lecture (lec-cher), noun, an instructive speech

I’ve participated in conferences which exemplify both ends of the spectrum and pretty much all points in-between as well and the events I get the most out of most definitely fall into the debate category rather than the lecture category.

debate (dih-beyt), noun, a discussion involving opposing viewpoints

This was very much the case earlier this year with WhereCamp EU in Berlin and it will be very much the case, and hopefully even more so, at W3G in Nottingham in just under a month’s time.

After last year’s first tentative steps, W3G is back, a little bit older, a little bit wiser and a whole lot more provocative under the banner of “Because There’s More to Geo than Just Maps and Check-Ins”

We all know that there is more to geospatial information than just ‘check-ins’. We all know that the free Web 2.0 map services offered are generally little more than ‘push-pin’ maps.

Yet the potential for the technology being developed within this environment offers so much more….and we aim to expose some of those applications. We also want to provoke and provide a way to discuss and debate some of the barriers to those applications being taken forward.

Be it open data, open APIs, or, as the recent Apple and Android “tracking-gate” showed, too open location technologies, we hope to see all this and more discussed, debated, critiqued and pored over.

But to avoid being merely a lecture, a debate has to be a two way thing and to blur the boundary between audience and between speaker.

And, as it’s an unconference, W3G needs you.

So head over to the official W3G web site and start the debate and the dialog. Suggest session topics or even start the unconference wall with a pledge to do a talk, moderate a discussion, or put together some slides.

If you’ve even been to an unconference, even one without a Geo flavour, then I hope you’ll agree that to Geo debate is far far more fun than to merely Geo lecture.

Nonetheless, on Monday of this week I found myself at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, in London’s Russell Square, at the CIPR Social Media Conference 2011, allegedly talking about something called The Smartphone Web, to just such a room full of seasoned communicators.

I say allegedly talking about The Smartphone Web, as that was the theme and title that the conference organizers asked me to opine on. But as is so often the case, when I sat down to start to write the talk, it morphed into something slightly different.

There’s been a meteoric proliferation in social media over the last few years, driven not only by increased awareness and availability of social networks but also by the increasing use of smartphones and the sensors that these devices have built into them. Whereas before, social networking was chiefly about sharing thoughts, comments, views and links, social networking now also allows the sharing of photos and videos, the sharing of location and checking-in to locations. You’ll note that I cunningly managed to work location in there, thus retreating ever so slightly to my comfort zone. And so it was that what started out as The Smartphone Web, ended up as The (Geo) (Mobile) (Smart) Social Web.

After a brief introduction and displaying my own set of social media credentials, I looked at the history of social media, of smartphones, of the sensors within these devices and of the convergence of all of these factors into the social media experience we now know and use on a daily basis.

As so many times in the past, writing this talk was an education in itself, and my initial assumptions that social networking and media was a relatively recent, post Web 2.0 bubble, phenomenon, were quickly disabused as I traced the forebears of today’s social web as far back as the late 1960′s when CompuServe was founded.

I also touched on some of the side effects of today’s social web; how social media accounts have become the single-sign-on for lots of online services, bypassing contenders such as OpenID and how you can build web presences entirely from existing social media content with a few simple lines of PHP code. How social media acts not only as a social broadcast medium but also a social conversation medium. How our own social media interactions can form a valuable aide memoire (where was that bar we went to two weeks ago?) and provide insights into our own lives.

I finished the talk with a brief look to the future; how the next billion people getting online are predicted to do so via a phone and not via a laptop or desktop computer and how social media has drawn attention to some of recent time’s tumultuous events, such as recent natural disasters and events in the Middle East.

Due to pressures of work I wasn’t able to attend the entirety of the one day conference but was lucky enough to arrive in time to see Euan Semple give a fascinating (and at times highly amusing) talk on What Wikileaks Has Taught Us About The Web. I’ve always liked reading Euan’s Twitter stream and to finally meet a social media contact face-to-face was a great way of rounding the day off.

Which brings me to Twitter. These days Twitter has all but supplanted almost every other form of back-channel communication. Not every conference venue and conference organiser likes this. I was recently at a conference which provided no network connectivity in the conference hall at all. When questioned, the excuse was that “using laptops distract from what the speaker is saying“. Ignoring the fact that 3G data dongles and smart phones are pretty much ubiquitous these days, it does make live demos and live blogging just a tad challenging. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some conferences actively encourage the Twitter back-channel, going so far as to publicise the official hashtag to be used and providing large screens running Twitterfall to provide immediate feedback to speaker and audience alike.

For the vast majority of conferences, use of Twitter is accepted and welcomed, somewhere in between the two extremes in the previous paragraph, but despite this I was a bit taken aback to be reminded in the opening proceedings to “Tweet responsibly“; judging by the instant flurry of Tweets on this topic, I wasn’t the only one. Granted, the Twitter back-channel isn’t always complimentary and can be harsh but then again, not every talk at a conference is excellent either, with barely disguised sales pitches masquerading as informed industry insight and frequent death-by-Powerpoint slides with the speaker insisting on reading out every single one of the damned bullet points.

