Category: Conferences

I go to conferences as a speaker, and also work with some big conferences in blogger relations or outreach. I think about conferences. Complain about them. Have ideas.

Very Last Moment to Propose a Contribution for LIFT'08 [en]

[fr] C'est la dernière minute pour faire une proposition de workshop, discours, discussion, ou encore participation à la venture night de la conférence LIFT. (Utilisez les liens dans le corps de l'article.) Eh oui, c'est aujourd'hui le dernier jour!

Il est d'ores et déjà possible de s'inscrire aux workshops (j'y propose d'ailleurs une initiation aux blogs -- inscrivez-vous si vous ne bloguez pas encore, ou parlez-en à vos amis non-blogueurs). J'ai aussi proposé une présentation-éclair de 5 minutes au sujet de Going Solo (ça me rappelle qu'il faut que je blogue à ce sujet en français un peu plus en détail), et je pense animer une discussion autour de toutes ces questions linguistiques qui me préoccupent.

Quel programme!

I almost missed the announcement. Submissions for workshops, open stage speeches, discussions or the venture night at the LIFT conference close today! (I don’t know exactly when, but remember that LIFT is European, so it might very well be end-of-day CET.)

If you click on the links above you can already see what has been proposed. I’ve proposed a workshop (Get Started With Blogging) — you can already sign up for workshops by visiting the page of the workshop you’re interested in and adding your name to the page — and an open stage speech in which I want to tell the story behind Going Solo (I also reproduced it on the Going Solo blog — have you subscribed to it yet?).

I’m going to send in a discussion proposal too (thought you could avoid me? tough!) — most certainly around all the language and multilingualism stuff that’s been going around in my head lately. I was hesitating with something about teenagers and the internet but as I see there is already a workshop on the topic (Teenagers/Generation Y and Technology), which I want to attend, I think it’s better to come up with a totally different topic.

Any thoughts?

Update, 1pm: sent in proposal for language discussion: All These Languages! Localization and Multilingualism Online — if you’re interested in being one of the “discussion starters”, get in touch (otherwise, please vote for my proposal!)

LIFT'08 Workshop: Get Started With Blogging [en]

[fr] J'ai déjà parlé ici de mon projet de cours d'initiation aux blogs. J'aurai (si les participants sont assez intéressés!) l'occasion de donner ce cours sous forme de workshop à l'occasion de la conférence LIFT à Genève, le 6 février prochain.

Le workshop est gratuit, mais il faut être un participant à la conférence (je vous invite vivement à vous y inscrire si ce n'était pas encore prévu -- c'est un des meilleurs événements du genre en Europe).

This is something I’ve wanted to do for some time now, and I’m happy to kick it off at LIFT: provide a crash-course in blogging for non-bloggers.

I know many people attending LIFT are already seasoned bloggers like myself. Many of you (my readers) probably are. I wanted to offer something to those who are not so immersed in the web as us.

So, basically, this is a three-hour workshop to open a blog (from scratch, I plan to use WordPress.com), twiddle the basic settings, learn how to publish, and talk about blogging. I’m always amazed that though the media now sing “blog, blog, blog” in every publication, many people haven’t really had a chance to get near one and see how technically easy publication is.

So, if you know anybody who is going to LIFT and isn’t (yet) a blogger… send them to my workshop 😉

Quoting from the workshop description, here’s the stuff it’ll cover:

First, on the “blogging technique” side:

  • opening your blog
  • discovering the various options and settings offered by the blogging tool
  • how to publish a post or a page
  • linking to blog posts or websites
  • organizing one’s content with tags and categories
  • managing comments
  • choosing a design for your blog and managing sidebar content

Second, on the “blogging culture” side, we might talk about:

  • blogs vs. “normal websites”
  • different uses of blogs (personal, corporate…)
  • dealing with openness and conversation in a public space (negative comments…)
  • blogging etiquette and ethics
  • reading other people and how to promote one’s blog
  • other “Web 2.0” tools to use in relation with your blog

Badges at Conferences [en]

Laurent Haug blogs about conference badges and his desire to make LIFT a badge-free conference.

Funny, I was also thinking of badges at LeWeb3. But actually, the main thing I was thinking was: when are conference organisers going to stop making one-sided badges dangling at the end of a thingy that is designed to let them rotate freely?

I personally like badges and would be quite unhappy without them, because I’m a very bad physionomist. I index “person data” by name. Dozens of times at conferences, people come up to me saying “hey, Steph, how’ve you been?” — sometimes their face looks familiar, others it doesn’t even ring a bell. Half the time, I’m saved by the badge. I catch a glimpse of their name, and all I know about them, our shared history if we have one, comes back to me. I index people by name.

So, take away the badges, and I have to use the awkward “excuse me, before we say anything more, would you mind telling me your name, because I’m so bad with faces?” — I do it (I’m not one of these people who can pretend very well), but I really prefer the badges. I’m one of these rude people who’ll turn your badge around to read your name — but the presence of the badge makes it easier, because it suggests that we’re going around reading people’s names.

Also, I know a lot of people online without knowing their faces, and badges do help with that.

There are things I do not like about badges, though. I’d like to highlight two of the “cons” Laurent points to, because I agree with him:

  • Chest navigators. People who walk through the conference starring at badges looking for keywords like “CEO”, “Facebook” or “Press”, usually for bad reasons. You end up losing your time with these 95% of the time.
  • Misconceptions from titles. This is especially painful for people working for big companies where you HAVE to have a lousy and arrogant title. From a really cool dude I met at Leweb working for Microsoft: “People see Microsoft on my badge, so their crap filter goes up one level. Then they see Marketing and they start to draw strategies to get away from me”. The guy is brilliant, open, helpful, all the opposite of the stereotype that his badge could push you into.

Laurent Haug, “Badges”

I would definitely go for the following:

  • get rid of “castes” on badges
  • get rid of formal company names or job titles: let people choose what they want written on their badge
  • print them on both sides!
  • look for creating solutions like headwear — or maybe stranglers?! — to get badges off people’s chests
  • absolutely avoid pin-on or sticky badges (as a woman, I have to say I really don’t like putting them smack on my breasts, I’d rather have something hanging around my neck)

Some thoughts in the “Devil’s advocate” department, though:

  • there are situations where it is useful to know what company the person you’re talking to works for, or what position they have
  • badges printed on only one side are handy: write something on the back, stick business cards in, or the programme of the day
  • no badges adds serendipity to networking, which is good.

Feel free to share your badge thoughts and experiences.

BlogTalk 2008 Proposal — Being Multilingual: Blogging in More Than One Language [en]

Here’s the proposal I just sent for BlogTalk 2008 (Cork, Ireland, March 3-4):

The strongest borders online are linguistic. In that respect, people who are comfortable in two languages have a key “bridge” role to play. Blogging is one of the mediums through which this can be done.

Most attempts at bilingual (or multilingual) blogging fall in three patterns:

  • separate and independent blogs, one per language
  • one blog with proper translation of all content, post by post
  • one blog with posts sometimes in one language, sometimes in another

These different strategies and other attempts (like community-driven translation) to use blogging as a means to bridge language barriers are worth examining in closer detail.

Considering that most people do have knowledge (at least passive, even if incomplete) of more than one language, multilingual blogging could be much more common than it is now. The tools we use, however, assume that blogs and web pages are in a single language. Many plugins, however, offer solutions to adapt existing tools like WordPress to the needs of multilingual bloggers. Could we go even further in building tools which encourage multilingualism rather than hindering it?

Extra material:

I’ve gathered pointers to previous talks and writings on the topic here: https://climbtothestars.org/focus/multilingual — most of them are about multilingualism on the internet in general, but this proposal is for a talk much more focused on blogging. Here is a video of the first talk I gave in this series (by far not the best, I’m afraid!) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2096847420084039011 and which was about multilingual blogging — it can give you an idea of what this talk could look like, though I’ve refined my thinking since then and have now fallen in the grips of presentation slides. I also intend to base my talk on real-world examples of what bloggers are doing in the field.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you would like more details for evaluating this proposal.

