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SXSW Videos - Capturing the scenes of South By!
SXSW Videos - Capturing the scenes of South By! — Unofficial collection of SXSW videos.
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Tweets - Overheard.it
Tweets - Overheard.it — Nice application to browse things people have twittered that they overheard.
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If all your friends jumped off of a bridge… at Ben Brown, Internet Rockstar
If all your friends jumped off of a bridge… at Ben Brown, Internet Rockstar — Insightful article on social networks and how on facebook 'the more people join, the less useful it becomes'.
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Oxford Geek Night 4 | 28th November 2007
Oxford Geek Night 4 | 28th November 2007 — Everybody should come to this, its going to be great! see you there! ...
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3spots: del.icio.us as color tool
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'Networking'
I entirely agree with this chap when he talks about being in someone's company because you want to be, not for what advantages it can get you in life.
I have been in situations at conferences where you think you are having a nice chat with someone and then they get starstruck and leave suddenly - even mid-sentence on occasion - to talk to the object of their admiration.
John Scalzi's article makes for a far more articulate rant:
The most successful networkers don’t 'network.' It’s an odious term. The most successful networkers ignore the grasping patheticness of the term altogether. Rather, they talk. They laugh. They share the moment, and enjoy other people’s company; are generous with other people and help them celebrate their successes, rather than asking to scrape up against that success so some of it might crumble off on them. It works the same online and off.
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disambiguity - » Ambient Intimacy
disambiguity - » Ambient Intimacy — Interesting post about the Water Cooler effect online.
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Oxford Geeks
Oxford Geeks — Oxford Geeks aims to pull together information about the geek community in and around Oxford, UK. The site combines local events, photos and blogs by local developers.
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twittervision
twittervision — ooooh realtime twitter update visualisation by location, gosh I wish I had been watching this during eurovision! :).
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flickrvision (beta)
flickrvision (beta) — Am awesome realtime fickr map visualisation, very cool indeed!
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Vimeo
Vimeo — The nicest, slickest video upload site out there. Goodbye youtube!
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So that was Oxford Geek Night 2
The second Oxford Geek Night last night went well and was by all accounts a success. We came across various hiccups in setting up but several totally ingenious solutions and a few friendly geeks later we were all set.
The talks were great, and in my mind they really made the event what it was. So, a big thank you goes out to all the speakers. Also in my list of thanks is our very generous sponsor Torchbox who kindly funded the event, keeping it free for all to attend.
Most of the slides and links from the talks are up online already and the remainder will follow shortly. Also to come soon are the videocasts and podcasts of the event. I'll keep you posted as to when they are ready.
The photos are now up online too. If you are uploading any then the official Flickr tag is 'oxfordgeeknight2'. If you tag them they will appear on the site for the event.
If you were at the event last night you may have noticed two women with fancy video cameras interviewing and filming, they were from BBC Oxford South Today. The media coverage has all been a bit of a surprise really, I guess when it got picked up by the Oxford Mail after the last one everyone else wanted to have an "and finally, geeks leave the house" type story! :)
Interview with BBC Radio Oxford (Wednesday 11th, 11:30):
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(Download Interview)
Oxford Geek Nights on BBC South Today Oxford (Thursday 12th, 18:30)
See high resolution Quicktime version (4.8 MB)
I am really keen to get other people inspired to organise their own, more specialised events. So if anyone wants to start up, say, a JavaScript meet-up, Oxford Pub Standards, Oxford 2.0 or anything really, then that would be absolutely fantastic! I would be happy to help.
I would really love to hear your feedback on Oxford Geek Nights in general and on the last event. I have set up a (optionally anonymous) feedback form, so you can let us know what you enjoyed or how we can improve the next one.
We have set up an announce only email list as a Google Group for Oxford Geek Nights, or you can use our new Atom feed to keep up with news and information.
The Oxford Geek Nights are every two months so watch this space in June/July for the next event!
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Talks for Oxford Geek Nights announced
The talks for the forthcoming Oxford Geek Night event have now been announced. You might already know that Jon Hicks and James Webster are lined up for two great looking keynotes on Typography and Amazon web services respectively, which is very exciting. What you might not know yet is the fantastic line-up we have for the microslots ...
