I wasn’t planning on blogging four times today, but I thought I should join in this global blogger’s effort. Today is Blog Action Day – a day where bloggers unite to discuss, raise awareness and initiate action in one issue: poverty.
I’ve never experienced real poverty and I’m guessing most readers on my blog won’t have either. And it’s so easy to forget just how lucky we are. I already couldn’t imagine a life without my computer, let alone the more vital aspects of life, like food and clothing. And yet there are thousands of people living in these type of circumstances.
So what can I (and you) do to make a difference? For starters, spread the word. Talk about this Blog Action Day and see how many people you can reach. Secondly, donate. How about lending money on Kiva.org? Kiva is a great way to help entrepreneurs in developing areas raise money for their projects and helping them build and improve their community.
I also want to mention Skellie’s blog post here. Besides it being a great post with 30 simple things you can do today to battle poverty, she’ll be donating 5 cents to Kiva.org for every visitor today. So head on over to her blog post!
One last thing: if you’re a blogger, have you already blogged about Blog Action Day?
When I saw this ladder, I immediately thought I should hang over the side of the dock and make a couple of shots. I didn’t expect it to look this dreamy though!
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?
This is my first “real” street photography type of shot! Ever since Cristiano got his camera I’ve been wanting to experiment with it myself and try to make some cool pics. Now that he’s got a second camera (a D50), I’ve got time to learn how to use the D40.
What I like about this photo is how both people are so busy and concentrated, still completely in the mindset of “work”. London is truly a city that never turns off…
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.
You may have noticed I’ve been using a new avatar here on my blog and on Twitter. During our trip to Dorset, Cristiano made a couple of cool photos of me and I had been thinking for a while to change the avatar I use everywhere. The old one was taken 2 years ago in Italy, so it really felt like time to update it.
I liked the colours in this one, but after trying it out in a smaller size, it just didn’t pop out as much as I wanted (plus the hairs in front of my eyes look weird in small):
I really loved this sepia photo of me, but after cropping it and rescaling it, it just didn’t seem to work as an avatar:
Then Cristiano suggested changing the colours; instead of sepia, there’s now a slight overlay of the Miss Geeky red over it. I think it fits pretty good in this site:
