Tag: talk

More About the M-DEX, and a Cool Blog: Hack and Hear [en]

[fr] J'ai trouvé comment faire marcher le M-DEX correctement! C'est pas si mal!

I have just listened to the really interesting talk on audiology, hearing aids, and hacking them embedded below. Helga (@helgarhelgar), the speaker, is a friend-of-a-friend, fellow geek (probably geekier than me!) with hearing aids. And she has a few years’ headstart on me exploring the tech. I’ve just started going through her blog, hack and hear.

Midway through her talk, I was inspired to give the disappointing M-DEX another chance (I wrote about it in my previous article about hearing aids).

Lo and behold, I figured it out, and it doesn’t work too badly!

M-DEX

Here’s the trick:

  • first of all, it increases the general volume of the hearing aids, so the horrible crackling sound I heard when I tried to use it with the phone is actually (mainly, as far as I can tell) outside sound: muting the “room” (with the mute button) takes care of that
  • second, music sounds like crap, even on the music programme (the M-DEX music programe — as far as I’m aware my aids don’t have one yet); this is maybe because of my hearing aid settings or programme, and understanding better how compression works and feedback loops are countered, I’m also understanding why my hearing aids behave badly during my singing rehearsals => so I’m sticking to voice for the moment
  • third, the M-DEX user interface is pretty crap, it’s hard to figure out which button to press when to obtain a desired result: what I do now is first mute, then press the middle button to get to the bluetooth menu, then enter that; however, if bluetooth is on and the device is selected (on my computer for example), it “switches on” when I start playing sound. Pressing the red button when listening to sound from the phone/computer and when on mute goes back to the main programme and un-mutes (if you’re just on normal mute it doesn’t do that). Very confusing. It’s probably going to take me some time to learn when not to press on which button.
  • fourth, it’s possible to pair the M-DEX with more than one device (I mistakenly thought it wasn’t) — to prevent the M-DEX from kicking into gear unexpectedly, I turn off bluetooth on the devices if I’m not using them, or turn off the M-DEX
  • fifth, the M-DEX needs to be pretty close to the hearing aids (which is why they provide a lovely strap so you can hang it around your neck like a necklace), or at least somewhere that is at a stable distance — if you move it around it crackles really annoyingly, and if an ear gets out of range the sound in it dies.

So, I might end up keeping the expensive toy after all if I settle on the Widex hearing aids! Still need to test it with a real phone call though, which I’m not going to do while in Spain.

Update: looks like I’m not alone in thinking the M-DEX is suboptimally designed!

After the glowing review of my hearing aids and my audiologist, it is unfortunate that I have to be so negative about the other component in question. The M-DEX is a piece of shit — I am a software engineer and architect, and I have never seen such poor interface quality or assumptions about the listener.

Le monde a changé (Cluetrain 101 pour formation SAWI MCMS) [fr]

[en] This is a "Cluetrain 101" presentation I gave as part of the course I teach at SAWI on community management and social media. It was initially published on the course blog.

Je co-dirige la formation au diplôme SAWI de spécialiste en management de communautés et médias sociaux. Cet article a initialement été publié sur le blog du cours [voir l’original].

Si cette présentation est une “introduction au Cluetrain”, c’est en tant que le Cluetrain Manifesto est le représentant et l’expression d’une culture — et même, si on veut oser les grands mots, d’un changement de paradigme. Mon but n’est donc pas tant de faire un résumé du livre (lisez-le plutôt!) mais d’aborder un certain nombre de thématiques qui permettent de comprendre en quoi internet a profondément (à débattre!) changé la façon dont les organisations intéragissent avec les gens, que ceux-ci leur soient intérieurs ou extérieurs.

Sans vouloir mettre par écrit ici tout ce que je vais dire, voici la présentation Prezi qui servira de base de discussion, ainsi que quelques notes aide-mémoire.