We had a long discussion on IRC about the fact that the submission process required a 2-page paper for a talk (in all honesty, for me, almost the same amount of sweat and tears as preparing the talk itself — I’ll let you figure that one out yourself). BlogTalk is a conference which aims to bridge the space between academics and practitioners, and a 2-page paper, I understood, was actually a kind of compromise compared to the usual 10-15 page papers academics send in when they want to speak at conferences.

The form was changed, following this discussion, to make the inclusion of the paper optional. Of course, this might reflect badly on proposals like mine or Stowe’s which do not include a paper. We’ll see!

I’ll also be speaking on structured portable social networks during the workshop on social network portability, the day before the conference.

Cory Doctorow: Europe's Copyright Wars – Do We Have to Repeat the American Mistake? (Web 2.0 Expo, Berlin) [en]

My live notes of Cory’s talk. Might be a bit messy because I have trouble wrapping my head around some of these issues, and Cory does indeed talk rather fast. Plus, as you probably know by now, I’m in a frightening state of exhaustion.

Europe and America: harmonization escalation.

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 26

It’s easy to laugh at US copyright policies from Europe.

Inducing infringing of media copyright: should be held liable. If your technology might be used to infringe copyright… arghl… you’ll be held liable.

So if you develop your technology with the idea of infringing copyright, you will be held liable (thought crime!) for any subsequent copyright infringement.

With this kind of stuff, the VCR would never have seen the light, because one of the main ideas behind it was “time-shifting” and “librarying” (watch something later, or collect your favorite shows). The court ruled that time-shifting was legal, but never ruled on librarying.

FCC.

Guy who gave a talk explaining how Adobe’s DRM was evil, arrested at the end of the talk by the FBI for talking about the wrong type of maths.

DMCA takedown notice. No need for proof. Routinely abused to silence critics, etc.

Viacom abuse, searching YouTube for keywords, thousands of DMCA takedown notices, for things as innocuous as people talking at a part who happened to have the names of their characters, etc.

Viacom says that by allowing private videos, Google and YouTube are inducing infringement.

Lawsuits against music fans in the USA. Suing fans does not convince them to go back to the record store! Hard to believe that the record companies’ best response to file-sharing is suing enough college students hoping the rest get the message.

Europe is by no means inculpable. DMCA started as a proposal shown to Al Gore who said it was bad, then presented to Europe where it got positive response and became the EUCD and back to the US as DMCA. steph-note: maybe the difference in perception, if the laws are similar, has to do with the suing culture?

IPRD 2 : probably the worst. Copyright infringement, historically, has to be dealt with in court. This criminalizes copyright infringement. And turns over dealing with it to the public police. steph-note: I’m afraid I don’t understand all this, a bit over my head.

e.g. Sweden, whole server farm taken down by the police (servers in police van), including legitimate sites of legitimate business, just disappeared into the van.

The sophisticated “cyber criminals”, this kind of thing doesn’t stop them. It just can be the end of it, however, for innocent people who aren’t very tech-savvy. Police cordoning off area for 6 months, 70% of businesses hosted there failed within those six months.

DVD CPCM: Europe-wide thing, all devices reading DVDs required to be compliant. CPCM can individually shut down certain classes of users, based on content producers’ decisions, even if you have the legal right e.g. to show something in school, you wouldn’t be allowed to break the CPCM.

Disturbing CPCM flags: DVD flagged so it can only be used by one household. (What is and what is not a household? huge problem. They have a very “conservative” concept of what a household is, which doesn’t include children and parents scattered through continents, old dads entering retiring homes, kids with divorced parents…)

Restricted playback systems. Goodbye interoperability. We didn’t need permission from Vauxhall to plug in your Nokia phone, or permission from Microsoft for Keynote to open ppts, or film company for playing their DVD on a Toshiba player…

All this is turning interoperability into a crime! You need keys to interoperate, and you’re not allowed to reverse-engineer keys.

steph-note: quite scary, all this.

Some of your sound systems won’t play certain types of audio, etc.

US smart enough to stay away from things like the Database Directive. In Europe, a collection of facts in a DB is protected for 50 years! Economist’s opinion on this: the DB directive is not good for Europe. They also asked the incumbents if the directive if it was good or bad, and of course they said yes. So the commission concluded: “opinions are divided! some people say it’s good, others say it’s bad! let’s leave things how they are!”

What can we do? Get involved in the EFF. steph-note: or ORG

Problem now: hearings for copyright stuff attract copyright holders, not technologists, geeks, economists.

Keith Richards isn’t going to go hungry if he doesn’t get another 40 years of copyright protection for his recordings.

First time in copyright history that the government turned its back on a proposal, and said “no, copyright extension is not a good thing”.

What Cory thinks the BBC should be doing. Streaming with DRM. Excuse: “we don’t have a choice, the right holders dictate the terms.” Why does a corporation funded by the public, for the public, come and tell the public that it has to adapt to the right holders demands, and not the opposite? Here, the BBC is not acting in public interest, but there is a history of the BBC doing so.

At one point, rights holders wanted use-by-use payment for the radio. e.g. each time the DJ want to play something, he has to call and ask permission. They turned that down. Found another solution, other music. Finally rights holders backed out and asked the radios to license their music (instead of the stupid conditions they were putting previously).

So Cory’s advice: look the rights holders in the eye, and go off to find other content, artists, etc which will agree to their terms, and give them a place they have been denied until now.

Problem: nobody is offering collective licensing schemes to the internet. Nobody is offering ISPs a blanket license for music or television shows.

It is not good for society that average people are criminalized for accessing culture.

The EFF is about copyright reform, not copyright abolitionism — not is Cory.

ThePirateBay weren’t abolitionists in Cory’s opinion, at the start.

Useful for copyright reformers that there are copyright abolitionists, because allows to say “if you don’t negotiate with us, you might end up having to deal with them”.

Jesse James Garrett: Delivering Rich Experiences (Web 2.0 Expo, Berlin) [en]

Here are my notes of the end of Jesse James Garrett’s keynote. There might be bits and pieces missing and I may have misunderstood things. Thanks for bearing with me.

steph-note: missed the beginning, sorry.

MS Word Displaying All Toolbars!

Word Toolbars all turned on sends the following message:

“Word processing is complicated. In fact, it’s so complicated that we, the developers of this tool, haven’t figured it out. So, we’re outsourcing that job (figuring it out) to you, our users.”

Look at video cassette recorders. They’ve come a long way these last 30 years, lots of buttons but… nobody seems to be able to set the clock, still now.

Mentions something Steve Jobs said in 1984.

Beautiful, elegant solution that works.

The product has aesthetic appeal (beautiful), maximises simplicity (elegant), has to address a genuine need/desire (solution) — many startups out there fail because they don’t address a real need — and can be used by its users, not just by us, its creators (that works).

Even MS word has started to get this. They’ve moved beyond toolbars. More simplicity. Not there yet maybe, but real progress. The new interface is much cleaner and simpler.

Last generation of video cassette recorders. Now, we have TiVo. But TiVo was only made possible by really taking a step back. Look at TiVo users: passionate. Users develop an emotional attachment to products which deliver on those four points.

Research seems to show that there is something different happening in our brains when we interact with complex technological tools. steph-note: some variety of pets? Like our interactions with other people, same mechanisms in our brains. We respond to these products as if they were people. We imagine they have personalities, moods… 12-year-old girl who kissed her iPod goodnight before going to bed on the day she got it. Or adults whose iPod breaks, go out and buy a new one, but can’t open the box for two days, because it would mean they have to say good-bye to their old, broken, companion.

iPod case “iGuy”. TiVo logo that has arms and legs.

Products who know who they are, and reflect a consistency in their behaviour.

Experiment: have users try software and evaluate it. One group, user same computer for both tasks. Group 2, different computer. Group 1 were nicer with their feedback, almost as if they didn’t want to hurt the computer’s feelings.

Diamond Rio, first mp3 player commercially available. Looked like a transformative product, so much that the record industries went to court to have it banned in the US. But nobody remembers it! Everybody remembers the iPod as the first mp3 player. Met with a lot of skepticism. (ipod = “idiots price our devices”). Too expensive, not enough features. But actually, it’s a beautiful elegant solution that works.

Developing software applications: we talk about them as data, wrapped in logic, and a user interface. User interface = shell.