Thankfully, the vast majority of the audience took the concept of responsible Tweeting and ignored it, providing the usual lively back-channel. Some of the audience, like myself, felt strongly enough about it to blog about it after the event. Telling an audience, most of whom have paid good money to be there (either personally or through their employer) to Tweet responsibly isn’t a good thing, smacks of a mother telling her child off (for something the child might do) and underestimates the audience’s intelligence. I think the best way to take this is to view it as well meaning but ultimately ill worded. Tweeting responsibly was a first in my experience. Hopefully it’ll be a last as well.

All in all, it’s been a geotastic day.

The variety of reasons are both personal and based on my departure from Yahoo! at the end of this week and that the Telematics conference is coincident with my first week with [redacted]; I don’t yet have a clearly articulated story with regards to [redacted] and I don’t just want to retread the Yahoo! location and place story.

However I do plan to be speaking at the Location Business Summit USA in San Jose in September and in the same month I’ll be chairing the first w3gconf in the UK. All of which provides ample scope for a modicum of geotasticness.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

There’s a booth with some strangely comfortable sofas and chairs, a purple orchid, loads of purple swag, “geoballs” and a free wifi point called yahooligans. Sitting cozily between the PayPal and Vodaphone booths, this has been the home of the Yahoo! Developer Network and Yahoo! Geo Technologies teams for the last 48 hours.

I presented on both days as part of the University Sessions track. On Thursday I talked about “Place not Space; Geo without Maps“; which was somewhat incorrect given that it featured a guest appearance by Google Earth. Using Yahoo! Placemaker, I showed how you could extract places from web content and sanitise the content with YQL. Whilst it would be great if all the web used Yahoo! web services, we need to work with the rest of the world, so I showed how you could use the long/lat metadata returned by Placemaker to drive Google Earth.

Then on Friday I talked about how “Geocoding and Geoparsing are Easy“; I may have been somewhat economic with the truth. Geocoding isn’t easy and Geoparsing is even less so. This talk showed some of the pitfalls that frustrate us and how we need to model geography in real and colloquial terms and not simply structured and formal terms. Or to put it another way “we can make the internet work better by making it understand how we speak in the real world”.

Both sessions were really well attended, with people standing at the back during the Friday talk, which is a great thing for a speaker to see. FOWA attendees are a very geo-savvy crowd who asked lots of intelligent, challenging and pretty direct questions. There’s nothing I like more than an audience that “gets” a topic.

Back at the booth we were gently but firmly mobbed during break sessions which was pleasantly surprising, given that we were on the first floor. An entirely non-statistical review of the questions we came across on the booth showed three main trends:

• Tell me about YQL and YUI - they’re really cool
• Tell me more about this “geo” stuff
• Is the wifi really this bad?

As an industry we thrive on a strange barter system based around the acquisition and donation of items of branded schwag. We continued this fine tradition with loads of “geoballs” and some much prized YDN screwdrivers. We also thrive on vast amounts of caffeine so it seemed only fair to run a competition with the prize of a coffee machine which resembles the robots that were used in the Fiat “designed by humans, built by machines” ad campaign. To win, all you had to do was guess the number of unique users that hit the Yahoo! UK network on Tuesday September 1st 2009.

Answers ranged from the hugely optimistic “a lot”, to some very precise, yet very wrong, figures, ranging from 20 thousand all the way up to an insane 2.3 billion. The real answer was 24,452,863 users and we were able to unite Raymond Tamblyn of Visa Worldwide with the coffee machine for his answer of 23 million.

And then after 2 days of no natural light, slightly crazed from too much caffeine and throats croaking from too much talking, the booth was dismantled, the purple orchid found a home and we stepped back into the fading daylight and hip shopping area of High Street Kensington and headed home for the weekend and to an internet connection that works.

Lousy wifi seems to be the hallmark of a great web event. Oh the irony.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

AGI GeoCommunity ’09 – ‘Realising the Value of Place’

September 23rd – 24th 2009, Holiday Inn, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK

True, the big names and the big players of the overall geo community are well represented; Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, ESRI, Pitney Bowes MapInfo, Ordnance Survey and I’m fortunate enough to be representing Yahoo! Geo Technologies on the second day but take a closer look. John McKerrell of mapme.at is speaking, so’s Andy Allan on OpenCycleMap, Tom Taylor is talking about neighbourhood boundaries and Terry Jones will be making us all location aware by using FluidDB, plus keynotes from Andrew Turner and from Peter Batty.

This is a staggering and diverse cross section of the entire geo-community and Steven Feldman, this year’s conference chair and Chris Osborne, from London’s #geomob, is behind the geoweb track of sessions, deserve recognition for being able to bring this all together; you can find out more at Steven’s and  Chris’s respective blogs.

It’s going to be a geo-tastic conference and I’m looking forward to seeing the usual geo-suspects as well as meeting new friends and colleagues; see you all there.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous