Archives for Conference Notes

On writing my talk for dconstruct... (September 16, 2007) A few people have asked me to put up my slides for the dconstruct talk. However, I'm going to be doing a variant on the talk at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin in a few weeks so I thought I'd let...

Podcasts and Presentations... (October 15, 2006) I've just noticed that Ryan Carson and the Carson Workshops crew have put up presentations and MP3s for the Future of Web Apps summit that I spoke at in San Francisco a few weeks ago. For some reason there is...

I'm the only gay in this village? (September 17, 2006) Right. I'm in a bit of a mood right now because Valleywag just called me the token gay at all-white-male conference Future of Web Apps. Apparently this was in response to Chris Messina's post the other day on the future...

Decompressing after Future of Web Apps... (September 16, 2006) The conference is over and the reviews are in and I appear to have survived with a decent proportion of the people who wrote about it seeming to think it was a good and useful talk. I cannot tell you...

Maps, Invaders, Robots & Throwies... (FOO 06) (September 8, 2006) So I thought I'd end my series of posts on FOO (which some of you may have determined was originally one grotesquely long post of approaching 5,000 words, roughly chunked to last as long as possible sometime last weekend) by...

Terahertz waves vs. Alexaholics... (FOO '06) (September 7, 2006) Wrapping up my coverage of FOO sessions, I just thought I should probably mention the two last I attended, even though I don't have so much to directly say about them. I've got one more post to come though, so...

Brain stimulation for the masses... (FOO '06) (September 7, 2006) There was one speaker at FOO this year that would literally have blown my brain away if he'd happened to have had his equipment with him. Ed Boyden talked about transcranial magnetic stimulation - basically how to use focused magnetic...

On the Politicisation of Science... (FOO '06) (September 6, 2006) One talk from FOO Camp 06 started off fascinating me and end up driving me to distraction with frustration. Chris Csikszentmihályi from the MIT Media Lab did a talk about the implicit politics that lies behind all technology. Initially I...

On a global AIBO consciousness... (FOO '06) (September 5, 2006) My third FOO post in a row, and I'm only just getting onto the talks themselves. This time I learned from my experience last year and made sure that I tried to steer myself towards talks that were outside my...

On Werewolf at FOO Camp 06... (September 4, 2006) I'm sure Tim actually gets quite annoyed by the amount of times that people ostensibly talk about FOO Camp but actually end up talking about Werewolf - a game that is played pretty much solidly throughout the Friday and Saturday...

Some thoughts about FOO and elitism... (September 4, 2006) I'm going to try over the next few days to capture retrospectively my FOO experience in a little detail. I didn't think I'd have enough time to do it, but it turns out that when you're trying to avoid writing...

How American are Startups? (May 17, 2006) The second day of XTech and the first day of the conference proper (yesterday being tutorials) starts with a keynote from Paul Graham (see his Wikipedia entry) talking about whether or not the success of Silicon Valley might be replicated...

Heading to Amsterdam for XTech 2006... (May 15, 2006) In about six hours I'll be heading off to XTech 2006 with team-mates and fellow speakers Paul Hammond and Simon Willison. I'll be doing probably my final run at Native to a Web of Data in public before I write...

What do we do with 'social media'? (March 31, 2006) I'm a nervous public speaker, and so when I was asked to talk at the Guardian Changing Media Summit, I started to scratch out some notes about specifically what I'd say about Social Media. When I'm talking, I never really...

Back to London and Changing Media... (March 30, 2006) Phew! And I'm back in London and this is basically the first opportunity I've had to put my head above water since. I'm ploughing through a backlog of e-mail from stuff I've not had much of a chance to deal...

Veen & JJG at ETech 2006... (March 6, 2006) I'm in my first session for ETech 2006 - watching Jeff Veen and Jesse James Garrett talking about Designing the next generation of Web Apps: An insight that I've gained from the session so far - that there have been...

In which Foo blows my head clean off... (August 22, 2005) So the whole FooCamp experience has ended, and frankly it's been pretty astonishing. It comprised roughly a hundred and forty potential talks to go to across ten rooms, assembled in an ad hoc fashion on the Friday night. Some of...

Supernova '05: Byron Reeves on MMORPGs... (July 3, 2005) It's difficult to articulate how busy I've been since Supernova - what with servers falling over and jet-lag and work and general calamities. All of which probably explains why I'm still writing up Supernova notes almost two weeks after...

Supernova '05: A round-up of Tuesday afternoon... (June 29, 2005) The talks that this post refers to occurred at Supernova 2005 on Tuesday 21st of June between midday and 4.30pm. In the first post I wrote about my experiences at Supernova I expressed this opinion about the conference as a...

Supernova '05: Jeff Weiner from Yahoo! (June 29, 2005) The talk that this piece refers to took place at Supernova 2005 on Tuesday 21st of June around 11.30am. Now I think I can say with relative certainty that the Chris Anderson talk did not go down terribly well with...

