Chris Heuer's Insytes

Not that I am partisan or anything like that, but I am just now catching up on Apple’s earlier announcements, and once again they have proven themselves worthy of the adulation. Just look at the remote for the new iMac in comparison to the remotes for the Windows Media Center PC. They really are a tremendous example of a 2.1 mentality – they know how to really provide functionality and an interface that real people can understand and use. Their motto should be:

Simplify it, and they will come.

Then again, I was hoping they would announce a deal with Tivo to directly sync the Tivo to the iPod. So while I am generally ecstatic about the products, the ramifications of the system they are deploying for media as property just sucks. (Give to the Creative Commons fundraising campaign if you have not done so yet) The fact that they will be charging $1.99 per episode may be good for shareholders but is terrible for us working folks. As with my earlier post on Digital Photos though, it is pretty difficult and expensive to make the whole situation simple. In fact, I still have not gotten my Tivo synched with my Mac for taking shows with me, so perhaps it might be worth $1.99 if I missed an episode, but I will avoid doing so as long as I can.

Is this the beginning of the real revolution in Video Journalism though? Only time will tell, but if I were to place a bet today, my guess is that the general public will clamour for this next generation – shipped in time for the holidays even – wow. Its so damn sexy I would run out and by one now if I was not living on a budget. My iMac is not even 7 week old and its already obsolete though – this never ending cycle of whetting and satiating our technolust is starting to wear on me….

But I still want a new iPod – besides, it costs the same as the 5 GB model I bought on the first day it was introduced.

I was just going to write about wanting to do a VisionQuest 2.0 in preparation for what lies ahead (though there is not time unfortunately, so I will spend some time ‘going within’ instead). Naturally, I figured I would link to some photos of the Rites of Passage VisionQuest I did at the end of 2001. At the time, Yahoo was really the only easy to use choice for photo sharing that I knew about, so I put them there along with some others. So when I went to grab the URL for the VisionQuest Photos I rediscoverd all of these other photo sets I had there from days gone by. So now my photos are everywhere – on Flickr, on Yahoo photos, on my own PHPGallery site and even on Shutterfly.

I realize I can merge my Flickr and Yahoo accounts, but that will screw up other services I have since I use a Mac – and it will likely mean that I would have to use my Yahoo login instead of my Flickr login. But then again, it always seems that my iPhoto Flickr Export just drags on and on forever so I have a challenge using it as it is – is there some trick to this to optimize the performance? Even if iPhoto Flickr export worked for me properly, I have another problem – before my wonderful girlfriend Kristie (who just launched her own Blog after getting inspired last week) bought me an iMac G5 for my birthday, I lost a lot of my photos when I upgraded my iBook to Tiger and the backup copy I made onto an external hard drive was corrupted (Maxtor firewire problem it seems)

So now my photo collection is just a complete mess – almost as bad as my MP3 collection – with multiple copies everywhere, recent favorites missing etc… I won’t even get into all of the photos I have stored in the garage that I would like to get scanned (literally thousands, all the way back to my grandparents baby photos)

As I see it, iPhoto to Flickr is really the best option for managing and sharing photos – but this alone is not enough. You still need a good backup plan running on a regular schedule and you need to consider each photo for its tags and then assemble your albums. Simply put, there is only so much automation you can have – and even less of it for free since this is a complex problem.

I could see where one day we could just have the photo go from the camera to the site wirelessly with a date tag, the GPS in the camera identifies the location, which correlates it to any known events, Ojos automatically tags the photos with the names of the people in it and all you need to do is decide who gets to see it and if there are any witty things you want to say about it. (this just reminded me of seeing a speech by Phillipe Kahn at Interent Everywhere back in 2000 where he talked about his ideas for LightSurf)

So we need a beter way to import photos to Flickr now from all these other places (I heard a rumor that one might be coming for PHPGallery to Flickr) – hopefully more open source developers will find a way to have conversations with average users like me to understand what they could be building that would be really, really useful. We also need for Flickr (or someone) to enable the entire value chain around the digital photography space.

Using “The Communications Strategy” framework on this problem would produce a service that looks like this:

• Educational materials on “so you want to take digtital photos” – a primer for those who want to know what the fuss is about and then a getting started guide
• Links to camera review sites, tied together with user opinions on the reviews and their own views on the cameras being reviewed
• Enable the camera purcahse transaction
• Educate people in how to use the camera model
• Educate people in how to use a camera (manual vs point and shoot)
• Explain the scenarios and usage of photo sharing better
• Import photos from everywhere possible
• Photo scanning (do it or enable the economy around it)
• More user stories of how the power of tagging and ad-hoc groups can be used in cool ways to create communities
• Provide stronger group functionality (my grandfather need not see those photos of our trip to Couples Resort in Jamaica)
• Tips for photo editing / design for advanced users
• Printing
• Guaranteed backups
• Licensing of photos via stock agency so that photographs uploaded into the system can be sold – this includes a Creative Commons license that would let designers search for Royalty-free photographs
• More local user groups for people to get together
• Community systems for knowledge sharing and passion sharing (ie interests) – perhaps rather than build these, stronger interfaces for integrating with existing communities can be built. Most people dont understand the concept of a Flickr Badge yet
• A place where the “I Hate Flickr” people can rant so that an understanding can be built of the most commonly experienced problems, which can then be corrected
• Don’t become an evil monopoly – maintain open standards, enable a solutions economy to flourish that provides opportunity to innovators and other service providers – essentially, don’t do everything, but facilitate everything and become the trusted source

So, this is totally not what I was supposed to be working on, but since I did, now you can get a sense of what I have been thinking about the last few years with regards to The Communications Strategy (aka The Customer Strategy, Customer Knowledge Management, Customer Experience Lifecycle and too many other silly names over the years to count). As Patricia Seybold said in Business 2.0:

If manufacturers want to own the customers’ branded experience with their products, they need to take responsibility for disseminating all of the product-related information the customer needs to buy and enjoy the product…”

Final Note on a separate rant: I was going to link to Business 2.0’s article from which I pulled this quote many years ago, but besides being an impossibly slow site and hard to find with basic text search, I had to join to see the full length article in order to see if it was the right one, so no link to Business 2.0 (or any other media that puts up such barriers to our conversations).

Just got another email last night from a friend who was in town for the Web 2.0 Conference who says he has the flu. That makes 7 people I know (plus myself) who came down with something after the week’s activities. Anyone go to the doctor yet? Is it just a cold or is flu season fast upon us?

Since my lunch meeting was cancelled today due to one of those illnesses, I am hoping to get down some of those lessons learned from last week to share with everyone. I also have about 120 tabs open in 8 windows that I want to share/talk about – along with a dozen other longer pieces on items of import. Thankfully for me, I am not totally out of commission, but am certainly not feeling 100%

Finally, last night after some serious soul searching, I have mentally and emotionally commited myself to what’s next… expect an announcement at the end of the week. In fact, if you are interested in seeing what we did last week continue and want to be a part, be sure you reach out to me to let me know (seems I dont have the full attendee email list). We are planning a little get together to discuss and would love your input…

A friend asked me how much traffic I was getting on the site and I had not even thought to look until today. It is really interesting to see it go from zero to a thousand plus from site launch on Monday 10/3/05 at around 1am to the day before the event. Also of note, about 20% of tracked referrer links (over 350) came from Chris Pirillo’s post on the event – not only is he a nice guy with some great parents and a great partner in Ponzi, but apparently he is pretty widely read too 😉

One of the things we were going to do at the event, but did not have time for since it was not core to the reason for being there, was to have people show how they heard about the event through a pen and paper built social map in the form of a MindMap. Am trying to figure out an easy way to get this done virtually, but don’t know of any free tools to do so easily – perhaps an OPML list could do it though, so if someone can take a stab at it and let me know, that would be very cool.

I may have been a principal organizer of the Web 2.1 BrainJam, but it truly was, “Of, by and for the people”. It was not about expensive versus inexpensive, though that was a part of the inspiration – it was about enabling real conversation between people with different backgrounds to expand our understanding of one another and the world around us. It was about bringing smart people together for ad-hoc collaboration, fertilizing the conversation with positive intentions, setting a little direction and watching the magic happen. It was about trying some new things in the realm of the unconference and so much more.