But in the minds of our users: there is the user interface, and magic inside.

When we make choices about our products based on things that our users cannot see, we’re going in the wrong direction.

But this is changing. The web (2.0) is leading the way. We make decisions about the user interface first, and allow those decisions to drive technological choices. “Designing from the outside in.” (O’Reilly)

Web 2.0 companies are not being driven by a business or technology strategy, but by an experience strategy.

The experience is the product.

Any technological choices that do not reinforce the experience that we want the users to have of the product are the wrong decision.

Jeremy Keith: The Beauty in Standards and Accessibility (Web2.0Expo, Berlin) [en]

Here are my notes of Jeremy Keith‘s session. He’s somebody I always appreciate listening to, and he also happens to be the creator (and provider) of Buzzword Bingo. Play with your neighbour when keynotes or sessions go down the buzzword path.

My notes are as correct as I can make them, but they may be missing bits and pieces and I might even have misunderstood stuff.

Web 2.0 Expo 6 - Jeremy Keith

First define. Who knows about beauty? The poets.

John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

William Blake: Auguries of Innocence. “To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”

Looking deep beneath the surface. Close-up sketch of a flea. Micrographia. Beautiful. Viewing source. This is how we see the beauty of things.

This whole web2.0 stuff is not about details. We’re not using microscopes, but telescopes, looking at the “big picture”. Telescopes can be good: think “Galileo”.

He brought upon the world an a priori change. A new way of looking at the world, though the world had not changed. The earth revolves around the sun, and not the opposite.

Darwin: the world didn’t change from one day to the next when The Origin of Species was published, but our view of the world did.

We want to think about structure. How is the house built? It’s when you understand the structure that you can build solid houses. Same with web pages. This is where web standards come in.

Separation. Before: all mixed up (html, css, js). Now: separate. (cf. http://nataliejost.com) Progressive enhancement. An a priori change to how you design websites.

a) begin with your content
b) structure it (HTML)
c) think about how it’s going to look (CSS)
d) think about the behaviour (DOM Scripting)

Web 2.0 Expo 5

If you remove any of these layers, it will still work. It won’t look pretty, it won’t behave as well, but it will still “work”.

CSS

  # in a separate document!
 p { }
 #foo { }

Then, add rules using selectors. From general to specific.

DOM

Very similar approach. Make it external. You don’t put it in the document. The vocabulary is different, but you also reference elements in the page pretty easily

 document.getElementsByTagName("p")
 documnet.getElementById("foo")

School of thought called “unobtrusive scripting”, “unobtrusive javascript”

Beware

First structure, then presentation. If you catch yourself doing this…

 <a href="..."> # wrong!

If you put behaviour in here, you’ve wasted a hyperlink.

Slightly better… but still bad

 <a href="#"> # JS equivalent of using the style attribute

steph-note: I’m learning stuff about JS! yay!

Bandwidth benefits in doing things the right way. Process benefits, you can separate the work. And also… the beauty of it. Flexibility. See how it reacts in situations you haven’t accounted for? It won’t fall apart if somebody accesses with no CSS, no JS, no images…

So, is this about making site accessible? Kind of. Note: go to the talk on accessibility Thursday morning.

Jeremy is talking more about universality. You’re not shutting out devices. Mobile. Search bots. Screen readers.

W.B. Yeats (April 1916) “All is changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”

Ajax

Wonderful, beautiful, but can be terrible depending on how it’s used. steph-note: reminds me of what we said of JS in 99-00

The key to Ajax is about asynchronous communication with the server. XmlHttpRequest.

Jeremy’s definition: “A way of communicating with the server without refreshing the whole page.” Just part of the page.

Buzzword Hijax.

Here is how Jeremy thinks we should build an ajax application.

a) build a website in the old-fashioned way — buttons, links, for interaction with the server
b) then, come along with ajax — which parts of this page benefit from just being refreshed separately, and intercept the links/events. Hijack the requests. Bypass the whole page interaction.

Progressive enhancement rather than a terrible beauty that locks people out. Switch off JS, and everything still works.

Where? When?

Patterns: when I click a link/form, and when I submit it, I return to the same page with almost nothing changed.

