Meh
i for one think this is brilliant. we really need the ability to capure “meh” and “dislike” as well as “like” on the social web. jus looking at the number “likes” versus number of hits to an article is not enuf, imho. actual numbers provides a deeper understanding of your demographic and reader base.
besides, sometimes “meh” or “dislike” or “hate” “this-is-just-dumb” says a lot more then just walking away.
also more and more groups are now cropping on facebook with titles like “i really hate XYZ” and it’s membership base growing by people “LIKING” it …
instead, i feel/think, if we just had the ability to dislike something and just share that dislike instead of liking a negative statement user engagement would be easier
contemplating a move from wordpress to posterous
WhereCampEU 2010 – an organisers tale
12th and 13th of March saw around 180 Geo Enthusiasts, Developers, Geeks, Hobbyists etc attend the first ever edition of WhereCampEU. I have debated not doing this post because many other have done WhereCampEU posts. A couple of the good one’s are listed here
- Blog What I Made » First WhereCampEU – Definite Success
- WhereCamp EU – The Geo Unconference Experience for 180 People | Gary’s Bloggage
After reading them all I felt, as one of the organisers, I wanted to talk about the organising experience. What it took to put this event together.
Let’s first take a look at what a Where Camp is about. It is based on a model made popular by BarCamps, which is at BarCamp 8 here in London. This means that it’s NOT a conference, rather a un-conference which is free to attend and during which anyone can speak or present or run a session or many. The schedule is left blank and on each day of the conference any of the attendees can announce their talk by putting it on The Wall.
Yup you guessed it. The largest part of organising a conference is taken care of by your attendees themselves. What’s left you ask? Here is a small list
- Venue
- Date
- Sponsors
- Advertising/Marketing the event
- Attracting the audience
- Sponsors
I list sponsors twice in the above list because without them events like this one are NOT possible. Remember that this event is run as a FREE event (as in ZERO DOLLARS entrance, although travel and accommodation is their own). I learned, very quickly during the early organisation meetings, that a large part of the initial effort would need two things. People who are well connected in the city the event is being run in and/or people who are very very good at making cold calls. I was hoping to be in the later category as I have only been in London a few years and do not really have great contacts to be able to get venue sponsors etc. The cold calling was quite an experience but in the end the Friday evening beer venue turned out to be better then I had hoped for and we all had a great time drinking away beers from a great sponsor.
During the camp itself there wasn’t the main tasks were to liase with the venues, herd all the sheep (I mean the attendees) around 
, ensures the sessions are running to time, ensure plenty of Q&A time being allowed for in each session etc etc. As a result, you as an organiser, do get to enjoy the camp just as much as all the other people.
By the end of Day two I was completely and totally fried. My head was buzzing with all the content from the camp, all the org details and general Geo Goodness. I can safely say that organising this camp has been one of the highlights of my career so far. I am really looking forward to doing it all again one day, but first it’s over to you. Yes YOU! One of our aims in bringing WhereCamp to the EU was that it would spread across Europe. The first one was organised in London by virtue of us being based in London but we are really really hoping that one of the many geo folk out there take it upon themselves to lead the community in the next WhereCampEU. The WhereCampEU Wiki has a section in it for you to put your name down and start thinking about the next camp. We would be glad to help you get started!
Google Agrees: IE6 Must Die
Kudos! Wondering if i can leverage this somehow to influence my current employer.
much ado about flash
there has always been lots and lots of noise about the iPhone (and now the iPad) not supporting flash. i have always wondered why as i always tend navigate away from sites that use flash to one’s that have a html interface. today i read an article on mashable titled : Adobe Calls Out Apple for Lack of Flash on iPad
my thoughts :
i can see why adobe, who own flash and hence vested interest, is making such noise. but i think the time has come to think differently.
like YouTube and Vimieo, we have to start serving video on the web using HTML5 and bring forward the adoption of HTML5 compliant browsers. it’s time for change. it’s time for leadership. let’s walk our users away from IE and towards other mordern browsers.
question is : will those that matter, the giants of the web world, those that have the mindshare and the attention of their users, show leadership ?
an update
This is a long overdue post. I can’t believe I have not posted here in 6 months. During this time Expedia has kept me well truly under the pump. We have been hard at work migrating components of our site onto a new application which runs on a shiny SOA stack.
Here are some links of a few things I have worked on during this time @ Expedia
- Hotels Travelguides : http://bit.ly/6jQHt6
- Hotels Geo Sitemap : http://bit.ly/8Q0o4O
- Flights To : http://bit.ly/67KiRM
Outside work I have been busy with travel which was highlighted by our September trip where we spent the entire month in trains and on ferries as we journeyed from London through France, Italy, Greece, Egypt and then back to London.
I am also involved in organising the first ever edition of WhereCampEU : http://wherecamp.eu.
The new year brings with it some new challenges and I am hoping I will be able to devote more time to the blog this year. Some immediate topics I want to blog about are URLs, design patterns like PRG etc.
Happy New Year!
recent applications on dock
Have you ever wanted recently launched applications in your dock like next to the other spring loaded folders like Documents and Downloads. Here’s how to do it :
Launch Terminal and paste the following 2 commands one at a time
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others \
-array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
killall Dock
have fun!
fowa itinerary
I am definitely heading to FOWA this year and I wanted to list the workshops I am attending here.
- How to build Facebook Connect + openID into your site ?
- How to build a Web App from A – Z ?
The full list of workshops can be found here. Ping me if you are attending and want to catch up for a beer after the workshops or at the FOWA Party.