- Jim Purbrick - Second Life Meets The Web
- Josh Hart - The making of Diarised
- Simon Whitaker - Yahoo Pipes introduction
- Mark Norman Francis - Code review processes at Yahoo
- Nick Grandy - Semantic Mediawiki and DiscourseDB
- Marc Tobias Metten - Geocoding
- Matthew Westcott - DIY Javascript effects without Scriptaculous
- Dave Sant - Quakr, 3D modeling of the world
Update [07-04-07]: Due to illness, Norm's talk above has been replaced with Simon Willison talking on 'Why HTML 5 Matters'
So it looks to be a fun and informative event! I hope to see you there, feel free to sign up on upcoming to give us an idea of numbers.
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Happy Naked day!
As part of CSS Naked day this site is going CSS nude for today only! I encourage you to do the same. Go on ... show off your <body>!
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Oxford Geek Night 2 call for proposals
As there are limited places available for microslots and demos at the forthcoming Oxford Geek Night in April, I have set up a wufoo form (I really love wufoo!) to manage talk submissions.
If you have a talk proposal please fill it out the form below or go to the wufoo form:
Powered by Wufoo -
Oxford Geeks hit the media!
It looks like the last of the Oxford Geek Nights has caused quite a stir in the media recently. I'm not entirely sure how the Oxford Mail initially came across the story but it got half a page of coverage in last Wednesday's edition (see online version or archived online version)
As a result of this I was contacted by BBC Radio Oxford, BBC South Today and Radio Oxford (Formerly Passion FM) who are all interested in covering the next one. Radio Oxford also interviewed me for about 10 minutes, snippets of which were used in the news every half hour for the next morning.
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(Download News snippet)
Adam from the breakfast show heard the interview I gave to the news team and wanted to interview me live on his breakfast show, although this meant me waking up at 8am on my holiday, I agreed.
Get Flash to see this player.
(Download Breakfast snippet)
With all this news coverage and potential publicity for the next event, I decided to start planning for the next one. We are looking at Mid April, likely the 11th of April for the next event.
Consider this a call for participants, I need 2 keynotes of 15 minutes and 8 Demos or lightning talks of 5 minutes each. Let me know if you are interested - nat@natbat.net
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An excitable BarCamp
This week has just been all go! Fresh from a successful project launch I dived straight into BarCamp. BT were generous in their provision of the great venue we used for the weekend. There were over 160 people attending, roughly 70 of whom stayed overnight we think!
Co-organising BarCamp with Ian and Jason was a lot of fun, sure I was running around and I didn't get chance to have as many in depth conversations with people as I would like, but it was definitely an energetic and exciting weekend. I would do it again in a shot.
All the talks I went to were superb, I just wish I could have seen more - I was particularly upset at missing the improvisation sessions which I hear were fantastic! My personal favourite of the whole weekend was my sister Leu Downe who is an artist and not (yet) a web developer, but she had a great time and gave a presentation on how to release your inner owl to save it from being forced to produce ice cream!
Other talks (sorry if I miss any out) that I enjoyed and got something out from include:
- Design consequences by Lisa Reichelt - Fascinating technique to get everyone from the team involved in the behavioural design (the fun part) of an interface. 5-8 people sit together with lots of post-it notes paper and pens, everyone designs separately the same wireframe of the interface. After this you swap with the person next to you, annotate and improve on their design for another 5 minutes and then present what you now have to the group. The meaning behind this process is to get everyone involved and thinking about ideas of the design, development and consequences of the design.
- Project Management for busy geeks by Meri Williams - Good presentation aimed at busy geeks with little time for project management. The main point I got out of this was that planning isn't always about producing artifacts you will use later on, it is more useful as a process just to get members of the team thinking about the project.
- User centric design by Andy Budd - Proposing the idea that usability is not everything, ("The ipod would have failed usability tests") there needs to be more fun in design. Reasons behind the popularity of sites like myspace revolve around the interface being 'game' like, users are rewarded for exploring yet at the same time should be prevented from doing any serious damage to anything in the process of their exploration.