  • registration forms (specially for user name availability)
  • comments on a blog/forum
  • add to cart
  • steph-note: sign in links

“Web 2.0” is not about web applications versus documents in the old “Web 2.0”. It’s a sliding scale. Most sites are somewhere in between documents and application. Applications work with documents! It’s not an either… or thing.

This kind of Ajax is more on the document side of the scale, roughly mid-way to the application end. Doesn’t scale to “more application”.

But at that point, why the hell are you building that with HTML, CSS and JS? The reason to use them is that they degrade gracefully. If you decide that all three are required, maybe you need to use another technology, like Flash. These technologies have their place for applications which cannot degrade gracefully. Flash is made for building web applications! But there is an insistance in building “2.0 Apps” in HTML/CSS/JS.

Maybe hesitancy because Flash isn’t a standard in the same way as HTML/CSS/JS?

Standards: you know your stuff will work, you know there’ll be support there. The best thing that Adobe could ever do in Jeremy’s opinion is to open it up truly (steph-note: if I understood that correctly).

History of standards.

ISO, ECMA, W3C…

Open data. API. RSS. XHTML.

If you’re going to release and API, look at what Google and Yahoo are doing and copy. Build upon existing conventions. Your own format is not going to make it.

If you allow people to access your data like that, you start to see emerging patterns.

Microformats! steph-note: yay!

Machine tags! steph-note: yay again! There is a machine tags wiki.

Jeremy, like many of us, really hates the “Web 2.0” label/buzzword. It had its place a few years ago, but now it’s really putting us in a box. Ajax is a good buzzword, because it allows to talk about a certain technology in a snappy way. Whereas Web2.0… ask ten people, and you’ll get 10 explanations.

Web2.0: people.

But we don’t need a buzzword for that. We already have a word for “leveraging collective intelligence”: the WEB!

Combine looking through the microscope and looking through the telescope.

Too Many People [en]

[fr] J'ai atteint un point où je n'ai plus envie de faire de nouvelles connaissances. Je n'arrive déjà pas à voir les gens qui me sont chers autant que je voudrais. En ligne, les relations "délicates" (asymétriques, par exemple) sont plus faciles à gérer qu'hors ligne. De plus, les outils de "réseautage en ligne" nous aident à rester en contact avec plus de personnes qu'il ne nous serait normalement possible. Quand tout ça passe hors ligne, cela frise l'overdose.

This is a post in which I expect to be misunderstood, judged, and which will probably upset some. But it’s something that needs to be spoken about, because I’m certain I’m not the only one going through this, and I think it’s strongly related to what changes the internet is bringing into our lives when it comes to relating to people.

I’ve argued many times that online relationships and behaviors in general reproduce what goes on offline, so it may seem that I’m contradicting myself somewhat. But I think it’s also clear for everybody in this space that technology does change the way we live with others. Right now I see that our world is changing — it’s a bit blurry ahead, and actually I’m quite scared to see more clearly — and in our lifetimes, chances are the nature of human relationships will be deeply impacted by the technologies we are using and developing.

If all this doesn’t make sense, don’t worry. I’m not sure I understand what I’m saying myself. These might just be the tired rantings of a burnt-out and frustrated node in the network.

“Being an online person”, as I call it, means two things:

  • there are people out there who know you, sometimes quite well, but that you have never heard of
  • the “presence” dimension of our social tools allow you to keep in touch with more people (and better) than you would be able to offline

With their consequences, when your “online social life” goes offline:

  • micro-celebrity, micro-fame, fans
  • more relationships to nurture than the limited space and time permits

Our online social network does not necessarily translate well offline.

Let’s have a look at a few aspects of our relationships with others that we are maybe not necessarily the most proud of:

  • we like (or even love) some people more than others — or perhaps simply differently
  • we find some people more interesting than others
  • some people we are happy to spend long periods of time with, but infrequently — if we saw them every day they would drive us up the wall
  • some people we are happy to see a little each day, but would not want to spend a whole afternoon with
  • we sometimes want to spend time with one person (or some people) at the exclusion of others (others who can be people we care about, too)
  • we keep in touch with some people or are nice to them because they are useful to us
  • we like some people less than they like us (and vice-versa)
  • some people are business contacts to us, but would like to be our personal friend (or even get into our pants)

I think that if you look honestly, you will recognize yourself here. These facts about our social life are uncomfortable to deal with, and awkward. We don’t like thinking about them, much less talking about them. And we very rarely deal with them directly in the relationships they apply to.

Offline, we deal with a lot of this social awkwardness by avoiding it. This is why I argue that contact tagging, if done to structure our personal social network, must remain a private matter. We don’t tell some people certain things. We don’t mention that we’re meeting with Judy after lunch. We act a bit more distant with Tom than with Peter, hoping he’ll “get the message”. We tell Susie we’re too busy to see her, but drop everything when Mike invites us on a date.

Online, it’s even easier. We don’t respond to IMs or e-mails. We read certain blogs but not others. We chat absent-mindedly with Joe who is telling us his life-story, while we have a heart-to-heart discussion with Jack. We mark our status as DND but still respond to our best friend. We receive Twitter notifications on our phone from a select few, and keep a distracted eye on others’ updates. We lie more easily.

So, online, we actually have more freedom of movement (mainly because our emotional reactions are not so readily readable on the moment) to deal with some of these “awkward relationships” than offline — particularly, I would say, what I’d call the asymmetrical ones. From a networking point of view, being online is a huge advantage: the technology allows you to “stay in touch” with people who are geographically estranged from you, with a greater number of people than you could actually manage offline (“continuous partial friendship“), and it also allows you to keep in your network people who would probably not be in your offline circle, because it helps you tone down relationship awkwardness.

Conferences have lost their magic for me. I know, I know, I’m coming to this 18 months after everybody I know (I mean, I know I’m not alone and this is a normal process — but I’m still interested in analysing it). The first conferences I went to were bloody exciting. I got to meet all these people who were just names in my online universe, or with whom I’d been chatting for months or years, or whose blog I’d been reading in awe for ages. I made a lot of friends. (Maybe they wouldn’t agree, but that’s what it was like for me.) I met many people that I found interesting, likeable, wonderful, even. Some of them who also seemed to appreciate me back (as far as I can tell).

Over the last six months, conferences have become more and more frustrating. I’m speaking only of the social/networking aspect here. A dozen if not twenty people I really like are in town, sometimes more. Getting to see them offline is a rare occasion for me, and I’d like to spend half a day with each of them. But there is no time for that. People are here, and gone. They also have their other friends to see, which might not be mine.

To some, maybe, I’m “just another fan” — that I can live with, even if nobody likes being “just another fan”. But does one have to make conversation and appreciate every reader of one’s blog? If you like somebody’s blog, does that automatically mean they’re going to like you? Find your presence or conversation interesting? The hard reality of celebrity and fandom, even micro, is that the answer is “no”. It doesn’t mean that as a fan, I’m not an interesting person in my own right. It doesn’t mean that if I got to spend enough time with the person I’m fan of, they wouldn’t appreciate my company and find it enriching. But the fact I’m a fan, or a reader, doesn’t earn me any rights.

And increasingly, I’ve noted over the four or five last conferences I attended that there seem to be more people who want to get to know me than people I want to get to know. Or people who are interested in me for business reasons, but of the type where they get something out of me, and I don’t get much out of them. Or people who have been reading my blog for ages and are happy to be able to talk to me, but I know nothing of them.

I’ve reached a point where I don’t want any more people. I can’t keep up with my people, to start with. I feel spread too thin. I want to deepen relationships, not collect superficial ones. Contacts are useful for business, and though I’ve said many a time that the line between business and personal is more and more blurred, business contacts do not have to become personal friends. I know there are lots of wonderful people out there I don’t know. Lots of wonderful people I’ve maybe brushed aside or pushed away when suffering from “people overload”, when all I want to do is climb into my cave and stay there.

But you know, there are way too many great, interesting, fascinating people in the world to give them all the attention they deserve. Even if the world, here, is just “Web2.0-land”. But there is also a limit to how many meaningful conversations one can have in a day, and to how many meaningful relationships one can fit in a life. Those limits are personal. They vary from person to person. Some have them low, some have them high. But when the limit is reached, it’s reached.