While calling it Web 2.1 was a bit of marketing finesse, the intentions were true – we, the creators of technology, should learn to speak the language of the ‘average man/woman’ and remember it is not about the things people use insomuch as it is about the people who use them. The ideals of what we happily called Web 2.0 earlier this year have been overtaken by the buzz. Web 2.1 was about re-fortifying those core values and bringing some attention back on the people rather than the technology and the hype. Web 2.1 was about bringing creators, users and facilitators together in conversation – to this end, I feel comfortable calling it a success.

Enric posted some very insightful video in addition to the piece that Brian Shields produced for KRON4, Scott from Laughing Squid had a nice post and many photos are available on Flickr. I will be pointing to more articles over the next few days as I get to read them all.

With this email, I wanted to once again thank all of our Patrons for supporting this experiment and putting their faith in our ability to pull it off. I also want to thank my girlfriend Kristie, without whose help I could never have done this. Given the feedback of participants thus far, it would seem we will be doing more of these in the near future – though the what, how, why, who and where questions are still up in the air.

Lessons learned will be gleaned over the next few days along with a discussion centering on what is next. As of now, one thing is for sure, we will be building a community around BrainJams to help others do these types of events, and we hope to collaborate with the BarCamp folks to work towards common goals. If we are remotely successful at getting non-developer business professionals to share more of their knowledge and experience through BrainJams, we will have taken giant strides in making the world a better place. I am deeply thankful for the opportunity to be a part of this in whatever role I end up playing.

The final accounting will be finished in a couple of days after we return a few items to the store we did not use and take care of some other minor administrative stuff. But I wanted to share the good news now – we expect to donate nearly $1,000 to the Internet Archive once the final checks are in. We have also decided that we will donate all the money from registration fees, about $140, to the Creative Commons fundraising drive.

In the end, my best hope in regards to how this event is perceived, is that anyone else can do what we did by understanding how the systems work, how to use Web 2.0/2.1 tools and believing in themselves enough to take that all important leap of faith.

Empower to the people.

Tech Tags: web+2.0 web2.0 web2.1 web2point1 web+2.1 brainjam brainjams blogoposium1 Web2.1BrainJam barcamp InternetArchive CreativeCommons

Holy HorsePigCow!

Chris Pirillo wrote earlier to see if I could jump on his show tonight for a couple of minutes which is just such an honor in and of itself, but I had to politely decline because I really don’t want tomorrow getting out of hand (and I was going to Recovery2.0 and the Colors of Web 2.0 Party to get some more feedback on our structure (or lack thereof) for tomorrow’s Web2.1 event.

Recovery 2.0 is really an incredible idea that Jeff Jarvis began to organize and I am going to be happily supporting and thinking about. Before the Web 2.0 Colors party, I had a great dinner wtih Will Pate, Chris Messina and this really cool guy who just moved back to SF from the UK named Justin. [correction: my ears were clogged in the noisy restaurant and I dont seem to do well with names until I have met someone twice, his name was not Justin but Dunstan Orchard – thanks Chris]

The party was definitely fun (have you ever been to an open bar party where Chimay was on tap?), but opening my email and seeing a followup from Chris just made my week. The email simply said:

Can Lockergnome sponsor for $1,000?

Chris

Having just spoken with Kristie about how little money we were going to have left over for the BrainOff after party and wondering how much we might be able to afford to go into debt to pull this off, you can imagine how ecstatic I was. I guess we have proved that giving of yourself and your knowledge really does bring many unforseen rewards. as Chris said in a subsequent email “One conference supporting another? Oh, the humanity!”

Much deep, heartfelt thanks and love for Chris and the Lockergnome community.

Odd chain of events but I saw a DVD Boxset of Sex in the City today, which somehow reminded me of speed dating, which made me think…

What if we did speed BrainJamming?

OK, so this may not be for tomorrow but could be a very interesting experiment and perhaps it should not be dismissed for the seeming silliness just offhand. Imagine the basic table setup of speed dating bur replace the table with a ‘soapbox’ where people who have something cool to talk about can introduce themselves and an issue they care about passionately. The other 1 or 2 people then offer suggestions or ideas or just ask clarifying questions to dig deeper and learn more about it. 5 minute rounds with everyone encouraged to share equally. especially those who normally would not speak up in a typical large conference.

Another alternative is where the same principle applies but the topic is pre-set by the participants. Questions like “What is Web 2.0?”, What is it missing? and what do we want from Web 2.1?

Hmmmm… see you shortly at Recovery 2.0

I have not had time to read what others are writing about on this, but I have talked with several attendees who have told me the rooms are so overcrowded that there is not even standing room available. Very strange thing to be oversold like that… definitely should have picked a larger venue. That said, the Google party last night was rocking when we got there from the Web1.0 Summitt. Scott from Laughing Squid has a great post with some funny photos and so does the kind and gracious MissRogue. Met some darn nice, smart, fun, cool people who we hope to speak more with sometime soon. But the people at Web2.1 are cooler.

Their crowding problem makes me think about how we are handling the crowd size for Web 2.1 tomorrow. At the moment we are expecting about 50 people. That is probably the perfect sized crowd, so while it is difficult to do, I am feeling as if we may need to close registrations at some point. Rather than just announce it like that though, I want to think about it and get your feedback. I know it seems rather anti-open principle, but I am not sure what else to do as switching venues is nearly impossible at the moment and I would rather not. If you have some other ideas on this please let me know. Perhaps it wont be a problem, but if the word spreads too much farther I would rather we did not have to deal with it by turning people away at the door.

Part of the problem is that many people I know have not registered and just have planned on showing up, and several people are just iffy regarding whether or not they will make it. So here is what I think I would like to do:

Unless you have registered via PayPal or we have spoken personally and I have your name down as an attendee on the Web2point1.org wiki by midnight tonight, I am sorry to say we wont be able to accomodate you. Totally sucks, but we are running out of space on the hard drive, and nothing else will fit… It is also kind of a security thing that I had not thought about with regards to the studio and all these people coming in. I really want to be respectful to the people at KRON4 since they have really gone out of their way, not only donating the space and the facilities management, but they also came up with $500 to support our after party.

If you are not going to be able to make it, but I have your name on the Web2point1.org wiki, please take it off or email me at the joinus account to let me know. It will let me sleep a little tonight perhaps if I dont have the added stress of this being too successfull. Can you imagine the terribleness of such troubles? Thank god no major news source picked up on it yet as that would have actually sucked. I like grassroots stuff… a lot

BrainJam web2.0 web2.1 web2.1brainjam knowledge+networking brainjamming

I just got back from a walk-through meeting with Brian Shields over at the studio. While the studio space is not made for collaborative meetings with break out sessions, the great team Brian works with over at KRON4 have really all stepped up to make it work for us. Much thanks to all of the great folks that are helping to put this together – especially Dave Johnson – IT, Mark Mano – Production
Craig Porter – Chief Engineer, Kevin Adler – Promotions, Pat Patton – Programming. And the greatest appreciation and respect to Brian for being the first to really get behind the idea and take the actions necessary to garner all the other support he had gotten from KRON4.

A photo of the studio space (forgot my camera again) is online here but it does not show the rest of the space, just the stage, but at least you can see why I thought it was so cool for what we are doing. So the setup as it stands now will look like this:

• Wifi throughout (but please go easy on it since it is being used by the staff as well – we dont want to cause bandwidth troubles for all the people working there, so no P2P apps or big downloads if you can avoid it)
• 1 main screen projector with the IRC Channel on it – thanks to Scott from LaughingSquid for setting up the channel
• 2 separate projectors in ‘break through’ areas (better term then break out dont you think?) – bring your own laptop and any special connectors you might need (ie Mac video out dongles)
• We are gong to do a Skype conference line for people to listen in but we need to know more about getting audio into the laptop from the room – anyone have ideas on best practices? anyone have a special microphone that might do the trick?
• Post-It Easel Sheets (to stick on walls if needed) and easels for people to write on
• Waters, sodas, snacks (healthy and junky)
• ….. and lots of Legos for the “What is Web 2.1” sculpture contest (more on that later)

It is really exciting now and I am getting really nervous for some reason – perhaps it is because mentally I keep thinking to myself I need to set an agenda, I need to organize a presentation, I need to do this and do that, but then I remember that those thoughts are so not the point. We are just setting up a space for people to have directed conversations about things that matter to them. I am not coming in with any real plans other than to go with the flow and contribute my experience to what everyone else is doing

So the plan for the day is pay attention, think, contribute, repeat

KRON4BrainJams web2.0 web2.1 web2.1brainjam knowledge+networking brainjamming