I got a ticket to Playful today and it’s one event I’m really looking forward to. To quote the Playful website:

Playful is a one-day event all about games and play – in all their manifestations, throughout the contemporary media landscape. The event aims to promote lively debate on the nature of games: what they mean to different people – both inside and outside the industry.

Besides the ‘traditional’ area of video games, there are also so many other forms of games out there. Board games, alternate reality games, social party games (like Werewolf), there are lots of people designing these games and even more playing them. The Playful event brings key practitioners from all of these different game areas together, exploring how to make the games medium more meaningful to more people.

Just check out the speakers list, it will show the variety of all the different backgrounds and fields of the participants. I’m very curious to see Eric Clough‘s presentation. Remember the Mystery on Fifth Avenue, the New York apartment that had a game hidden within it’s architecture? Clough was the main brains behind that. Two other speakers I also look forward to seeing are Adrian and Dan Hon, the guys behind Perplex City and We Tell Stories. I loved playing those games, so I’d like to hear more about the design behind them. These three are only a glimpse of the great lineup of speakers that are confirmed for Playful. 

So when, where, how, you ask? Here are all the details:

When: Friday October 31st
Where: Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London [map]
Price: £25 (Buy Ticket)
Speakers: current confirmed speakers

Check out the Playful website and be sure to buy a ticket, if you plan on going.

In my blog post the other day about my week of madness, I mentioned the launch from 3 of the Sony Ericsson W595. And this is my write-up about that evening; an actual review of the W595 will follow some time later (once I’ve actually sat down with it and tried all the features out).

I wasn’t planning on going to it first, because it was arranged the same day as the London Blogger’s Meetup (and the Girl Geek Dinner Superstruct event, which I also had to miss). Luckily for me it was rescheduled to one week later: the same day though as the Mini GeekDinner and the day my parents arrived in town. Anyhow, I managed to get to the launch nicely on time, despite all the other events happening too.

I was invited by the PR guys from 3mobilebuzz, whom I had previously met during some other events. Besides me, there were 3 other bloggers (2 of which I also had met before): Anthony from Fresh Plastic, Abul from adonismobile and Ben from Mobile Industry Review. The rest of the guests were (to be honest I’m guessing here, cause I didn’t actually talk to any of them) all actual, traditional press. That’s a first for me; I mean, I’ve been previously invited to special bloggers events, but nothing along side normal media. 

The whole event revolved around the W595’s ability to upload videos directly to YouTube. To make it a bit more ‘special’, it was all about creating scary videos, giving the event a Halloween type of atmosphere. It helped that it was held at the Holy Trinity church at No 1 Marylebone (opposite Great Portland Street tube station); inside (even without the extra props) it’s pretty creepy. Next to that, there were some scary characters walking around: a vampire, a ghost/white lady, and some paranormal investigators. Ooh, and we were served The Dark Side cocktails with blueberry and vodka. Yumm!

It all was pretty elaborate, in a cheesy, but likable sort of way. The event was split into two bits: First each guest got a personal hands-on demonstration from one of the paranormal investigators in how to make a ghost video with the W595. Because we were guests of guests though, we weren’t on the list and weren’t allowed to try out the W595 (because of time constraints). 

The second part consisted of The Darkside Pod, an abandoned, rusty lift shaft. In groups of 2 or 3, you had to go sit in it and scary things would happen to you. What I didn’t know at the time though (must have missed it during the explanation) was that we were being recorded. Oops. We were giggling through out it, talking about how non-scary it was (I think one of us might have called it ‘lame’ at one point). Some of the funniest reactions are now on YouTube, like this one:

Last but not least, we all got a very cool goody bag. The main coolness goody: the W595. Sweet! It was bit weird though, cause during the whole evening we hadn’t even been able to see it, and then we’re allowed to bring one home. I’ll be doing a review some time next week (thinking of a video review, what say you, dear readers?), but I’m really loving this phone at the moment. Then again the one that I was using (also a Sony Ericsson) was already 2.5 years old, so anything new compared to that one looks good.

All in all, it was a fun event and an interesting way to launch a product. Thanks to 3, Sony Ericsson and the guys at 3mobilebuzz for inviting me!

As I said in a previous post, two weekends ago I went to the first London Social Media Camp. I’m a regular BarCamper and I love the atmosphere surrounding these type of events. But there are a lot of events out there calling themselves “blabla”-Camp, without actually embodying the whole BarCamp mentality. I had previously gone to two MediaCamps and while they were interesting days (I met a lot of great people), they didn’t have the right to call themselves a BarCamp.

So I had my doubts before this SocialMediaCamp, but I shouldn’t have worried. Vero had organized everything so perfectly, it truly felt like a real BarCamp. I think the only thing that was missing was that it wasn’t two days (and thus no overnighter). For the rest though it was fantastic. I think we even had better food here than at BarCampGoogle! 