Pas vraiment changé

  • retour à des valeurs pré-industrielles
  • “les marchés sont des conversations” => “les marchés sont des relations” — ça va plus loin!
  • culture de masse comme anomalie historique — traiter les gens en masse comme on traite les objets sur la chaîne de production

Perte de contrôle

  • une des conséquences les plus visibles, et les plus déstabilisantes pour la culture d’entreprise classique
  • démocratisation de la parole publique, redistribution du pouvoir (VRM)
  • on a les moyens de remettre en question les “messages” qu’on nous sert

Objets numériques

  • les lois de la physique n’ont plus cours en ligne
  • donner sans perdre (cf. tout le débat sur le partage de fichiers)
  • économie basée sur la rareté qui perd ses repères dans un monde d’abondance
  • “ideas want to be free”

Différentes conceptions d’internet

  • ville: celle des gens qui y vivent et y créent (des liens ou de la culture)
  • bibliothèque: celle des consommateurs d’information
  • télé: celle des annonceurs

Voix humaine

  • reconnaissable, désirée
  • très différente de celle de la communication officielle, du blabla publicitaire ou marketing
  • écoute, authenticité (qui n’est pas un vain mot), partage, humour, personnalité, transparence (jusqu’où?)
  • c’est la seule qui rend possible la relation (essayez d’avoir une conversation sensée avec un robot de service clientèle ou un communiqué de presse publié sur un blog)

Conversation

  • pas juste deux personnes qui parlent (être vraiment présent, authentique, désintéressé, transparent)
  • il ne suffit pas de dire qu’on a une conversation pour en avoir une (cf. blocages à la communication)
  • importance de la narration — ce n’est pas par hasard qu’on aime les conversations et les histoires
  • les conversations ont lieu de toute façon — l’entreprise peut rester extérieure ou se mouiller
  • on n’est plus dans une logique de broadcast; la profondeur des échanges importe plus que leur nombre

Bouche à oreille

  • le plus grand influenceur
  • en ligne, prend une autre dimension (espace public + objets numériques)
  • libre choix de ce dont on parle, d’où sa valeur
  • véhicule: la voix humaine

Espaces semi-publics

  • difficulté à se positionner
  • le cloisonnement en perte de vitesse
  • impose la réconciliation de discours parfois contradictoires
  • “public” élastique (taille, nature)

Réseaux

  • renversent la hiérarchie
  • réseaux de gens, réseau hypertexte — le double réseau internet
  • chacun en son centre, propagation, veille, recherche

Communautés

  • groupes restreints
  • investissement émotionnel
  • émergent de la complexité des rapports entre les gens et aux choses

Retour à la conversation: en quoi internet change-t-il la donne pour vous? Si on prend quelques pas de recul sur nos peurs, que peut-on dire sur ce qui se passe dans le monde? En y regardant de près, beaucoup des thèmes que nous avons abordés sont présents dans la fonctionnement de l’entreprise classique, mais clandestinement ou inofficiellement.

Liens en rapport, ou notes de dernière minute:

SWITCH Conference, Coimbra: José Fontainhas [en]

Running notes from the SWITCH conference in Coimbra. Are not perfect. Feel free to add info in the comments, or corrections.

Jazz and the art of Chaos

About how José became a better musician. Everything not in English at Automattic has something to do with José. But first and foremore, he is a drummer.

Where it began: a few years back, José decided he wanted to be his own boss. Wanted to develop ideas that don’t thrive well in the online world. Generic websites. Found WordPress: open source, easy to use, and named for jazz musicians. Started WordPress-Portugal.

Playing solo doesn’t work for all musicians. Freelancing felt a bit like playing solo, studio work. He came across Automattic.

Automattic does WordPress.com, but many other products: Akismet, BuddyPress, VideoPress, etc. 11 mio blogs on wp.com.

1200 servers running across a whole bunch of data centres. The service speaks more than 60 languages, and this is where José comes in. Portuguese is the third most popular language after English and Spanish.

He sent in his application, and a few months later got an answer. Whee! Felt like getting a positive response from Mick Jagger saying he’d love to play in the band or something 🙂

He thought they would be like other companies, but they’re crazy! Same kind of craziness as him, however.

  • work is completely distributed, everybody works from home (50 people!) — 12 US states, 10 countries
  • everybody sets their own work hours
  • no offices (Pier 38 in SF though, but it’s more a space/lounge rather than an office) — used as a coworking space, open to others
  • communicate using p2; IRC channel, conversations logged, indexed and archived, but it became too busy => but afterwards, moved to p2 (they use e-mail, but really not that much)
  • in-person meet-ups every six months or so, to see each other’s faces, etc.; weeks with fun activities and small projects and workgroups to be delivered at the end

Point: the system is chaotic. No titles. No diagrammes. No PAs. But there are responsibilities. Each person needs to be grown-up enough to find his or her place in the journey.

They push code changes live to production upto 20 times a day. Direct from dev to live.