So at some point, I need to choose who I spend my time with. In a very selfish way, I choose to give priority to the people in my life that I care for, and who bring me something. I’m there for me first, others after. I consider that one can only truly give and bring value to others when it is not at one’s own expense. I think this is valid in the economy of social relationships too. Being spread too thin impairs my ability to care — and I don’t want that.

Choosing who I spend my time with online is rather easy. I can tell the umpteenth guy who wants to “be friends” with me on IM that I have enough friends, I’m not looking for more, don’t chat with people I don’t know, and really can’t chat with him now. If he insists, I can ask him to leave me alone, and tell him that if he doesn’t, I’m going to have to block him. I can keep him out.

Offline, in a conference, it’s way more difficult. Maybe we need to take inspiration from Aram Bartholl and hang status messages around our necks, or chat windows (with curtains?) that we can close. I’m kidding, I honestly don’t think there is a real solution apart from being honest — in a socially acceptable and non-rejecting way (easier said than done).

I think we need more awareness of the complications offline to online transitions bring about. Maybe we’re going to have to start being explicit about these “social awkwardnesses” that I mentioned above — because changing the setting from online to offline makes it much more difficult to resolve them by ignoring them.

We’ve all been through the very unpleasant experience of being “stuck” in a conversation we don’t find interesting, but which is obviously fascinating for the other party. It happens even with our friends: I’m talking with Jill, and hear with my spare ear that Bill and Kate are talking about something much more interesting to me, but I can’t just dump Jill, can I? But what if Jill is somebody I’ve met 3 minutes ago — does that change anything? And of course, this dreadful thought: heck, could it be that I’m his/her Jill? Have I been the dreadful boring person one tries to shake off, without noticing?

These are human problems — they’re not technological. I feel I’m getting tired now and before I ramble too much (I feel I’m not very coherent anymore), I’ll don my flame-retardant suit (you never know) and hit publish. I’m looking forward to reading your reactions — whether you agree or disagree with me, of course.

FOWA: FireEagle (Tom Coates) [en]

[fr] Notes prises à l'occasion de la conférence Future of Web Apps (FOWA) à Londres.

Here are my live notes of this Future of Web Apps (FOWA) session. They are probably incomplete and may contain mistakes, though I do my best to be accurate. Chances are I’ll be adding links to extra material and photos later on, so don’t hesitate to come back and check.

FOWA 2007 134

Share your location online. Capture and make sense of your location, share it with your friends, share it programmatically.

How Fire Eagle works.

Apps either get your location or use it in some way. Too heavily enmeshed with one another. Flickr is good at using your information, but bad at getting it (you have to enter it by hand). Plazes is good at getting location. So, problem, each time you build such an app you have to work on both sides.

Better model: one brilliant way of capturing location, then a whole bunch of services based on it.

Open APIs mean anyone can build a client and anyone can access the data (with permission). Central repository.

Input: postcode, address, GPS trace, co-ordinates, neighbourhood name, village/town/city…

The service: a way of handling the data in the middle and APIs on the outside. A bit like PayPal, a service in the middle.

You give other services permission to access your information.

Example: Dopplr gives my location (London) to FireEagle. Then, I manually update my location on mobile site (“Victoria Dock Thingy”). Or I could broadcast location from my phone. (The app exists for certain phones already.) Then I can decide to share more or less precisely where I am with various applications. I open my laptop at a café, Plazes sends Fire Eagle my location. Then, I take a picture and send a geotagged picture to the web. Site updates my location.

Twitter maps application: I only want updates from my friends if they’re in London. steph-note: that would be great!! Proximizer: know how close your boss is. Friends and family widgets.

Being honorable with your data (privacy, ethics, etc). Because, in fact, why would I want to put that information anywhere? Because it’s profoundly useful and fun to do so. Possible to share location without being invasive. Also, exposing your logs to you. Possibility to purge your data. If you’re doing something naughty (buying your partner a present secretly), “hide me” button. Private places.

Possible problem: people forget they’re sharing. The app can check back and remind them.

FOWA 2007 135