- Code reviews by Mark 'Norm' Francis - On the code review process at Yahoo! Code reviews in my opinion are important to the maintainability of a project but also as a quality assurance method within the team. Norm elaborated on the best way to perform regular code reviews with as little wasted time as possible. The thing in particular I got out of this talk is that every time an agreement is reached in the code review sessions, for example doctypes or the best way to do 'x' it is documented in a table with a reference to resolve future disputes. The code reviews Norm talked about had 3-6 people analysing the code in a quiet place away from IM, email and phones. After this they get together for 30 mins with the author (who is encouraged to say as little as possible) and discuss their findings and a moderator takes notes and keeps things on course. A list of recommendations is produced, these are addressed and then there is a followup meeting. I think this is a good process and it would be really interesting to see exactly how effective it is.
Strangely enough - I didn't realise this till writing it up just now - all the talks above that I really enjoyed are about processes!
As anyone who was there knows though, BarCamp isn't just about the talks - its about the energy created by the people that attend (and of course the now obligatory late night werewolf sessions!). The atmosphere last weekend was electric, the feedback received has been really positive which is fantastic.
Thanks once more to the generous sponsors of the event BT, BBC Backstage, O'Reilly, and Torchbox. All in all it was a very fun weekend! I met lots of really interesting people who I hope to see again, thanks to everyone who came and made it so enjoyable.
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InXile - The Official Home of Line Rider
InXile - The Official Home of Line Rider — omg, I could spend so so many hours playing with this!
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First Oxford Geek Night a success!
Thanks to everyone who came last night. I really hope everyone had a fantastic evening, we had some interesting talks and some cool demos. It was pretty tricky to judge numbers from where I was sat, but I have been told that we had over 100 people at one point, which is great!
The running order of the night went as follows ...
Keynotes
- Simon Willison - An introduction to OpenID
- Olly Willans - Demonstration of Photoshop CS3
Microslot set one
- Tom Dyson - Peastat
- Jonathan Leighton - Ruby on Rails Migrations
- Tim Almond - Wordpress as a CMS
- Gemma Hentsch - Concatenating forms, a Django extension
- Garrett Coakley - Drupal 5
- JP Stacey - Building an ultra thin CMS with XSL and Atom
Microslot set two
- Nick Birch - New Popular Edition Maps
- Artem Pavlenko - Mapnik, a map rendering engine
- Matthew Westcott - London Underground Tube map demonstration
- Bryan Gullan - Avoiding accessibility pitfalls
- James Wheare - Live bus times, a Google maps mashup
The photos from last night are online and can be found on flickr, the slides, links and hopefully audio of the talks will be available soon.
A big thank you to the fantastic speakers yesterday, to Torchbox for their generous sponsorship and to all the wonderful people who helped me out on the night.
We're planning to organise a second Oxford Geek Night in a few months time.
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Year Of Living Generously
Year Of Living Generously — A social site for resolutions to make the world a better place.
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Line-up for Oxford Geek Night
The debut event for Oxfordshire based geeks draws ever closer, this coming Wednesday at the Jericho Tavern! As you may have already read, the doors to the upstairs bar will open at 8pm and the talks will then start at about 8:30.
We now have a fantastic line-up for the evening, starting with two 15 minute keynotes on very different subjects. Simon Willison gives an introduction to OpenID followed by Olly Willans demonstrating the latest version of Photoshop - Photoshop CS3.
The set of 5 minute microslots cover a wide range of exciting topics. The first 6 cover content management, frameworks and statistics, the second set explores maps, mashups, JavaScript and accessibility.
Microslot set one
- Tom Dyson - Peastat
- Jonathan Leighton - Ruby On Rails Migrations
- Tim Almond - Wordpress as a CMS
- Gemma Hentsch - Concatenating forms, a Django extension
- Garrett Coakley - Drupal 5
- JP Stacey - Building an ultra thin CMS with XSL and Atom
Microslot set two
- Nick Birch - New Popular Edition Maps
- Artem Pavlenko - Map rendering engine
- Natalie Downe - The importance of permalinks in unobtrusive JavaScript
- Bryan Gullan - Avoiding accessibility pitfalls
- James Wheare - Oxford bus times, a Google maps mashup
There will also be plenty of time in between the talks for socialising and drinking at the upstairs bar.