During the first session slot, I didn’t go to any presentations. Friends kept dripping in late and I got caught up in catching up with all of them. I am regretting that tough, because I heard a lot of good comments on Tom Whitwell‘s talk about How To Write Awesome Headlines. I already had missed it during the eBay BarCamp the week before and now I missed it again. The rest of the day though I made sure I went to a presentation every session. Here’s a quick recap:

Native to a Web of Dudes

I saw this session on the board at BarCamp eBay, but because of the unclear name decided not to go to it. During the SocialMediaCamp breakfast I talked to David Thompson who explained to me what it exactly was about. I told him at the time the title really wasn’t working for it. Anyhow, it turned out to be an interesting session on microformats and how relationships should be represented online.

TV Branding

I then went to a session about TV branding for the digital era. It was all about how to build brand equity through aggregation, placement and promotion. Some cool things were mentioned like TV tie-in ARGs (like Heroes and Lost).

Alternate Reality Games

I repeated the session I held at BarCamp eBay, and this time I had 15 attendees! Like last time, I hadn’t prepared any slides, doing more of a show-and-tell of the websites and games I had played. It was interesting to see the questions and discussions during this talk take a different route than the previous time. Here a lot of people were interested in the marketing/business side of it all.

Managing Your Online Reputation

This session from Vero was about how to manage your online identity and reputation (as the title says). It quickly turned into a discussion with everyone chiming in with their own point of view. Should employers be allowed to judge their employees based on Facebook updates? 

Social Media – How Not To Get Fucked

Zoe aka Girl With A One Track Mind gave a short presentation about losing her online anonymity (for those of you who don’t know her: she was an anonymous sex blogger and her real identity was revealed in the press). This also turned into a discussion and it was a nice companion to Vero’s talk. Here though it was more about maintaining different personas. You act differently for family, friends and work and now with the “online” world, there may be even more types of groups.

Blogging Breakdown

Another session I missed during BarCamp eBay, so I was glad to catch it here. Annie Mole from London Underground blog talked about being under pressure to write a blog post. She also mentioned some cool facts about blogging, like the state of the “blogosphere” and research into why people blog. Her slides are up on slideshare if you want to check them out. 

Social Media Bingo

The day ended with a cool game of Social Media Buzzword Bingo. Emma and Utku had written tons of buzzwords on a couple of white boards and everybody had to go around creating 4×4 bingo cards made up of those buzzwords. Then one by one every player had to come forward to create a pitch for a web startup for the three buzzwords they pulled. I went twice with “Creating an algorithm to calculate statistics of people commenting by email” and “Developing a proof of concept for the lifecasting of a werewolf hunter”. 

Afterwards there were free drinks and time to mingle and chat with people. I talked briefly with a bunch of people (most of whom I didn’t get a business card, so sorry, but no idea anymore who you all were). After a while everyone thought the tab ran out (it hadn’t, but everyone thought it had), a group of about 13 decided to grab some dinner together, All together it was a great event and I’m looking forward to the next SocialMediaCamp!

I’ve been non stop the past 7 days, with no time for blogging, reading my rss feeds or just simply sitting down and chilling. Finally today I’ve got some time for myself again to take some time out and just rest. I’m completely worn out, mentally and physically. So what have I been up to, you ask?

Here’s a quick recap, I’ll be blogging more thoroughly on some of this stuff later:

4 Oct: SocialMediaCamp

This was a one-day BarCamp organized by Vero. I had my doubts about beforehand, wondering if it would be a “real” BarCamp, but it turned out to be great! Fantastic sessions, yummy food, interesting people, but most of all the right BarCamp mindset. Plus even more people showed up to my Alternate Reality Games session than with BarCampLondon5!

6 Oct: Karaoke

Looking back it may have been a wiser plan to have done this during a less busier week. Singing for four hours long can be pretty hard on your voice, especially if you have to talk even more the next couple of days. It was great fun though! 

7 Oct: Pre-Fowa/Moo Party

Moo kindly sponsored this event, with free drinks until the tab ran out. The idea was to “pay” for your drinks by handing in a Moo card… and of course I forgot to bring mine with me. Anyhow, it was good to catch up with some people who were especially in town for FOWA. 

8 Oct: Wednesday Madness

My parents were in town for five days, so I wanted to meetup with them for some dinner. But then there was the idea for a last minute GeekDinner with Kevin Marks, and I was invited to a product launch of the Sony Ericsson W595. I decided to try to do all of them. We met up with my parents around 16:00 to have a nice meal at YoSushi!, and then afterwards had some coffee and desserts (Belgian Waffles with ice cream, FTW!) at Patisserie Valerie. Cristiano then went to arrange the GeekDinner (I’d meetup for drinks later) and I went on to the SE-W595 launch. I’ll talk more about that event in a later blog post, but suffice to say it was a pretty cool experience (free vodka cocktails!). Plus I actually got a W595 to play with!