Supernova '05: Chris Anderson on the Long Tail... (June 29, 2005) Quick apologies - my notes and write up of Supernova have been thrown out of whack by various unforeseeable pressures. I'm going to try and get through them very quickly now. This session was held last Tuesday at 11am. It's...

Supernova '05: "Apps. for a Mobile, Connected World" (June 23, 2005) Hm. So I spent a good forty-five minutes yesterday writing the next post in my series on Supernova '05, only to lose it catastrophically when Safari collapsed under the weight of 150 open tabs. So this will probably be a...

Supernova '05: "Perspective: Jonathan Schwartz" (June 22, 2005) Since yesterday morning I've been hanging around at Supernova and I've been taking some fairly intensive notes, but I've not yet had the opportunity to write any of it up. Over the next hour or so, I hope to put...

On doing two papers at ETech 2005 (February 15, 2005) Hm. The O'Reilly ETech button on the right there doesn't really look very comfortable on the page, does it? All looks a bit showy and ostentatious. It's just the wrong width, really. Ah well. Never mind. I've actually been meaning...

Live from ETech: Cory Doctorow and e-books... (February 12, 2004) Warning: What follows makes increasingly little sense. Day Three Proper of ETech has resulted in a certain lack of mental flexibility and a weird warm grinding feeling at the temples as my over-saturated lobes rub together... So in a few...

Is there a ROBOT OVERLORD in your future? (February 12, 2004) ETCon gets weirder and weirder by the moment... [larger version]...

Live from ETech: Day Two Schedule... (February 12, 2004) In lieu of a detailed coverage of what's been going on at ETCon, I just thought I'd post a schedule of the talks I've been to today. I'll drill down into some of the more interesting ones later this evening...

Live from Etech: Flickr and the end of Day One... (February 11, 2004) So ETCon Proper Day One ends and I'm basically high on some kind of highly emotionally charged intellectual hysteria-generating buzz. So far I've only managed to write about the things that have caused me frustration and irritation - probably because...

Live from ETech: Nutters from the Defence Department... (February 10, 2004) Wow. Weird. The Defense Department / Many-to-Many technologies session turned into some kind of weird recruitment/intimidation drive from a marching shouty soldier man. What a creepy and kind of dirty-feeling waste of time! Such a shame, I was really looking...

Live from ETech: iRobot... (February 10, 2004) For the most part the ETCon keynotes are pretty much high-concept fluff. They're fundamentally high-profile, high-glamour bits of hardcore tech that (often) are completely outside the practical experience of the so-called Alpha geeks that attend these events. But they have...

Network troubles at ETCon... (February 10, 2004) Day Two of ETCon and the network horror starts. Rendezvous isn't working for me, so I can't see or connect to any other SubEthaEdit documents. I can't IM anyone, I'm trying to download IRC but the network is collapsing. All...

Live from Etech: Digital Democracy Part II (February 9, 2004) Two more Digital Democracy Teach-In events come and go. The guys from meetup.com put together a couple of presentations including some useful statistics and a few nice punchlines, but I'm not sure I learned anything particularly new during it. Certainly...

Live from Etech: Joe Trippi... (February 9, 2004) Rapid recontextualisations make my head hurt. Nonetheless today I'm not in Los Angeles having fun with friends in drag. Today instead I'm watching Joe Trippi talking about American politics and the consequences and effects of the Dean's internet-enabled online fund-raising...

Are there gay people at ETCON? (January 15, 2004) So first things first, after considerable soul-searching and fiddling around with finances I've found a way to go to Emerging Tech this year to cheer on my BBC other half's paper: Glancing: I'm OK, You're OK. Last year the conference...

Emerging Fallout... (April 30, 2003) I'm back in the UK, and it's half-past midnight and I feel as fresh as a daisy despite only having slept for about half an hour in the last thirty-six... My mind still feels like it's got too much Emerging...

"UpMyStreet Conversations: Mapping Cyber to Space" (April 24, 2003) So. A bit delayed. Sorry to all concerned. I'll post later about the experience of delivering a paper at Emerging Tech later, when I've had a chance to assimilate the whole experience, but if you're looking for the PowerPoint presentation...

Vignette from ETCon... (April 24, 2003) So I'm hiding in the Speaker's Room with Vee McMillan - trying to get my stuff printed out for my paper (T minus one hour, fifteen minutes) and this woman comes into the room saying that she thinks she really...

Emerging Tech 2003 (April 23, 2003) So on Thursday I'll be delivering a paper at O'Reilly Emerging Tech called "UpMyStreet Conversations: Mapping Cyber to Space". The paper, which I have co-written with Matt Webb and Stefan Magdalinski, will be mostly about the basics of how...