Monthly Archives: October 2007

10.03.07
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At the Future of Web Apps Autumn 07

So, I’m at the Future of Web Apps, and already feeling grumpy. The venue, ExCeL, is in London’s Docklands, miles away from nowhere, and the conference opened registration at 8am, and the talks started at 9am. It took me over an hour and a quarter to get here, and I’m not a morning person.

Yet again, there are nowhere near enough power outlets for the number of laptops here. They have only a few power strips at the back of the room, and they just very cheekily said “don’t hog the power”, but if they had more power strips, then it wouldn’t be a problem. I mean, who’d’ve thunk it – a tech conference with lots of people wanting power. Gah.

ExCeL is a big, big box of a venue, with a lot of sound bleeding through from stage to stage, and from the expo area. There are, after all, only curtains between them. That’s not so bad when you’re sitting at the front, but at the back in the power outlet ghetto, it’s a bit harder to filter out the extraneous noise because you can hardly see them, so you can’t focus on the person and use that to keep your ears trained in the right direction.

The seats are insanely close together, at least in the Entrepreneur stage. Both talks so far here have ended up having people sitting on the floor and standing – just not enough room for everyone. Given the size of the expo floor, I’d say that they haven’t really planned this quite so well as they could have.

I’m still really miffed that all of the schedule information has totally the wrong talk title for my talk. I never even discussed talking about “The Future of Blogging” with anyone, so I have no idea where it came from! It concerns me a bit that people are going to not come, because the future of blogging is a way lame subject, and that people who would have come to hear about adoption in enterprise aren’t going to know that’s what I’m talking about.

It’s a shame. FOWA’s grown a lot, which is great, but I’m not sure that this experience is anywhere near as nice as the first FOWA I went to, which was one day, one track, and just really high-quality talks from people I respected. Now it’s two days, two tracks, lots of short talks, in a hideous venue. At least some of the speakers are still high-quality, and that might just redeem it, but I’ve heard the phrase “jumped the shark” already this morning.

10.03.07
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Don’t be afraid of Creative Commons

Suw wrote about the case last week when Virgin Mobile Australia used a Creative Commons licenced photo in an ad campaign. She called it an abuse of goodwill. Now Robin Hamman has warned people to think twice about re-using Creative Commons licenced photos. Virgin Mobile Australia kept to the letter of the law in terms of the Attribution Creative Commons licence, but, as Suw said, they are guilty of “flagrantly abusing its spirit”.

I’m a huge advocate of Creative Commons licenced content, and I’m trying to increase the use of CC audio, video and images at the Guardian. At the moment, Guardian management has taken a cautious approach, worrying that even if people have licenced their works allowing commercial use that people might think twice if a media company uses their images, audio or video. I wasn’t involved in those discussions, although I would have liked to make a more pro-CC argument. (Part of me wonders if there were union considerations as well. But as I said, I wasn’t privy to the discussion so that’s only speculation.)

But I’ll provide a couple of quick examples of how acting with goodwill and keeping both to the letter and spirit of the law can be a way to increase engagement with your community and broader, more distributed online communities, even if you are a commercial media company. On the Guardian’s Food Blog Word of Mouth, editor Susan Smillie set up a Flickr group and encourages blog fans to share their photos. Anna Pickard used a picture from Flickr on a post about sweets that people bring back from their holidays abroad.

I used a picture from Flickr to illustrate Republicans hatred of Hillary Clinton on our new US-focussed blog, Deadline USA. I take care to link back to the original photo, credit the user and link to their profile and make sure that it is clear that this is CC-licenced content, not content under Guardian copyright. If I have contact information, I let the photographer know that I used the picture. This morning, I got a nice message from the Flickr user who created the illustration, azrainman. He thanked me for making the extra effort, and even gave me a little link love.

This is what blogging and social media is about, knowing the social norms and taking part in this global conversation as an equal even if you do work for a big media company. If you’re looking to boot-strap your community on your site, it’s always good to plug in and play (nice) with established digital communities.

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10.02.07
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links for 2007-10-02

10.01.07
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links for 2007-10-01

10.01.07
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Future of Web Apps – Preparing for Enterprise Adoption

I just wanted to clarify that I am not talking about “The Future of Blogging” at the Future of Web Apps conference this week, as the schedule said until recently. I’m not really sure where that talk title came from, but I was somewhat surprised to see it, as I’d been prepping a talk on “Preparing for Enterprise Adoption” instead!! Thankfully, that’s the one we’re going with, so if you were hoping to find out what I think lies ahead for blogs, I hope you won’t be disappointed by what’s going to be a more practical, business-oriented talk about adoption.

I’m on stage on Thursday 4th October, at 12.05pm, in the Business Track room. I hope you’ll come and see me, and please do say hello afterwards.