It’s a jam. Embrace the chaos, don’t fight it. Improvisation. Be a better musician. He is the master of his instrument, and his band mates know he is and trust him to use it the best.

*Here’s a video of Zé’s talk (minus a little bit when my memory card was full, oops!) if you want to listen to it.*

How Do You Personally Define or Explain "Web 2.0"? [en]

On Tuesday I’m giving an introductory keynote at the next GRI theme day here in Lausanne. I’ll be setting the stage for the day by clarifying what “web 2.0” is and is not, where it comes from, how it’s used (and abused). I’m doing quite a bit of research to get my facts straight (and they’re starting to look pretty starched by now) and I thought I’d ask you, readers (or not) of this blog, to contribute a little to my research by answering the following question in the comments:

How do you personally define “web 2.0”? Today, in 2010, what is the meaning of “web 2.0” (the expression) for you, in a few sentences? If somebody asks you what it is, how do you explain (simply)?

I can read the Wikipedia page and the history of the term, and see how various people use it. But what I’m interested in here is the way you use it. Beyond all official definitions, what does “web 2.0” mean when people actually speak the words or write them?

So, thanks a lot if you can take a minute or two to write down what it means to you here in the comments.

It would also help me contextualise if you could add a little info about your background: I’m interested in knowing if you’re a social media professional, or power user, or “just a user”, and also if you were online doing things like blogging before 2004.

Update: I’m not looking for the definition of “web 2.0”. I know how I understand it and use it (or don’t use it). I’m interested in seeing how various people have various ways of explaining something that is often pretty fuzzy, complex, and overused. It’s not about “good” or “bad” ways of saying what it is, it’s about collecting a variety of definitions which will show how multifaceted and ambiguous “web 2.0” can be.

Update 2: If you’re feeling a bit self-conscious about going public with this, you may use this form instead of the comments!

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Judging Talk Proposals for Conferences [en]

[fr] Très difficile d'évaluer la qualité d'une proposition de conférence basé sur un résumé textuel (ce que je suis en train de faire à présent pour la conférence BlogTalk 2009 qui aura lieu à Jeju, en Corée du Sud). Il faudrait que les candidats donnent non seulement un descriptif écrit de leur proposition, mais aussi un court extrait vidéo (2-3 minutes), soit d'une conférence qu'ils ont déjà donnée, soit d'un "pitch" pour le sujet qu'ils proposent.

Just a passing thought, as I’m spending some time reviewing submissions for the upcoming BlogTalk 2009 conference in Jeju, South Korea.

Just as my proposal was reviewed (and rejected) last year, I am now on the other side of the fence, looking at proposal abstracts and trying to determine if they would make good presentations for the conference.

BlogTalk is an interesting conference, because it tries to bridge the academic and practitioner worlds. The submission process resulting from that led to some interesting discussions last year (academics are used to submitting papers all over the place and are paid for that, practitioners on the conference circuit are more used to being asked to come and talk) and as a result the process was modified somewhat for this year. Practitioners and academics alike submit a short abstract of their talk/paper/research, and people like me (the programme committee) review them.

What I am realizing, doing this, is that it is very hard to imagine if the proposals will produce good talks. I mean, I can judge if their content is interesting or not. I don’t know the people sending in the proposals, so I keep going from “ah, this could be really good if the speaker is competent” to “ew, if the speaker isn’t good this could be a nightmare”.

Already in my long-gone university days, I had understood that content is only half of the deal. Take great content but a crap speaker, you’ll lose half your audience (and I’m being nice).

In 2007 and 2008, I gave a fair amount of talks all over the place and organized my own conference. All this time on the “conference circuit” and amongst regular speakers led me to view it as something quite close to the entertainment business.

So, setting up a conference that will be successful means finding engaging speakers who will be able to talk about interesting topics. When I organized Going Solo (clearly a very different type of conference than BlogTalk, of course), I picked speakers I was familiar with and that I had already seen “in action”.

Back to screening proposals for conferences — of course, if you want an open process, you’re not going to know all the speakers. But how about asking candidates, alongside the written abstract, for a 2-3 minute video excerpt of them giving a talk, or pitching their proposal?

Stephanie's October Conference Tour: SHiFT [en]

[fr] La conférence SHiFT a lieu du 15 au 17 octobre à Lisbonne. J'y parlerai des conférences que je donne depuis bientôt quatre ans dans les écoles. Il est encore possible de s'inscrire pour assister à la conférence, faites vite!

Well, here we are. I should have blogged about this long ago, but without getting into the details of these past weeks, it’s been kinda… busy here lately.

October is conference month in Stephanie-land. I leave on Tuesday. Let’s see what we have in store. First conference:

SHiFT, 15-17 October 2008, Lisbon

SHiFT - Social and Human Ideas For Technology I was present at the first edition of SHiFT in 2006, and really liked this Reboot– and LIFT-inspired event. Smaller scale than both of them, SHiFT is set in beautiful Lisbon and has a very nice atmosphere. I heard some great talks and met some incredible people in 2006, and I’m looking forward to more this year.

I’m really excited that I’ve been invited to speak, and will for the first time cover and comment on the work I’ve been doing in schools for nearly four years in schools, raising awareness about digital media issues with teenagers, teachers, and parents, in “What do teenagers, teachers, and parents need to understand“.

Even if you don’t work with teenagers or in a school setting, and don’t have any teenage children, I think you’ll find my talk interesting. I would really like to encourage you to attend. I’m saying this because I’ll be talking about what feels to me like my most meaningful work, and I want to share it. The thinking and issues behind it go way beyond educational settings, as I explain in my recent comments following a radio show about Facebook in Swiss companies, and the complete ignorance of what may seem basic digital media awareness in those environments — both on the part of employees and company management.

I’m not danah or Anastasia and my book project is on hold ;-), but I’ve learnt over the years that though it may not have seemed extraordinary to me at first, I have acquired some valuable insights about online behaviours of both adults and teenagers, and I’m really happy to have a chance to share them with my digitally clued-in peers.

If you hadn’t planned to attend SHiFT, hurry up and register. It’s last-minute but it’s still possible. EasyJet and TAP flights will take you to Lisbon from most places in Europe.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Here We Go Again [en]

[fr] C'est reparti. La course. Vite vite vite. Trop pour une personne. Déceptions. Personnes qui proposent leur aide et se retirent: une composante culturelle? Réduire mes attentes. Y'a encore du boulot.

It’s back. The Urge. The Urge to quickly quickly quickly do this, do that, get on the computer in the morning, do this, finish that, OMG-I-wanted-to-do-it-3-days-ago, here’s my list for today, urgent, urgent, quickly deal with it.

What’s going on? Well, first, the Dip. Those of you who know what I’m talking about will know what I’m talking about. As for the others… well, hey, a little mystery here and there can’t hurt, can it, in this age of public people everywhere. So, the Dip is back, and Deadlines are coming up (I resisted the temptation to say “looming on the horizon” right there).

Deadline 1: Friday morning, I’m heading off to the mountains and my chalet again.

Deadline 2: in a month minus 1 day, it’s Going Solo Leeds.

Busy-busy-busy!

Actually, it’s not astonishing that I feel crunched. Stressed. Running. I’m trying to do more than one person’s work. So, no wonder I can’t keep up.

I’m also learning to not get my hopes up when people offer help. It’s sad to say, but often people are enthusiastic, come forward, and have second thoughts when it comes to actually taking the plunge.

I realised it’s cultural, too: very un-Swiss. I’m not saying there aren’t unreliable Swiss people, but here you expect people to be good to their word. Reliability is very much valued. When somebody says “I want to contribute”, you usually expect them to do so. It also means it’s pretty difficult to find people to say “I’m in”.

I’ve had a few disappointing experiences over the last 6-8 months. In my dark days, it feels like I just can’t rely on anybody — but that’s not true either.

I think it’s a combination of various factors. I’ve noticed amongst my more entrepreneur/Valley/less-risk-averse friends a tendency to talk about lots of projects or “things they’re going to do”, start many things, and then drop a lot, too. Not all that is spoken about happens. “Fail early, fail often.” Be creative with your ideas, talk about them around you, try them out, and let go of them if they don’t seem to catch.

All good.

But I’m not like that at all. I have ideas. I talk about them as “perhaps maybe at some point I might possibly eventually try to start doing this or that”. It’s very difficult for me to make the step to say “I’m going to do this/I’m doing this”. Because when I do, I’m married to the idea. It’s going to happen. Giving up is not an option. (I sometimes do, but it’s agonizing and horribly difficult.) Once I have my mind set on something, I have a really hard time letting go or seeing things differently.

It’s not all cultural.

It’s a mix. Some cultural, and some personal. In a more entrepreneur-oriented culture like the US, I guess you’ll find more people who start things easily, go for it, and turn to something else if it doesn’t work out. In a very cautious and risk-averse culture like Switzerland, well, you don’t bump into that many people with that profile. It’s only recently in my life (these last few years) that I’ve started meeting such people and counting them amongst my friends and network.

On a personal level, well, I’m particularly risk-averse, and (as NNT would say) particularly ill-equipped for dealing with probabilities. When somebody says they’ll do something for me, I know there’s a chance it’ll fall through, but I somehow can’t keep my emotions in line with that intellectual knowledge. I build whole worlds on the sand of people’s words, and forget that they are likely to crumble. When they do, it feels like everybody and everything is letting me down.

Another situation in my life where suffering less seems to depend on my ability to adjust my expectations.

There’s still work.

Ressources for Parents and Teachers (ISL Talks on Social Networking) [en]

[fr] Quelques liens, points de départ pour mes deux conférences plus tard dans la journée (parents et enseignants, au sujet des adolescents et des réseaux sociaux comme Facebook).

I’m giving two talks today at the ISL, one for teachers and another for parents, about teenagers and social networking (that the request was specifically for “social networking” makes me happy, because we’re finally moving away from the whole “blog” thing). I think we’re moving away further and further from the “internet as library” metaphor, and the “internet as city/village” image is the one that most people are starting to have.

I have already gathered many links with useful information all over the place, but I think it’s a good thing to collect some of them here for easier access. If you’re reading this not long after I posted it, you’ll find a whole series of quotes in my Tumblr, too.

General starting-points

Fear of sexual predators

This is by large the most important fear linked to teenagers and the internet. Thankfully, it is much exaggerated and no more of concern than fear of predators offline. Three starting-points:

The real issues

You’ll see that these are much less “newsworthy” than sexual predators.

  • privacy (in the sense of revealing too much about yourself or in an inappropriate context, which leads to embarrassement or social problems) — a look at Facebook privacy settings
  • permanence of online media
  • weakness of anonymity
  • misunderstanding of how online interactions affect communication and relationships (“chat effect”, flame wars…)
  • slide-show of a presentation I gave about the kind of mischief teenagers get upto on blogs (what I managed to lay my hands on, with screenshots — no fear, it’s pretty mild)
  • intellectual property (copyright)
  • necessary to move away from a model of “education through control” as everything is available at a click of a mouse (age-restricted content like porn, shopping, gambling)
  • rumors, hoaxes and urban legends (use snopes.com to debunk them)
  • bullying and many other unpleasant online phenomenons are also offline phenomenons, but sometimes less visible to adults; the core issue does not change — if these problems are addressed properly offline, then they will also be online
  • cyberaddiction is not common at all, despite what some articles might want to have you believe — unhealthy usage of the computer usually is not the problem in itself, but an element of a larger problem which needs to be addressed
  • the jury is still out on gaming — though it’s clearly not healthy to be spending too much time immersed in interactive virtual worlds when you’re learning to get to grips with reality, it seems that participating in multi-player online games can have a significant positive impact on ability to work in teams and solve problems creatively

Other links or comments

I will probably add to this article later on, following the requests made during the talks. If you want to suggest a topic or ask a question, feel free to do so in the comments.

Vidéo de ma conférence sur le multilinguisme à Paris Web 2007 [fr]

[en] For once, I was asked to give one of my multilingual talks in French. Here is the video recording of it.

Il y a un décalage qui me perplexe parfois un peu entre les conférences que je donne en français et celles que je donne en anglais. En français, on me demande immanquablement de parler d’ados et internet ou éventuellement des blogs en général ou en entreprise. Dans le monde anglophone, c’est une tout autre histoire, et ce sont des sujets beaucoup plus pointus, comme le multilinguisme sur internet, par exemple.

Je suis contente qu’on m’ait enfin demandé de traiter de ce sujet en français, lors de la conférence Paris Web 2007. Voici l’enregistrement vidéo de ma conférence,intitulée “En attendant le Poisson de Babel”.

Sur le site de Paris Web, vous trouverez des liens vers l’enregistrement audio et autres ressources ainsi que d’autres formats vidéo. Voici la présentation que j’ai utilisée:

Voici une liste (pas forcément complète) de ce que d’autres ont écrit au sujet des diverses incarnations de cette conférence — en français et en anglais.

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.