After that I headed on over to the GeekDinner drinks, talking with fellow geeks until we got kicked out of the pub. We only got home at around 12, but I wanted to play with my new phone. I only got to bed at 1:30, which wasn’t that smart, because:

9/10 Oct: Future of Web Apps Conference

I had to get up at 5:30am. Ugh, I am so not a morning person. I had offered to volunteer at FOWA during these two days, but that meant being there at 7:30. Which meant leaving at 6:30. Which meant getting up at 5:30. Ugh. Anyhow, I first got to help out at the registration desk, handing out badges and lanyards. Then for the rest of the two days, I got to be a microphone runner. This basically meant I had to be on standby at the end of every session in the case there was time for questions and run around with the microphone to the people who had those questions (the developer room had places for more than 1000 people, just to give you a scope of why there’s a need for a runner).

It wasn’t too bad, half of the sessions didn’t even have questions and I had enough time to go to the sessions I wanted. I only didn’t get enough sleep, enough food, and add to that the running around, so I wasn’t fully attentive to the content of the sessions. The sessions were recorded though and are available on the FOWA website, so I will get to see the stuff I missed.

The Friday sessions ended again with the recording of Diggnation. After last year’s revelation of the rock star atmosphere, I wasn’t surprised to see the same happen again this year. After the recording, there were free drinks in the Fox bar and I got to mingle with Fowa attendees and Diggnation fans. We stayed until the end (which was 2ish) and with a couple of others took a night bus back to the center of London. We hadn’t eaten since that afternoon though (no food for more than 12 hours!), so decided to grab some food in Soho. Then we found out our bus was on strike, so it was horrible getting home from there: we only got home at 5!

11 Oct: Parents in Town

Today my parents were leaving again, so yesterday they wanted to drop by and see my apartment. Great! But that meant cleaning the house and not getting to sleep out too long. As mentioned above we only got to bed at 5ish, so getting up at 12, we didn’t get our full 8 hours of sleep. Anyhow, we later on had some okay Indian food (some dishes were great, others so-so. Anyone know where’s the best place Indian in London?) and went to Riflemind, a play starring John Hannah. It wasn’t really my type of play (a bit too depressing and serious), but it was nice to see my parents again. 

So that was my week. Busy, right? Next week is splendidly quiet and uneventful, but then I need some peace to recover from all this. Keep an eye on some blog posts the next couple of days; I at least want to blog about SocialMediaCamp, the Sony Ericsson W595, and FOWA.

Last Tuesday was time for another London Bloggers Meetup. I’ve been now three times to these meetups and the event just keeps getting better and better. Organized by Andy Bargery, it’s a great monthly event to meet and catch up with other London based bloggers.

This time it was sponsored by Smirnoff and it was held at the bar of their parent company Diageo. Of course that meant: free cocktails! The poison of choice that evening was the Moscow Mule, a delicious wodka and ginger ale combo. Here’s a short video on how to make one yourself:

Now before coming to the event, I had heard that they would design cocktails based on everyone’s blog. All of us kind of assumed they’d just concoct something there on the spot based on what your tastes were. In reality though they were way more pre-organized than that: there was a book with all our names, blog descriptions and photos to guide the cocktail makers in their design. Brilliant!

The actual creation and decision making of what should go into the cocktail though did happen there on the spot. It was simplified by the fact all cocktails were based on the Moscow Mule (so wodka and ginger ale). But still I loved how they came up with the Miss Geeky Cocktail. They didn’t even read my blog’s description, they just wanted to create a drink that was “Geeky”. So they started brainstorming on what fruit was “Geeky”. According to them, banana was smart (I don’t get that logic though), but sadly they didn’t have any there (you might not notice but I’m being sarcastic here: I hate banana). Eventually one of them came up with the clever idea that geeks are passionate… so let’s use passionfruit! Ooh, yes please, I love love love passionfruit. Then they added a bit of mint, ginger and orange bitters to complement the taste, and mixed that with crushed ice:

Delicious! It was really a great fit for me, which I hadn’t expected at all. I also loved to see all the other types of cocktails they further came up with, for instance the Italo-Netherlands or the Mind the Gap. Besides the wonderful cocktails, it was great fun to catch up with some of the regulars, like Annie Mole and Chris Gilmour. And of course I meant a whole bunch of lovely new people: Gary Andrews, Hayley from Punlimited, Tom Phillips, Melanie from Fake Plastic Noodles and Rax from Splendid, who co-organised the event.

Kudos to Smirnoff and Spendid for organizing this great event. To top it off, at the end everyone got a “little” goodie bag… each containing a 75ml bottle of Smirnoff in it. Coolness! Looking forward to the next event!

Sidenote: just noticed that every recipe card all of us bloggers received from Smirnoff contains a splling error: Sminoff without the “R”. Ehm, fail?

