel seems divided on online shopping.)

Luisa: convenience vs. safety (giving your credit card number)

Elliot: quite wary of using the credit cards he has, because he knows
he’s being tracked quite closely.

Comment: the teenagers here have little “positive” experience of using
their credit cards to counter-balance the media scare about issues
like fraud or identity theft — which can explain their general
wariness.

Chloe: her dad and her do grocery shopping online on LeShop.ch, and
she’s comfortable with that. Useful.

Luisa, Liam: really weird to go shopping for clothes and food on the internet.

Elliot: gets information in the store and order it online.

Our panel doesn’t seem that familiar with the “go in town, take
photos, post them on facebook, get feedback, buy online” method.

Luisa: more “funny” pictures from changing rooms, but wouldn’t really
put them on FB.

girls: ask opinion about shopping for clothes to offline friends with
them, but wouldn’t do it via the internet. So much more fun to do it
offline. No fun to do it over the internet.

My question: plagiarism in homework

Answer: systems in place in school to detect it, don’t do it — know
people who have gotten away with it, but this is more something the
younger grades do. Doesn’t make much sense because you can’t fake oral
presentations.

Elliot: wikipedia not regarded as a good source.

Liam: because anybody can write what they want on it.

Got to be careful with what you find in wikipedia. Experimented with
putting BS into pages just to see they could.

Music creation and writing on the computer. Picture editing.

Consensus: online doesn’t beat the real world.

Luisa: a good photographer is not somebody who’s skilled in photoshop,
it’s somebody who takes a good picture.

Some consensus here that digital art is “less” than using classical
techniques. Don’t feel “creative” in front of a computer.

Comment: you guys actually look down to things that are easy.
*steph-note: spot on*

*steph-note: interesting how fascinated we adults are to have a chance
to actually talk with teenagers!*

*steph-note: conversation is interesting but going off-topic as far as
I’m concerned (about being critical in general, having role-models).*

Elliot: technology makes it easier to be critical and determine if
what is said in a lecture is a widespread view or not, etc.

Question: do you have any role-models? *steph-note: imho badly
phrased… need to be more concrete: who do you look upto? admire?*

Discussion about music downloading. Awareness that they have the means
to buy the music they like (wealthy enough).

Luisa: “the internet isn’t the only way of spreading…(the word?)”.
Doing things for real (building a schoolroom in tanzania) has more
impact on me than buying a cow through the internet.

Not much webcam use (just Chloe, friends in the states).

*steph-note: sorry, tuning out — could have done with a break but
didn’t push for it.*

Discussion about creative commons and copyright. No perception that
photographs you find in Google are not free of rights. Seems to be a
lot of confusion about copyright regarding images/photographs.
Contrast with discourse about music downloading.

Blogs: a fashion that has gone past. *steph-note: confirms what I
thought, and also why I’m not asked in for talks in schools as much as
before. I think FB and social networking in general are “replacing”
blogs for teenagers. In francophonia though, I guess FB hasn’t taken
off, so it will still be Skyrock. But it’s called Skyrock now, and not
Skyblog…*

Less use of MSN, but Skype and Facebook.

Elliot: in the UK, Blackberry

This bunch are the student council, go on humanitarian trips, etc. Not
the most tech-savvy necessarily, but talkative!

Gambling.

Data usage: this is Switzerland! Data is horrendously expensive, and
it’s not in the culture to use it.

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

Insert standard disclaimer about live notes.

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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.

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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.