Tag: lift06

Social, Plural of Personal (or When Personal Scales) [en]

[fr] Grâce à JP et sa série d'articles, je viens de me reconnecter avec ce qui fait la fondation de ma passion pour le web et les médias sociaux: qu'ils mettent les gens en contact direct, et dans le contexte de l'entreprise, humanisent celle-ci. A lire.

Today I am going to send you to read JP Rangaswami, after my latest spree of ranty pots. JP is writing a series of articles around the idea that social is the plural of personal. And he is so spot on.

I was so happy when I read JP’s first article, because it made me remember what attracted me to social media in the first place (at the time, “blogs” or “social software”) and helped me understand the growing dissatisfaction I have developed about the field over the past years.

What I find interesting about social media in a business setting is how it helps humanize the organisation/company. How it puts human beings back in touch with human beings. And how in the context of an authentic relationship, you need to care for things to work out.

I am so frustrated that French does not have a good word to translate “care”.

I had a revelation when I went to the very first Lift Conference, in 2006. Here are the posts I wrote during the conference (see how blogging has evolved since then — this was before Twitter and Facebook). My memory tells me that I owe this revelation mainly to the talks of Robert Scoble and Hugh MacLeod, and the conversations we had during the conversation. I remember that it was this pivotal moment which made me understand what use blogs (at the time) were in a business context, and therefore that there might be a way to earn money with what was fascinating me.

Update: link to lift06 videos.

Six+ years later, well, you know the story.

I’m trying to remember if I also met Euan Semple that year at Lift, or if it was somewhere else, or later. Do you remember, Euan? Anyway, a few weeks before reading JP’s post, I had ordered Euan’s book, “Organizations don’t tweet, people do”. I haven’t yet started reading it but I’m really looking forward to diving in. Same thing: it’s all about putting people, and personal, and relationships, and trust, and authenticity back in front of the scene.

Somewhere along my business life, with all my freelancer insecurities, the pressure to actually earn a living through my activities and interests, I seem to have lost touch with the core of my passion for the living web. Not to the point where I’ve sold out to some ad agency and started spewing out viral videos or whatnot. Not so much in my actions — more just that I forgot.

But I remember now.

Thanks, JP. Thanks, Euan. And thanks to all of you along the way who have not let go and are not letting go, and are working to make our organizations more human-friendly.

#back2blog challenge (7/10):

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.

Journée au Forum des 100 de l'Hebdo [fr]

[en] I'm spending my day at the Forum des 100 (a selection of 100 local personalities by l'Hebdo, a regional weekly magazine). My computer is still being repaired, and to top it all I've (temporarily) lost my internet connection at home.

J’ai piqué à  Anne Dominique (assise à  côté de moi) le joli Powerbook qu’elle a amené au Forum des 100. Comment?

  1. Mon ordinateur est toujours en réparation, et je n’ai depuis quelques jours même plus de connexion à  la maison (dans quelques semaines/mois, cependant, je devrais être l’heureuse propriétaire d’un nouveau Macbook.

  2. Il y a quelques semaines, j’ai reçu une lettre m’annonçant que je faisais partie des fameux “100” de l’Hebdo et que j’étais donc invitée à  passer mon jeudi 18 mai (aujourd’hui!) dans l’Amphimax de l’UNIL.

Quelques premières impressions:

  • que de mecs en costard! (bienvenue en Suisse Romande, me dit ma voisine.)
  • les verres dans lesquels on sert le jus d’orange sont vraiment petits, probablement pour nous forcer à  faire des allers-retours…
  • un webcast de la conférence (le lien est en haut à  droite) est disponible, vous pouvez donc la suivre depuis votre ordinateur
  • le modérateur (et néanmoins blogueur!) Bruno Giussani a annoncé lors des informations pratiques le tag à  utiliser pour les personnes couvrant la conférence sur leurs blogs: forumdes100
  • pas d’accent sur mon prénom, ni sur le badge, ni sur la liste des participants (malgré les nombreuses autres coquilles que j’ai pu voir!) — et ils ont même épelé “blogueuse” correctement (contrairement à  la lettre d’invitation qui m’a propulsée “blogeuse”…)

Ah oui! Bruno a aussi attiré notre attention (je suis assise à  côté de l’équipe de lift06) sur le fait qu’il y avait des fontaines à  eau dans la salle et des points d’alimentation pour laptops dans la salle. (Il se souvient des mes premières impressions de lift06…)

Voilà ! Je vais rendre l’ordinateur à  sa propriétaire. Passez une bonne journée!

PS: ah oui, pas de photos, je suis encore en train d’essayer de récuperer les dernières photos effacées de ma carte mémoire, qui ont péri avec le disque dur de mon iBook…

DailyMotion Problems Solved: View Robert's Video Now [en]

[fr] La vidéo de Robert Scoble que j'ai faite à LIFT'06 est maintenant réparée et visible dans le billet initial.

Finally! With help from Olivier of DailyMotion, I’ve solved the DailyMotion problems which prevented the wild videocast of Robert Scoble from playing correctly in the post I’d written.

I had copied the code from another video I’d embedded in a post on my Cheese Sandwich Blog, and changed the video ID. The only problem is that DailyMotion code includes a key which is blog-specific, so people were getting an error message when they tried to play the video on the blog. I tried republishing the video here using their “blog this” feature, but that didn’t embed it properly. Finally, Olivier pointed me to the “manual” option — which I hadn’t seen, although it was what I was looking for! — which simply spits out code for you to copy-paste into your blog.

So, if you gave up earlier, or didn’t have a chance to see it, go and watch Robert being podcasted by two swiss guys at LIFT’06.

Video Complaints [en]

[fr] Souvent pas facile de voir les jolies choses vidéo qu'on nous met à  disposition sur le web. Je me plains un peu.

Stupid user or balkanisation?

I’m listening to a video from LIFT’06. First of all I got a pop-up window which looked like a “go no further, you don’t have what it takes to view this” message. Actually, there’s a RealPlayer link in there. OK, cool. They have a partial podcast of the event, but I can’t open it in iTunes. What a shame!

At LIFT’06, I learnt that part of Robert Scoble‘s job is barging into people’s offices with a camcorder and saying “hi there, what do you do at Microsoft?” So I headed off to Channel9 to try and listen to some. My first impression upon landing on the site, I have to say, was “ew, what a mess! Where do I find Robert’s stuff in there?” OK, I found one: Jenny Lam – Designing Experiences at Microsoft. Click, click. Launches VLC. Doesn’t work 🙁 Quicktime usually works. Ah, damn, Quicktime is an Apple thing, isn’t it?

Yep, I’m running OSX, Firefox, and I’m not exactly a Microsoft fan. I’ve been very positively impressed, though, from what I learnt that Microsoft was doing in the transparency department. Aren’t I precisely the kind of audience Channel9 could be interested in catering to? Make it easy for me, please 🙂

DailyMotion Problems [en]

[fr] Un problème avec DailyMotion, heureusement réglé. Si vous n'avez pas pu voir la vidéo où je fais la bobette derrière Robert Scoble, c'est le moment d'y aller!

You probably know I like DailyMotion. I posted some feedback about DailyMotion yesterday, and bumped into some naughty problems today.

The problem with DailyMotion is that it doesn’t have a nice forum or a real devblog like coComment where we can leave feedback. So I’m posting it to my blog and tagging it in hope it will be found. By the way, I’ve been wondering what the best place is for this kind of feedback: here or on the Cheese Sandwich Blog? What’s your take?

After LIFT’06, I put this video of Robert being interviewed online and wrote a post about it here. Unfortunately, it seems at least one of my readers is not able to view it . (I guess there are at least 20 of you out there who just didn’t tell me about it.) The message says something about a key not being valid for this blog.

DailyMotion allows you to blog your videos directly from the site. That’s neat, but as I’m a control freak, I like dealing with the code myself. Back in November I had posted a video to my other blog, so I grabbed the code from over there, adapted it (video id), and it seemed to work. Actually, that was because I was still logged in to my DailyMotion account.

I first tried adding CTTS to my DailyMotion account, as a second blog. That failed (error message, just doesn’t work). As I was writing this post, I tried logging out of DailyMotion, and actually saw the message all my poor readers have been seeing these last days! In a click of my trackpad I was able to fix everything.

So, if you haven’t seen me goofing off behind Robert Scoble as David and Marc-O try to podcast him (red wine and Apple hardware involved), now’s the time to do it! Sorry for the buggy post, and thanks a lot to Raphael for pointing out the problem to me.

Lift: Thanks for the Videos, but… [en]

[fr] Problème pour visionner les vidéos de LIFT avec OSX et Firefox. Et vous?

I tried to get to the LIFT videos but I can’t read them. I have the latest versions of Tiger and Firefox. I spent a minute in a pop-up configuration window (that was nasty to start with), and then it just didn’t work. Can’t we have DailyMotion-style videos that “simply work”?

Audio works, though. Would be nice to be able to download it instead of stream.

As for the podcast feed, it asks me if I want to open NNWL. A little button to subscribe in iTunes would be really neat.

Wild Videocast of Robert Scoble Interview [en]

[fr] Une interview (partielle) de Robert Scoble par Marc-Olivier et David de IC Agency, filmée de façon un peu sauvage. Quand on dit que les blogs sont la télé-réalité du web...

I was having a post-LIFT chat with Marc-Olivier in the lounge yesterday when David came up, stole him from me and started talking about getting Robert to do a podcast with them for a blog they were going to open. I offered to introduce them to him.

I was going to take a couple of photographs but as they started, I decided for video instead. Think of it as a “making of” videocast of their podcast. (I say “wild” not because Robert went wild on the video but because it wasn’t planned, staged, or whatever. Vidéocasting sauvage would be how I’d put it in French.

5-minute videocast with Robert (partial)

Robert Scoble podcast (5 mins) by Steph

My initial intention was to upload it straight away. I like the immediateness you can get with the web. (If moblogging wasn’t so bloody expensive I’d be moblogging away…) David actually asked me to hold off publishing the video and cut out some bits of it or put their audio on it, because they wanted to edit some of the audio (English mistakes in the questions, but IMHO, who cares?) I said I preferred to publish what I had recorded “as is”, mistakes, goofs, and all — it was OK with Robert.

I’m a bit embarrassed by the situation, to be honest. My video is on DailyMotion under a CC-by-sa-nc license, so they can put their audio on top if they like, whatever. I don’t really like having to refrain from publishing something, but on the other hand I am very much aware that if you appear on a video or a photograph, you have a right to control publication of it. I think what bothered me was the argument of “exclusivity”. My videocast is only about a third of the interview, anyway.

What would you have done? Should I have refrained from posting this until they had their version up?

I will of course be posting the link to their version(s) here as soon as I get it.

Back to Being a Low-Tech Audience [en]

[fr] Dans une conférence où beaucoup de blogueurs sont présents, on a besoin de pauses-blogging 😉 -- et peut-être aussi de présentations qui tiennent bien dans un billet? Suivent quelques suggestions pour les personnes qui font des conférences -- sachant que je ne fais certainement pas tout ce que je dis.

Running a bit late for Emmanuelle‘s talk on anonymity online, I decided to go in without my laptop, which was in the other room. Decision also fueled by my earlier cogitations about my decreasing attention span.

Well, there we are: I was more attentive and took notes on paper.

I was telling Robert that conferences like this lacked blogging breaks. The audience is in the real-time information business if you have lots of bloggers in the room, so if you don’t want them to spend half the talk time uploading photos, chatting, and writing up blog posts. So, how about give us blogging breaks, and plan post-sized talks? Wouldn’t that be neat?

For many people, the most interesting moments of a gathering like this is around and outside the talks. Try to change the balance a bit? I know there are organisational imperatives, but I’m sure a solution could be found.

Other than that, some ideas for speakers (and I’m aware I don’t do what I preach when I’m giving a talk):

  • Give me an outline of the talk, paper would be best (I’ll get lost somewhere else by trying to find it online). If I tune out of your talk for a minute (and I’m bound to) I need a chance to tune back in. An outline will help with that.
  • Be theatrical, keep me listening, or make me participate. Effective use of slides is good, but I don’t know how to do it so I won’t give you any advice on the topic.
  • Don’t talk to fast, particularly when the audio in the venue isn’t too good. Articulate. (Yeah. Sorry.)

Update: I took hand-written notes of Robert’s talk too. Lesson learnt.

My Notes of Robert Scoble's Talk

Now let’s see if you can decypher my handwriting!

LIFT'06 Photographs [en]

[fr] Les photos de LIFT'06 aujourd'hui sont en train d'être mises en ligne à  vitesse tout petit v. Merci de votre patience.

You probably noticed I’ve been uploading LIFT’06 photographs to Flickr since yesterday. I took a whole bunch of really fun photos last night, but upload is slow as slug, so I don’t know when they’ll be up. Thanks for your patience!

Cosy Geeking
Robert and Anina geeking away

Almost all of my photos are CC-licensed. Feel free to use them on your blogs if you’re speaking about the conference — a mugshot or two does tend to liven-up text-only conference notes.