Me: “Hi, my name is Melinda and I’m a BarCampoholic.”
Everyone: “Hi, Melinda”

Seriously though I love going to BarCamps. Last weekend I went to my fourth one of this year (7 in total) and I still can’t get enough of them. They are like the perfect event: great sessions, great conversations, great people, but most of all a great atmosphere. I always come out of a BarCamp feeling as if I’m capable to do anything I want.

So how did BarCampLondon5 compare to previous ones? Pretty good, great actually. I still haven’t had a “perfect” BarCamp, mainly because there are so many different aspects that can make or break for you. For instance, BCL3 at Google had the best food and a great venue, but I didn’t choose the right sessions to go to, so it didn’t feel as if I really learnt anything during that one (plus there wasn’t enough Werewolf!). The opposite has also occurred though: sessions yay, food bleh. So like all previous BarCamps, this 5th London one also had it’s highs and lows (although I might be a nitpicky).

The Venue

This BarCamp was held at the eBay offices in Richmond, picturesquely situated by the Thames. I loved the layout of this place for a BarCamp. On the upper floor there were a couple of smaller proper session rooms with projector, lots of light and big meeting style tables. Downstairs were the more quirkier type rooms, with bean bags, flashy chairs and couches. I must admit I was a bit disappointed there wasn’t a “working scale replica of the Enterprise bridge from Next Generation” (yeah, I can be a bit gullible), cause I was hoping for another swede! A great surprise were the showers in the basement (there’s nothing worse than smelly geeks), although it would have been nice to have known that beforehand; practically nobody had taken towels with them.

Food

Enough with the pizza already! Why is there almost always pizza as dinner during the London BarCamps? I mean, I’d actually be fine with it, if it arrived nice and warm and steaming, but it’s always, always cold. Blegh. The rest of the food though was pretty good. During both days the lunches were sandwiches and bread rolls, with lots of brownies added as extra (I might have been one of those people who first grabbed 4 brownies and then went on to the normal food). The Sunday breakfast provided by myMuesli was delicious, although I think I’ve discovered that I’m allergic to mango (another post will follow). I love that there was actual orange juice available during breakfast, but I’d prefer that too for the rest of the day instead of only fizzy drinks and coffee. All in all though, great food!

No-Shows

I have to make a point out of this. Neil already wrote a blog post about this and I fully agree. From the 150 who had signed up, more than 40 people didn’t show up. Seriously?! Guys (or gals) have at least the decency to cancel your ticket and let someone else go in your stead. The tickets for BarCamp are so coveted; there’s always such a fuss of making the cut and getting the ticket. And then people don’t show up?! Sorry, but that just pisses me the hell off.  

Schwag

Free stuff! Most events have a goodie/schwag bag, but with this one two things stood out to me. For starters, the eBay picnic blanket. It’s cute and small with velcro to fold it up in a neat little bundle and perfect for on the couch! Secondly, the t-shirts. Now some of the previous BarCamps also had t-shirts, but I think (correct me if I’m wrong here) this was the first one with girly sized tees. Woot! I’ve been complaining with previous events that you’ll always get this weird oversized floppy guy t-shirts; perfect as pajamas, but unusable for anything other than that. Here though there were comfortable lady sized shirts (I’ve even worn mine outside already). My only nitpick here though is that they had way more S than M or L. To put it in perspective: I just fit into the M size. Who would have fit into the S? 

Laptop-Less

This was the second time I decided to leave my laptop at home and I really like not having it with me. The first time I left it because of hardware reasons (the rubbers that are supposed to keep the hard disk in it’s place came out while replacing it and now the hard disk is kind of loose), but since then I’ve noticed I’ll enjoy a BarCamp more without one. That’s mainly because instead of playing around with my laptop, I’m paying way more attention to the sessions and throwing myself more into them. I know it won’t be for everyone, but give it a thought before your next BarCamp.

Introductions & Wrap-Up

Unlike a couple of previous ones the introduction session was great: snappy, to the point and no-longer-than-needed. Some people have complained about the point of the three tags round (every single attendee introduces themselves plus three tags), but I’ve always found it pretty interesting. Especially for newbies, it’s a great way to make clear that EVERYBODY participates. The wrap session though… Well, let’s put it this way: for me there was no wrap-up session. The last session was supposed to last till 16:00, so we stayed put until the end. Only to discover when we came downstairs that they already had had the wrap-up and clean-up. WTF? True, we had been warned 15 minutes earlier by another attendee that they were rounding people up, but we didn’t think that it would be that quick. We also had no idea if there were any plans on going to a pub for post drinks or anything like that. It just ended so abruptly, it really ruined the afterglow of BarCamp. 

Sessions

Because of all the people didn’t show up, the board also felt strangely empty. On the other though, there was always something interesting every slot, so much so, that I was hard pressed to find a slot for my own session that didn’t collide with another I wanted to go to. The session slots were one hour here, but with no real breaks in between (so from 14:00 till 18:00 there were non stop session). I would have preferred that they’d break that down, like the previous Brighton one, with slots of half an hour and 15 minute breaks between every session. An hour just feels way too much, plus by breaking it into smaller slots you end up seeing more presentations. Here’s a short recap of all the sessions that I went to:

Hacking the Moo API
A quick introduction by Stef Magdalinski on how the Moo API works and some cool examples that were already made with it.

Impro 101
The second time I’ve gone to one of James Aylett’s Impro sessions, which combines a bunch of games/exercises to loosen up your mind and make your mental reflexes work quicker. Most embarrassing but funny moment must have been pretending to be monkeys:

Diversity
Great discussion led by Rain which started about why there aren’t that many (barely any) woman conference speakers. It quickly turned into more of a discussion of the confidence of woman in tech in general, which of course will influence their readiness of being a speaker or not. If you want some more info, Rain’s got a great summary of it up on her blog. 

Developing iPhone Apps
Cool mini workshop from Simon Maddox on how to develop an iPhone app (and why his wasn’t accepted into the App Store). I already was interested in Cocoa development, so this was a nice add-on.

Food You Can Create Under 5 Minutes
Delicious food-tasting! I thought this session was going to be some simple recipes shown in a slideshow, but it was an actual hands-on “lets cook some stuff” session. We had: Microwaved Salmon on a bed of Mashed Cannoli Beans, Chocolate Dipped Strawberries, Thai Chicken Shrimp Noodles (created with Pot Noodles!), Eton Mess, and Salmon/Avocado Sushi rolls.  

Alternate Reality Games
I was planning on holding a short session about Operation: Sleeper Cell (again another blog post will follow some time this week), but decided on the day itself I could easily blabber on about all the different ARGs I’ve participated in. So I talked for an hour about The Dark Knight, We Tell Stories, The 7th Syndikate and Operation: Sleeper Cell. First session I’ve held at BarCamp that I’m actually proud of!

Building For The Web of Data
Interesting session from Dan W about how data should be structured on the web. Sites such as IMDB and Last.fm should take care of their respective subjects and act as Data Silos, which other types of apps like Viewers can access when necessary. Check out the slides.

Bring Your Own Gadgets
This was a small session hosted by Cristiano, where everybody just showed up with their own gadgets and was allowed to play with other people’s gadgets. I brought my Nintendo DS with a couple of the games I own. I ended up “playing” with Sam’s laptop, just checking my email/twitter/etc.

Architecting Human Behaviour
Okay, I definitely have to check out the Open Bibliotheek in Amsterdam now. Andy Budd‘s session was all about how certain buildings are designed to affect people in certain ways. For instance, all these little tricks that are done in Las Vegas casinos so that you’ll end up spending more: 

Karaoke
I ended my BarCamp with a great session of Karaoke singing. It wasn’t only singing; we were beta-testing the new app from Lucky Voice. We might have scared a couple of people away though; it wasn’t our singing, honest!

All together, it made for a great BarCamp. Kudos to eBay for hosting and organizing it and all the sponsors for making such an event possible. Next up: SocialMediaCamp this Saturday! I can only hope it’s a good as this one.

Our GeekDinner last Wednesday already showed us how fun the nice people over at Carsonified are, and now they’re holding a great contest, where you can win a Golden Ticket. The winner of this Golden Ticket will receive the following goodies:

1. A free ticket to ALL Carsonified 2009 events. This includes Future of Web Design, Future of Web Apps, Future of Mobile, Fuel and all Carson Workshops.

2. Pick one Carsonified event and we’ll fly you there and put you up in an amazing hotel, for FREE*

3. An all-access backstage pass at all 2009 Carsonified events

4. An invite to the VIP speaker dinner at one Carsonified event of your choice

Cool, right? All you have to do to win this great prize is write a blog post (what I’m doing right now) and drum up 25 comments on that blog post. And that’s where you, dear readers, all come in. Will you help me with reaching the 25 comments?

To make it a tad more interesting than just a list of “boring” comments, check out the schedule for The Future of Web Apps. Tell me, which session looks the most interesting to you and why?

So this was my 6th BarCamp. It doesn’t feel like that. It doesn’t feel like that at all. I still feel like such a newbie at these events, mainly cause I have no idea what to talk about. I’ve held a session at almost every single one of them (except for Berlin, because the schedule was completely full), but never something that seemed useful/professional/barcamp-worthy. I know that I know stuff, but I have no idea if people would be interested in anything I know.

Putting all that aside for a moment though, the third BarCamp Brighton was fantastic. Great venue, great sessions and a lot of interesting people. Like last time, it was held at the Student’s Union of the University of Sussex. It’s a lovely location for this type of event, with a nice selection of different types of rooms and enough space to hang around and chill in.

Saturday

I woke up at 6am that Saturday morning. Cristiano, Dan and I were able to get a ride to Brighton from Emma, but that meant being at her place at 7:30ish, which meant leaving our house at 6:50. Ugh, way too early. We ended up arriving later than we initially expected at 10:15. After a long introduction round, where every single person had to introduce themselves with three tags (my tags were facial expressions, machine learning and werewolf), people started filling up the board with their sessions.

HDR Photos

The first session I went to was Cristiano’s talk about HDR photos. I already knew what they were (High Dynamic Range photos), but not how to make them. The idea of HDR is that you take multiple photos of the same thing, but with different exposures, and then combine them into one image. Some cameras can do the first part of this (taking multiple photos with different exposures) automatically, called exposure autobracketing, but you can also do it by hand, if you place the camera somewhere stable. A handy Mac app that can do the second part is Photomatix Pro. It takes multiple images as input, merges the photos into one and then offers tone mapping to select the right colours, shadows and highlights. 

Ask The BBC Anything

I then went to the Ask The BBC Anything session with Ian Forrester, Rain Ashford and Ant Miller. I didn’t take any notes, so I don’t remember all the details, but some interesting points were raised about how the BBC has to deal with copyright. There was one anecdote about an orchestra concert, which was held at a BBC venue, played by BBC employees, music was in the public domain, but somehow because of the conductor, the BBC still didn’t own the rights to it. 

Rubik’s Cube Solving

One skill I’ve always wanted to have is to be able to solve a Rubik’s Cube. After this workshop with Seb Lee-Delisle, I’m one step closer to that goal. We didn’t have time to complete the tutorial, but I understand more about it then before. The most important thing to realize here is that the six middle points on every side (so square #5 of the 9), all remain on the same location the entire time. I won’t try to explain it further, cause my babbling won’t make it any clearer (there are loads of tutorials available online if you’re interested). 

Powerpoint Karaoke

Who doesn’t know what powerpoint karaoke is? The idea is simple: a victim gets to present a set of powerpoint slides which he has never seen before. The result can be very funny (or if you’re not lucky, very boring). There were hilarious presentations about cannibalism, bacon and genetically engineered trees.

Uncanny AI

This presentation from David Hayward was one of the sessions I enjoyed the most, mainly because part of it was a different perspective to theory I’m reading up on for my own research. The uncanny valley is a hypothesis about the response from humans to robot or CGI characters (anything that’s supposed to look and act human). The theory goes that right before they look and act completely believable, there’s a huge dip of repulsion: they just seem creepy and weird (like The Polar Express and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within). 

Impro 101

I’m not one for quick retorts; my mind just goes completely blank in those moments where I would love to be witty and sharp. I think though that maybe with enough practice I could teach myself how to do that. This session from James Aylett helped already a bit. He took us through a series of games/exercises, aimed to loosen up people and make them less self-conscious, while slowly building up the reflexes of thinking quick on your feet. 

Content, Content and Pop Culture

In this session Relly Annett-Baker presented what happens when companies give free reign to their fans and actually pay attention to what they (the fans) are producing. She gave examples of the Ace Attorney games for the Nintendo DS and the popular Japanese manga Prince of Tennis, which both have a vast assortment of merchandise. The presentation also touched such topics as slash fiction (guy-on-guy fan fiction, Angel and Spike swoon…) and hentai (tentacle sex!).

Werewolf

What would a BarCamp be without Werewolf? 

Game 1

In this game Emma, some newbie and I were the Werewolves. The game started with about 20 players, and us Werewolves went for a kill the non-newbies and non-experts strategy (so those who had played more than once, but not a lot). When there were around 10 people left, I (as a Werewolf) declared myself as the Seer. There wasn’t that much resistance, until one point where I should have accused a newbie of being a Werewolf. Instead I told everyone he was a Villager, which destroyed my brilliant plan. The only option was killing myself that night, after trying to explain to Emma during the night round with a series of weird hand gestures which next steps she should take. She didn’t follow my advice, but the Werewolves still won anyway. 

Game 2

Of course, after the game I previously played, I fully expected no one to believe me. And, of course, I had to pull the Seer card that game. To make things worse, no one died the first night and people straightaway wanted to lynch me. I had no choice but to declare as the Seer myself immediately. To make things even more annoying, some newbie declared himself as the Seer (while he was in fact the Healer!!). The Villagers believed me though and we lynched the newbie. Two rounds later I discovered a Werewolf, but he managed to turn the game around on me. Almost everyone believed him and the Villagers lynched me. The one person that believed me though succeeded in convincing everyone to lynch the Werewolf the next round and he discovered who the other Werewolf was. The Villagers won!  

