Seeing more and more sites cropping up along the lines of getsatisfaction.com. This is a good thing. Also sites like http://www.gigpark.com/ which invite people to build genuine community driven recommendations of businesses. It seems VRM then, is inadvertently gaining ground. Cue thoughts of "path of least resistance"...
Feels like the Cluetrain Manifesto is becoming a self-fulfulling prophecy! About time too. Isn't reality refreshing!
Whats in a name? I dunno, ask Loic
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So LeWeb3 fourth edition, '07 draws to a close and leaves me with a confused set of emotions. As I sit in a cafe at Gare du Nord, I am feeling a strange combination of excitement, concern, happiness, amazement and anger.
I will start positively. Although entirely subjective, I think the conference succeeded in bringing some interesting, bright and talented minds together, putting some on the stage, others on irc.freenode.net#leweb3 and a few more on twitter, and got people talking about some of the new toys, problems, issues, hopes and fears of The Internet. I state the Internet as this was not all about The Web as the title indicated.
Keeping this brief (as my train's coming soon), I shall spare you the usual summative highlights lowlights foo and say more what I think overall. The speakers in attendance were generally excellent, the likes of Kevin Rose of Digg Pownce and others, Evan Williams(twitter), my usual faves, JP and doc along with the idiosyncratic but amazing french designer Phillippe Starck were among the better ones. Speaking of idiosyncracies, it did seem an odd setup. Odd insofar as being likable to a "Friends of Loic le Meur" gathering. Some talks were cut short in light of earlier overrunnings despite some of those being some of the more salient issues (VRM with Doc Searls comes to mind). Particular sessions were wildly off topic, much to the dismay of the irc'ers and twitter clan. My colleague Robbie asked a very valid question during this session, to which the speaker panel basically sidestepped (read more here). At least the food left no sour tastes in the mouth, well done there.
Overall, hmmm. I'm left wanting more of some, less of other and better overall, apart from the company. I met some brilliant, interesting people here and hope to keep in touch with new friends and look forward to new relations. Now then, wheres that train...
I will start positively. Although entirely subjective, I think the conference succeeded in bringing some interesting, bright and talented minds together, putting some on the stage, others on irc.freenode.net#leweb3 and a few more on twitter, and got people talking about some of the new toys, problems, issues, hopes and fears of The Internet. I state the Internet as this was not all about The Web as the title indicated.
Keeping this brief (as my train's coming soon), I shall spare you the usual summative highlights lowlights foo and say more what I think overall. The speakers in attendance were generally excellent, the likes of Kevin Rose of Digg Pownce and others, Evan Williams(twitter), my usual faves, JP and doc along with the idiosyncratic but amazing french designer Phillippe Starck were among the better ones. Speaking of idiosyncracies, it did seem an odd setup. Odd insofar as being likable to a "Friends of Loic le Meur" gathering. Some talks were cut short in light of earlier overrunnings despite some of those being some of the more salient issues (VRM with Doc Searls comes to mind). Particular sessions were wildly off topic, much to the dismay of the irc'ers and twitter clan. My colleague Robbie asked a very valid question during this session, to which the speaker panel basically sidestepped (read more here). At least the food left no sour tastes in the mouth, well done there.
Overall, hmmm. I'm left wanting more of some, less of other and better overall, apart from the company. I met some brilliant, interesting people here and hope to keep in touch with new friends and look forward to new relations. Now then, wheres that train...
Lifestreaming meets MicroContent (is that a â„¢)?
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It seems the whole thing of Lifestreaming (or answer to the Robbie Clutton problem) is gaining pace day by day. Today i've read 3 mentions of a new service Seesmic which proffers to bring you feed driven video ala twitter, and provides aggregation of your other feeds, similar to that seen in onaswarm. Cool I hear you say; and indeed it is an interesting trend.
Seesmic is the brainchild of French hero-blogger/entrepreneur chappy Loic Le Meur and has received quite a bit of positive press. The big question, will it stick? So far one would say yes given opinions heard thus far. Interestingly though, twitter works because its quick, easy and pretty non-commital:
"What are you doing now?"
Doesn't take long to answer. If the aggregation part plays well in Seesmic could we have the next twitter?
Diatribe
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I am sick to death of careful demographic-select, target-market, key-message bu****it advertising. I picked up a copy of the Economist today - an excellent business/current affairs weekly (as I now have so little time to catch up with the news it makes a good tube read). Opening up the magazine a two-page spread by an oil company in a desperate attempt to invest in moral collateral after years of plundering developing countries reserves. Ethics of oil co's aside, in the back of my head I was screaming **** off! I don't care. I paid for a magazine, I don't want to be advertised at.
If you're in marketing heed this - I don't want your 'content' rammed down my throat like you're feeding a pre-fois-gras duck. Thankfully, the internet provides some respite. If you're using firefox and are sick of flashing crap and "you're the millionth site viewer" trash embedded in the articles you'd like to read get the ad-block plugin - a one stop flashing-crap-wasting shop.
Your life in a pipe
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My friend Robbie recently blogged about his annoyance at people aggregating their blog posts with their del.icio.us links and other stuff. He then came across onaswarm a new service in beta which aggregates your feeds from flickr, del.icio.us twitter... wherever you have a feed really, and brings that all together in one. Wow. I hear you say. Wow. But this is really cool as it allows you to aggregate not only your feeds, but those of your friends (or a select few depending on your preference).
In a way, the appeal of this lifestream tool is not entirely dissimilar to that of twitter - bite-sized updates on your friends, now with extra stuff in the mix. Interesting how many people think of the same thing at the same time. I wonder how many other funky uber-aggregators are/were in the pipeline. Exciting times as developers continue to hack down the marketing bubble-crap which has surrounded your sources of interesting stuff/info.
In this day and age? Why?
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I love messing around with computers. I'm fairly sure (and am constantly reminded by my girlfriend) this makes me a geek. Even with this the case however, I like messing around with computers, cos I like making stuff work. Enter Linux; specifically Fedora Core 6.
I've just purchased a couple of VPS's and am in the process of configuring them. Now I have come a step closer to understanding why some system admins just love windows, and conversely others love Linux; both appear to wear their inequities on their shoulders alongside their respective merits. But it did get me thinking, why in the age of immersive 3DUIs, so called "rich user experiences" and the likes, we are still hacking around at
[nigelpepper@fu15437664 ~]$ or C:\> depending on your persuasion.Are GUIs not meeting their marketing promise of "making things easier". I have certainly felt the pain of missing GUI recently. Don't get me wrong, I like hacking around at the command line; at times however, I just want "it" to work.
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