Will Knott

If you are looking for me tomorrow, I’ll be at the OSS Bar Camp in Kevin Street, Dublin (with my badge bag, makes me easy to spot I suppose)

While listening to Enda’s podcast of his interview with Clare FM, I realised something.

I’m old.

No, that’s not right.

I’m not young. I’m not a teenager.

This reaction wasn’t due to Teencamp Ireland, taking place in Film Base, Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin on Saturday (January 17 2009). No, I had planned to go and at least stick my head in. My reaction was from the presenter talking about teenagers and public opinion of them.

His reaction to how teenagers are “supposed to” act made me realise two thing. I haven’t done that stuff for years. Yes, I meet up with friends and hang around doing nothing, but now I require a roof, and maybe tea. And two, teenagers aren’t the problem. The generation gap is between those who think as adults and all the rules they think have to apply, and smart teenagers who take on the JFDI (Just Freaking Do It) attitude of getting stuff done.

Its not a generation gap, its an attitude gap. My shoes may be too tight, but I still dance. Badly and I need a rest afterwards, but I still dance. And I’m one of the more cautious ones. I haven’t had a brilliant idea to turn in to a new technology, or a new business to run. I was never a young technologist, despite my interest and love of all things techie. I’m only getting my head around the messy innards of running a business. I feel destined to be in the back room.

Getting things done. Done for others, but done.

Teencamp is an unconference for teenagers and technology. The notion of a BarCamp is easily understood. The focus here is on the teenagers getting together face to face about technology (I have no doubt that there will be a swapping of contact details so the conversation continue long afterwards). Its about people teaching their peers about how they do things. It’s about hanging out with others with the same interests. A normal BarCamp and a gaggle of teenagers hanging out share quite a few things.

So, can I call in? Be that embarrassing uncle. Find out if I can help… and then leave (I do want to ask the manga speaker a few questions about tracking down DVDs first).

An bhfuil cead agam dul isteach?

Will Knott

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I took a little too long with this, and with a question.

Joel Drapper of ProTwitter posed a question.

“What is twitter? How would you describe it? Because it is not just answering the question “What are you doing?”

Twitter technically is simply a means of communication. Its a giant instant message tool which is always on. You can choose to follow the messages (called tweets). Others can choose to follow your messages. There is a method to send private messages, but (unless you choose the option to only allow people you follow to see your messages) all your messages are public.

Its like holding a conversation with someone on the other side of the room by shouting to each other. Anyone can choose to listen.

I posed a different question based around how people use it. My plan was to simply collect information about twitter clients based on the observation that there were so many out there. My survey posed 4 questions.

1. How do you use Twitter (or more to the point, how do you access Twitter to post comments or to read answers)?
2. If you use an interface to read and/or post to post to twitter, (other than for mobile access) why do you use it? (Do you gain some benefit using this interface, if so, what?)
3. How many people do you follow?
4. How did you check the above figure?

A far more clinical set of questions.

But two things happened.

Firstly, TweetRush released a “by client” set of stats, where I could see some of the data I was looking for.

and secondly, While I asked some clinical “what” questions, I also recieved some non-clinical “why” answers.

I’ll go through my data analysis in a later post, but I wan to comment on the “why”s.

People communicate. Its possible that some areas of our brain evolved differently because of communications, and given our abilities to read expressions (and see faces out of random patterns) it seems clear that our desire to be with someone is something what drives us.

What does a tweet do. It (somewhat) reassures us that another person is there. A constant flow of messages via Twitter indicates that people we care (enough to follow) are still out there. Conversations aside, a tweet (or Jaiku or Pownce or Facebook / linkedIn status message) is simple a status update.

“I’m having coffee”

“The food here is terrible”

“Its wonderful here”

“I’m alive”

ping

ack

Twitter is a communications channel. Tweets are important messages. Mundane sometimes (“I’m finally home”), but important to someone (“He’s finally home; I was worried”).

In short, the importance is not the medium, or the message; but the messages themselves.

Anyway, the slides from my presentation on November 1 are included below, and I’ll talk about my findings of the statistics in my next post.

Take care,
Will Knott

Right now, freezing at the keyboard in my geansai gorm, I should be making slides and a talk for Barcamp Cork II. The talk is a HCI look at Twitter and twitter applications and interfaces (but I’m enjoying the data mining of the survey too much). However I’ve noticed something from that data.

I’ve asked people why they use particular twitter applications and interfaces.  In the process of discovering that people don’t always answer the question you ask, I’ve collected a few stories about why they use twitter.

Some use twitter for marketing purposes. Social media monitoring either for themselves or for their clients.

Some use twitter, Jaiku or other micro-blogging tools for a quick response to questions.

But most people seem to use it to stay in contact with friends. With their Tribe.