Game 3

This game was great, but very uneventful. Natalie Downe, Phil Hawksworth and I were the Werewolves and the entire game nobody suspected us. Cristiano was the Seer and apparently had checked me during the same night that we Werewolves killed him. The Villagers kept suspecting and lynching each other; all we had to do was not act too suspicious. We won with no Werewolf casualties! 

There was one more game after that, where I was finally just a Villager. I got quickly killed during the night though, because Cristiano was one of the Werewolves and didn’t want to risk me figuring him out. By then it was already 4.30 am, so it was time to attempt to sleep anyway.

Sunday

After 5 hours of sleep, I woke up half an hour before my own session started. Eek! 

What is the Definition of Geekiness?

I thought I’d do a discussion session following my blog post from last week about how to define geekiness. It went as okay as a session in the early Sunday morning can go. Most people are barely awake (including me) and still flaking out a bit. I did get some people to talk though about the differences between geeks, fans and academics, but most tended to agree with me. Then again most BarCampers do see themselves as geeks, while I think the most contrasting viewpoints come from those that don’t think they’re geeks.

Illustrator for Non-Designers

I’m reasonably proficient in Photoshop, but never took the time to learn a bit about Illustrator. Adam Mills did a quick introduction into the basics of Illustrator, explaining stuff like how the pen tool worked and how the workflow and setup differs from Photoshop. It was really a useful session; I’m thinking I should redesign my blog logo based on what I learnt here. 

Histograms

Cristiano had a second talk explaining photo histograms to newbies and the cool things you can do with them. Most people that showed up though already knew what histograms were (if you don’t, check out his presentation on SlideShare). There were some cool things though, like a image of the New York skyline, of which the histogram was shaped like the New York skyline (some people have too much time on their hands). Next to that, Cristiano created a useful bookmarklet that will generate a histogram for any image within the browser.

Pen and Paper Japanese Puzzles

I love pen and paper puzzles, but I tend to get obsessed with them: once I start one, I have to finish it. This presentation showed 17 newish Japanese puzzles. Most of them I knew already, having played a lot of Brain Buster Puzzle Pak on the Nintendo DS and some puzzle set on the iPhone. There were some new ones in between them though, like Futokoshi and Engima.

Ideas in Typography Related to Experience Design

I met Rebecca Cottrell two weeks ago at the London Girl Geek Dinner anniversary, and she wasn’t looking forward to having to give a BarCamp presentation. Suffice to say, she was surprised when it turned out her session was so popular, we had to move to a larger room. It was an interesting presentation about typography and design, and kicked off some interesting discussions (like typography on mobile). Check out Rebecca’s blog post, it’s worth the read (she’s got her slides on SlideShare and has added her presentation notes).

Geek Yoga

I’m not the healthiest person; I’m not overweight or anything like that, but sitting behind my computer all day, just doesn’t feel too good for my body. But I always thought that yoga would be a bit flaky or spacey, and not something I’d ever do. After this session though I’m completely turned! The instructor Jenny taught us some very basic positions and exercises, focusing on how to breath, move and relax at the same time. I’m definitely going to keep up doing these small things I’ve learnt and (once I’ve got a real job) eventually find a yoga place somewhere here.

Buildering 101

The day ended with an interesting talk from Tantek on buildering. Buildering is the sport of climbing buildings, inside and outside. After a quick presentation (Rule #1: Don’t Die), he proceeded to show some places within the BarCamp venue that were suitable for buildering. That included interrupting another talk, because the walls in that room had gaps in them which worked perfectly as hand and feet grips. I would have loved to try it out myself, but didn’t want to ruin my pretty shoes and dress.

All in all, I had a fantastic two days! I’m looking forward to BarCampLondon5 at Ebay in 3 weeks time. And this time I’m going to present something real!

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a couple of days now, but I’ve been working on a presentation that was planned for this afternoon, which got cancelled last minute. And that’s ‘last minute’ as in I arrived at the uni, ready to present, only to discover I had travelled down for nothing. Grumble, grumble.

Anywho, last week I got invited to a special guided tour of the ITV London News studio. Now I don’t actually watch the news; I don’t hassle with “normal” TV anymore and most news I find out via the web anyway. I almost declined the invitation for that reason. But the chance to go behind the scenes at a news station? Doesn’t come very often I’d think (not for me at least).

So last Friday (after a good Social Media Cafe) I made my way down to the ITV studios on Gray’s Inn Road. Of course, I managed to be 10 minutes late, but it didn’t matter that much; the first half an hour was for drinks and introductions. (Sidenote: I didn’t take any notes at all, I’m doing most of this based on what I remember. Sorry, if I get any names/titles/facts/etc wrong). I met up in the lobby with Jack, one of the writers on the ITV Local London Blog, and also the person who had invited me. After going upstairs, I met the four other bloggers also there for the tour: Ben Locker, Ludovic from Richmond Transits, The Brinkster and Rob from About Mayfair. We got introduced to a bunch of people from ITV Local London branch (Juliette, Casey, Colin and two others who’s names I’ve forgotten, sorry!) and then started with the tour.

We first had a quick look around of the ITV Local offices, where most of the (web) content was taken care of. After that we hopped over to the building next door, the ITN headquarters, where both the ITV national news and the local news is recorded. We first got to see the newsroom, where all the news is collected and edited into editorials. The desks are arranged here as circles within circles, all centering around one active point (called the hub or the pit). Half of the room was for the national news, while the other half was for the local news. I have to mention the monitor set-up here (cuz me wantz!): most desks had 3-4 monitors, some with an extra 3 smaller monitors stacked vertically above each other, all displaying a different news channel. Yes, this was the place where news was made. 

The editor of the London Tonight News, Stuart Thomas, then took some time to explain what he was doing. With the help of some special news software (it was called something like NewsEdit), he was working on one of the editorials for the program that night about surfing dogs. The funny subject matter aside, it looked very similar to Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere, where you can select the parts of film you want and add a separate audio track to it. Besides that, he could see (and edit) the schedule of the program that night, including which news items weren’t finished yet and which were live on location.

We then got a quick look at the London Tonight studio. It look exactly like on TV: comfy couch, grey interior and a big LCD screen with a view of London. The national news studio, on the other hand, is completely green screen. Okay, the desks, chairs and people are real… but everything else? Green screen. The first thing I noticed when entering that studio were the dozens and dozens of target-like plates hanging from the ceiling (I wish I was allowed to take a picture of that). The idea is that every camera uses these targets (by pointing a laser, I presume) to determine it’s location and thereby determining how the virtual news room should be correctly mapped onto the image it’s recording. Pretty nifty, right?

The highlight of my visit though had to be sitting in the gallery, seeing the news being “put together” live. We arrived there before the actual broadcast to see the presenters (Alastair Stewart and Salma Siraj) record some smaller voiceover bits which would be used later on. I’m not sure if they were putting on a show for us bloggers, or if it was because of the last-day-of-the-week syndrome that is Friday, or if they’re always like that, but both Alastair and Salma were cracking jokes and giggling while they were off-air. The moment they started to record though: pure professionals. Brilliance!

Then we got to the actual broadcast. During this, there were 5 people at the control panel: the director, who operates the video switcher and selects/controls/mixes all the elements of the show; the audio technician, who is in charge of the audio (duh), microphones and music; a production assistant, who takes care of the autocue; the editor, who makes sure all there are no problems with the editorials, and a fifth person (not sure anymore what they called her, for now I’ll refer to her as the timer, for lack of a better word) who makes sure the timing within the overall half slot is perfect. This last task is what makes a broadcasting so hectic: they’re given a half an hour time slot and it has to be exactly half an hour. Not a minute longer, not a minute shorter. Exactly half an hour. Throughout the broadcast an estimate of the end time is given with “plus” and “minus” indicating “over” and “under” time. 

You’d think the presenters “only” have to read off the autocue, but they’re doing so much more. During the broadcasting, the director and the timer are both giving directions through their earpiece. I don’t know about you, but could you read out something aloud, while you’re listening to something else? I couldn’t. Then when they’re a minute over, they have to speed up another segment, without it being too obvious to the viewer. And it’s even more difficult, when they’re a minute under; they have to start ad libbing bits. Another cool bit was the live report, where you saw the reporter getting ready on location. What made it even better for me, was that “on-location” was my local bus garage; I was just there that morning! From all the places a live report could have been, it was a place I knew (okay, okay, there was a strike and that’s a pretty big bus garage, but still).  

After our stint in the gallery, some time was reserved to blog about the tour, which would be followed by drinks at the pub. It was a friend’s birthday party though, so I had to leave earlier than all the others. All in all, it was a great day. This experience really has given me much more appreciation of everybody involved in putting the news on our telly. Thanks, ITV Local for inviting me!

You’d think I’d have more interesting pics to show, huh? I’m still messing around with Cristiano’s DSLR and I didn’t realize (well, I did realize there was something not right, but couldn’t figure out what) that the ISO was way too high. So almost all my photos were grainy and yucky. Must. Read. Manual.

Sorry, it’s been a bit quiet here lately! I went on a 5-day trip down to Dorset with a couple of friends, but as we were all geeks (we even called our trip Geeks in The Country), I took my laptop with me and thought I’d have time to blog a bit. Instead I’ve spent a great couple of days sightseeing, enjoying the countryside and eating wonderful loads of food. And I was completely tech free: no blogging, no emails, no Twitter. It felt like a real holiday; I haven’t been on holiday now for 2 years and it was great just to get away from all the busyness. 

I’ll be uploading more photos later this week and write a blog post or two about the wonderful things I’ve seen. For now: what do you think of my new wellies?