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Nicole Simon's passionate but pragmatic approach for using blogs, podcasts and other tools in professional and private endeavors. And some other stuff she is passionate about. Nicole lives in Lübeck, Germany and likes to facilitate a broader perspective for some readers ;)
Coming to think about it, why was I not outraged when they got to the podcatching software and after the *pod* part? Maybe it was a good test for them to see if or if not there would be an outcry. But now Apple is starting to go for the pod-related websites for "infringing the trademark ipod". What trademarks are you talking about? Apple does not have a trademark on podcasting and it would be interesting to see what the current ones really consists of.
Robert's question "Will podtech be next?" can be answered by "no" so far. Not the big ones of course, because they have the money to defend themselves and the clout to do PR.
In adaption we can say "first they came for the *podder software and I did not speak up because I do not program a podcatcher. Then they came for the *pod* websites and I did not care because I don't run a website. When they came for me, nobody was left to speak up for me."
So far, I am not 'directly' involved, but I do absolutly not like where this is going and I think it is time again to show a company that the net is nothing to mess with - even if you think you only have customers out there who will forgive you everything and still buy your stuff.
So how can we speak up? I have no idea how to go against Apple's trys specifically regarding the U.S. trademark, but I know we have to react and show Apple that they are a company producing hardware and not gods. As we know, a company like Apple only listens to one single thing: Money and bad PR.
Coincidentally, Apple's letter arrived the day before Podcast Ready unveiled a new version of its software -- one that works with the iPod.
That may be true but it is quite stupid to start these kinds of letters just one week before America's biggest event in Podcasting ever with over 3000 attendees: The Portable Media Expo in Ontario, CA.
Todd Cochrane suggested "It makes me so mad that I might have to demonstrate my displeasure with Apple at Podcast Expo by smashing my iPod. " This will not really hurt Apple, but may be good for a media stunt.
Christmas is coming and it is supposed to be one of Apple's big seasons for selling hardware. Put your money where your mouth is: Don't buy at Apple's. And let's face it: If it does not hurt sales or stock, nobody at apple will care!
So, how to get stickers / badges printed in time for the Expo stating "say no to apple" or "don't buy ipods"? "Everytime you buy an ipod god kills a litte podcast website?" What other suggestion can we do with this amount of people (and press) coming next week? What kind of logo would draw the most attention on blogs and make people aware of what is going on?
Will it be possible to have a joint statement by participating individuals and companies on the expo? Something to sign, photograph and then send off to every stock analysist you know?
How about a sound clip which you can run in your podcast? (Somebody make me some jingle, I'll record it).
First small steps:
blog about it and link to other blogs reporting about it (to enhance visibility) and use tags like I suggested below
Yuk. Yesterday and today my Gmail was a very slow. And if I say slowI mean slow!
Also I wondered about the few e-mails I was still getting ... it just was not enough. Not that I really want to have more e-mails but just by looking at it I could judge that there was something wrong with Gmail. Until I noticed that I was not getting a comment notification I thought "maybe it is a slow news day ...". After that I knew my mails where being deferred.
Since then I have been waiting for the rushing in of all the delayed e-mails and this afternoon, they came. Yikes. Did anyone else noticed something unusual?
Technorati tax (not tax. Tags. With a soft G. let's try again: technorati tax. Well it seems I have to do some training ...)
technorati tax. Now, little dragon, we don't want to give Dave Sifry ideas. Come on: technorati tax.
Hrmf. I would just use my bookmark list bookmarklet.
This is my first test recording with my new toy Dragon NaturallySpeaking -- after the Microsoft speech recognition software didn't work out so well I had to try something new.
When I saw on eBay an auction for the software, I was unhappy about the fact that it was a German version. To my surprise, there where also auctions with "Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred" in a US version available. Needless to say that this was my preferred choice.
This sentence was supposed to display house. Out Dragon PDAs over Microsoft's speech-recognition
[This sentence was supposed to display how superious Dragon is over Microsoft's speeck recognition ... well. Let's try that again!]
The reason why I am eager to train the software onto my voice is simple:
if I have trained it well it will be much faster than me typing and I can produce more postings. Hey! I did say a blog posting.
No, I did not say "a" blog posting - I just said blog posting.
So far, I am quite surprised -- pleasantly -- that the software actually knows blog. Okay, it still needs some training between blog and block.
[continue reading ...]
(Even if the 'deadline' is kind of over (like described in this boingboing posting) do it anyhow. From my point of view, EFF is at the moment the only organisation on 'my' side which will have an effect due to existing contacts and connections. And, the people supporting this Wipo treaty will either get it this time, or they will try again. )
If you are a podcaster or one of those video people, please take the moment and read the statement at the EFF site (see below) .
If you are a company which does podcasting / uses podcasting, please do so as well.
Do you enjoy podcasting? Check with your favorite podcaster if they have seen this as well.
If you agree with what you see, send a message to the email address on the EFF page with just line as you would like to sign it.
Actually, this one is even worse than net neutrality at the moment. This is not about you the small podcaster against the big ones as in fight against capitalism, this is about the power of the internet. Yes, I am serious. In this world it is not just one bad thing which is happening. There are multiple enemies. Make sure your voice is heard also. And that it stays in the rights you have chosen for your work.
Bringing it to the UN and Wipo makes it bad on so many levels which is why you also should care if you are not in the US. I know, a lot of people think about "this digital rights stuff" as something only happening to the US, but there are implications as well.
This is also an encouragement to consider donating money to an organisation like EFF to keep your digital rights. You may agree or disagree with the EFF and how they are run, but I do not care much about who you support, just help them support you. The one thing I would like to ask from you is to take a look if this organisation has a global view instead of a narrow country based one.
Please remember: This has to be scanned by somebody who has to judge the imporance of this. This is not for advertisement of yourself but to show off why you have to be taken seriously. Like for example:
Miles Metcalfe Head of IT Research and Development Ravensbourne College of Design & Communication Chislehurst, United Kingdom http://www.rave.ac.uk/
The Pixel Corps, Guild of Digital Content Creators, 2000 members in 35 countries Producers of "Macbreak", "Macbreak Weekly", "this WEEK in MEDIA"
Carl Malamud, USA
Chief Technology Officer, Center for American Progress, Washington, D.C.
Founder of the Internet Multicasting Service, distributor of first audio programs on the Internet in 1993.
Podiobooks.com (representing 50+ authors releasing audio versions of their books under Creative Commons license)
This is something often forgotten: Think who is going to read this through. If they see a lot of links, they will not see the rest.
The recipients of the document need to judge if you are important enought to them to be taken seriously.
Think about that for a moment.
And then ask you local politician about how they see this topic. And others. :)
Let me preface this by saying that I enjoyed the weekend and would like to thank the organizers for making this happen. :)
Looking over the reports of the last days of Barcamp, I notice some things popping up more than usual
the usual topic of lack of women on such events
the amount of user interface designers and flashers
I am not a werewolf or I want to jot down a list of things to actually read out at the beginning of such events to have a consistent knowledge of the rules
and last but not least: marketers are not evil and programmers are not gods
As you may have read by now Barcamp London happened with great support through Yahoo as in being there with space - a lot of space - even though we could not have all in there who wanted to be in there. And of course those other sponsor (list lifted from Riaz)
Yahoo! UK, venue and connectivity!
eBay, Saturday lunch
Yahoo! UK, Saturday dinner + beers!
BBC.co.uk and backstage.bbc.co.uk, Sunday breakfast and Sunday lunch!
TechCrunch, drinks and snacks for the event!
Chinwag, sponsoring event t-shirts!
Belkin, power and network equipment
Oh yeah: Special greetings to the idiots who signed up, saw the long waiting list and did not show up in the end. Your place could have gone to somebody who actually wanted to go.
I did mention Yahoo especially, because it is the third time I see them as a supporter - they where great participants at Barcamp LA also and a sponsor of Blogher.
At both Barcamps, the support was not only in material things like venue or financial support, but actually people from yahoo showed up and participated.
Note: Yahoo Werewolfe players are the most evil ones if they come disguised as helpers ....
But back to this Barcamp.
Developper focus is something which was - for my taste - a bit too much. For example driven by Ben Metcalfe who "disturbed" the talking crowd to force them to do mash pits - when most of the people just where waiting to play Werewolf. ;)
It may be a good idea to call it DevBarcamp if you really want this to be programmer centric but if you don't say so, people will show up for more than just the programmer centric topics.
In this regard I would like to ask if those flash people actually counted for programming or not? *gd&r*
Again, of course, there were only few women although I found there where quite a lot. Until I started counting from memory - naa, not that many. We had a longer discussion about this and especially Ian was very keen how to make this work for women.
Without falling for the "let's get women in here just for the sake of it". To which I agree totally. We can start passing on those messages to our networks and it may even be a cool idea to add to such a Barcamp description a bit more information for example about the camping part. (This Barcamp started out with having a boys / girls room but ended up with having a snorrer / non snorring separation.)
But in general I think we someday have to draw the line. I refuse to run after women all the time just to get them to such meetings if they dont also at least voice their opinions on why they did not come or where not feeling like coming. You cant complain about the cake but eat it too.
Something that became very clear at BarCamp is that women don't want to be treated like a special case, a bit like I don't like to be treated as a special case for being lactose intolerant when I go out to dinner. This is why I am asking what it is that would make women more interested in the events and conferences. I am sure there is something that we are missing.
Could it be that we (=attending such conferences) don't care about the extra treatment but the ones who do not come do?
One for example for staying informed is upcoming.org on which I encourage you to have a look at European New Media Conferences. Or others. And please contribute and make organizers contribute to such systems - it helps get the word out and helps aggregating such information.
Back to Barcamp.
I would have liked to see more people use up the wiki to add information about what they might want to present or not, I thought that gave a good overview on other Barcamps. I also would like if people added a way to find them or get in contact with them - I said it before: I do not just want to write on a blog a comment like "hei would like to mail you" just because no contact information is available.
On the organization side it would have been clever to not send us to two closed pubs on sunday afternoon. ;) if it would not have been for the PAPER business cards, we would have been stranded. ;)
Second would be food: It makes sense to think about it before and order food which may perhaps not be as great and nice but is easy to give away afterwards to a local shelter. It may be everything eaten up, but have a number handy to call and perhaps check before what requirements are.
Food leads to sponsoring: I dont mind clever sponsoring and I dont mind the sight of a name of a company to be seen on the food table. Especially not if it leads to so nice puns like "hmm ebay sponsoring the food - second hand lunch?".
To sum it up: I enjoyed my trip to London, especially with the Geek Dinner the day before. Note to other organizer please try to think about 'outsiders' of London at such events too ;).
I met a lot of new people who I hope to stay in contact with, heard some new voices and got exposed to the thought that Flash programmers might actually be interested in Usability. That one still boggles my mind. ;)
I will be very disapoointed to miss Barcamp Berlin - which is going to be so cool - but I am busy meeting all my podcasting friends from the US in Ontario.
Hm. We will see if I can get them to play Werewolve. :)
As not all of you may be login into the website or read the blog:
Urgent Security AnnouncementOn September 6 we discovered evidence that an intruder was able to access the Second Life database through the web servers. The exploit was shut down on the afternoon of September 6 when we discovered it.
Detailed investigation over the last two days confirmed that some of the unencrypted customer information stored in the database was compromised, potentially including Second Life account names, real life names and contact information, along with encrypted account passwords and encrypted payment information.
No unencrypted credit card information is stored on the database in question. Unencrypted credit card information has not been compromised.As a precaution we have invalidated all Second Life account passwords. [...]
People asked how to stay in contact and Ben had quite a bit of work to do to find some of the participants. To make it easier for your fellow barcampers, it might be a nice idea to have a kind of overview somewhere, for example the non self explaining flickr name etc.
In case you think "bah, I have a blog, why should I?" try to look if you actually provide ways to get in contact with you on that ...
Also you might want to go through the pictures stream on flickr and name yourself to help others to identify you. :)
Please note that listing that information does not included a guaranteed contact etc, but a way to help you out with starting a contact.
About Nicole Simon
I love working with people and help them get successful, especially through the use of social software. Though I have been on the net for over a decade and have consulted SMB for years, I also understand the corporate side, as I have worked in a major corporation for 15 years.
If you need a name for what I do, I usually call myself a European New Media Specialist with a special interest in (micro) blogging, podcasting and second life. I also love to 'testdrive' products / concepts which is best described as Technology Implementation Analyst. Recently I have finished the German Twitter book and will specialize a bit in 2009 on this topic as well as building more bridges between communities.
When I do interviews (mainly pre conference podcasts I put them up here: Bloxpert so I can seperate blog / podcast talk a bit more from the stuff here.
Useful Sounds is my personal podcast, and I also have a German blog. Living in Lübeck, Germany, a European point of view comes with everything.
Why ctbk? Smooth-tongued responses are for the timid ones, and if there are no challenges, there is nothing to gain either. :)
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