Look forward to seeing you on Wednesday!
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Tango Icon Gallery - Tango Desktop Project
Tango Icon Gallery - Tango Desktop Project — Set of really pretty open source icons,.
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box of chocolates » Social Networking Diseases and Disorders of the new Millennium
box of chocolates » Social Networking Diseases and Disorders of the new Millennium — What worrys affect us in the modern day.
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Adactio: Journal - More thoughts on portable social networks
Adactio: Journal - More thoughts on portable social networks — A well founded plea for social sites to properly mark up relationships and to use a suggested semantic URL structure.
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How to Change the World: The Art of Schmoozing
How to Change the World: The Art of Schmoozing — Social networking tips that are easy to follow.
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Upcoming geek fun and frivolities
So there looks to be a particularly busy period of fun things to do as a geek in and around London! Not being so close to the capital I won't be going to all of them but, for your information I thought I would briefly sum up some of the happenings. The first of which is a bout of Werewolf games in a London Pub tomorrow night (Monday). Werewolf is a fun role playing social game played a lot at the moment on the geek conference scene, for more information about the game see the entry on the geekdinner site or wikipedia for information about the dynamics of the game.
This Thursday (18th Jan) holds two events! Pub Standards and the Google Open Jam. Pub standards describes itself as "Where the worlds of web and booze collide, slap-bang in the middle of London ... " - and has always been a fun group of people to meet up and chat with. This second Google Open Jam I haven't seen publicised anywhere, so I am not sure if it is an open registration but if you can get a place it is quite an original event with a decent amount of free pizza!
Three events I know little about are 'Beers & Innovation 7: Do Agencies Innovate?' (upcoming) an unfortunately sold out new-media event on the 30th January, organised by NMK. ' Chinwag Live: Wobble 2.0' (upcoming) is described as 'When Web 2.0 collides with Bubble 2.0 is the result real, sustainable business or faddish pipe dreams?', Tuesday 6th February. 'Innovation technology' (upcoming) is on the 13th February and looks to be aimed more at theory of technology and business, though I could well be wrong about that.
Barcamp London 2 is one of the events I am most looking forward to. It is on the 17th and 18th of February and follows the time-old Barcamp format of a a fun relaxed adhock mini conference. People attending are not required to present though it makes it more fun if there is that solidarity of 'so what are you presenting', there is also less pressure to have good presentation skills when everyone is in the same boat.
The future of Web Apps (upcoming) was much anticipated last year and indeed a successful fun event. However I for one am undecided if I will be attending this year, the price has been jacked up to £195 and the conference now stretches over two days. I don't doubt it will still be good, but for me I'm not sure it is worth it.
You may also be interested in the MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit on the 22nd of March. This one-day conference is 'billed as bringing together senior execs grappling with the challenges facing traditional media in the digital age'. It has an interesting array of speakers though may not be aimed at a general web developer audience.
I'm sure I will have missed out some events worth going to over the next month or two, but I couldn't finish off a listing of this type without mentioning SxSW. So, an event packed period culminating in the pilgrimage many of you will make to Texas in March of this year. I wont be attending because of prior commitments, though I'm sure I will see you at something or other soon.
One final note, there has been recent talk on the Guardian that the web 2.0 bubble may have burst. The conference they are referring to was Upload 2007 due to be held on the 20th February, the first I heard about this was that it was an event that had already been canceled from lack of numbers, inadequate publicity may well have played a part here. I however, think that from the levels of continued enthusiasm and people's willingness to meet outside of work to discuss issues, exciting new techniques and just to generally have fun with like minded people; any bubble is far from bursting!
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apophenia: ephemeral profiles (cuz losing passwords is common amongst teens)
apophenia: ephemeral profiles (cuz losing passwords is common amongst teens) — "Many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their accounts in most places. Forgot your IM password? Sign up again. Forgot your email address? Create a new one. Forgot your login? Time for a change." - A look at social software and th.
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Welcome to TVASIG
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The Oxtremists
The Oxtremists — .
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Twidget - Twitter.com Dashboard Widget
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Twitter
Twitter — .
31 items tagged "community"
Look at "community" on del.icio.us, Flickr or Technorati