Think about it. Are you a sports fan, or a fan of a particular team in a particular sport? No one is a fan of GAA but not a team, but they are a fan or their club and county (even when their club is in a different county).They can admire another team, but they are fanatics for their own. Their tribe.

A fairly lonely sport like cycling has a community? Cyclists look to each other. Sometimes look after each other on roads when they encounter each other. Even as strangers, as their bike identifies them as being of the same tribe. Help will be offered. Tips will be swapped. A spare tube will be ‘lent’.

Going to a Barcamp, an un-conference identifies you as being of a tribe. A technical minded, or technology loving tribe. A tribe identified by their laptops, mp3 recorders and gadgets. A tribe allied with web 2.0 and a love of problem solving. Help will be offered. Tips and urls will be swapped. A spare cable will be lent.

And then we have the Jaiku versus twitter debate. Almost everyone in Jaiku is bi-textual, but there are tribes, groups, clans etc. Everybody wants to belong, be part of something bigger. Be part of a grander scheme. And one which makes person to person contacts. Everyone wants to belong, even if its to a school clique.

The older, traditional tribes; church, local neighbourhoods and work are disintegrating. So new tribes are forming.

And once a tribe is identified, it will be marketed to. (Buy Burma Shave).

take care,
Will Knott

How do you use Twitter? Click Here to take survey. I’ll be presenting the results at part of a presentation at Barcamp Cork II.

Image via CrunchBase

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• Pre-Barcamp Cork Food

Well that was fun. Head knackering fun, but fun none the less.

The Open Coffee Club BBQ took place last night. And thank you to Evert Bopp for setting up the event, getting the people in Terryglass, and supplying the food.

Actually, getting the food and the chef in one place. The meat was supplied by SulMeat.com, a Tralee based supplier is responsible for the ribs, smothered in Deborah Hadley’s own Spicendipity Two Brew BBQ sauce before cooking (so good, bones were nibbled). She also supplied the brownies (that mostly the kids found), the mix for which is also available. I’m sure we’ll find out how the Belfast co-working boys handle the cooking.

Conor O’Neill is also responsible for the first BBQ sitting during the talks.

The technical bits and talks beforehand were really good (waiting for the slide packs to become available), and I’m currently annotating the photos I took, including the competitors of the “Dragon’s Den” contest, won by the talented Daudi Kutta of Pitchside Products for his GAA design products.

The meeting people and associating online tags with faces (Do I really look like my twitter avatar?) around the glowing coals was also fun. But eventually the cold got to most of the crowd.

Now, I need more sleep,
take care,
Will Knott

I’ve gone past the Cork Marts building as it was being built, and I called in to see if I could take a few shots. What I found is a modern building which can have a double life as a concert and conference venue (working around the mart days obviously). And given the fact that they are currently setting up building-wide wi-fi broadband, it might just be a suitable future BarCamp venue.

The marts themselves are just that. Marts. Three different livestock marts have closed and combined (literally) under the one roof.

The smallest of the three arenas is the Funcheon Arena which is the new home of the Mitchelstown mart. It deals exclusively with sheep and calves.

The next largest is the Owenacurra Arena which is the replacement for the Midleton Mart. If you haven’t guessed by now, the arenas are named after the rivers that run past the original marts. And I was told what this mart dealt with, but I can’t remember now (sorry).

Before I continue, I had better mention the paintings throughout the building. They are all by Brigid Shelly who is based near Ardmore.

The final and largest arena is the Blackwater Arena, which takes over from the near-by Fermoy cattle Mart.
This Arena is interesting for a few reasons. It’s the only wheelchair accessible arena in the building, and it changes.

The rails around the show area are removable, and a stage can be build over this area, allowing the auctioneers podium to become a stage. There is also a drop down screen for projections, and naturally a (presumable) good sound system for the auctioneer or presenter to use.

There are also the Corrin and Switzer Kingston conference rooms (currently empty and, lets face it, an empty carpeted conference room is less interesting a picture than the arenas) which can seat about 400. They have the projectors and flat screens to repeat the presentation throughout the large room. These flat screens, and the ones in the rest of the building are designed to show the agenda of sales in all the arenas (or in the other rooms) as required. The idea is to prevent missing the sale you’re interested in, but it could be used for a talk agenda at an unconference.

You might be wondering about the catwalks in the sign above. Well…


… the catwalks are the metal walkways above the animal pens where the sale stock can be viewed before the sale.
I can actually see events taking place here, but I doubt the tech geeks and nerds would be let play in there. But if there is a charity date auction… Oh never mind.

The building also has a number of (disturbingly sluice-able) breakout rooms. As well as full catering and bar facilities.

Well, that’s about it, but I’ll have to call in after the building opens to the punters, and the livestock.

take care,
Will Knott

I might stick out like a tomato here, but I’d like a food camp.

And I do mean a FoodCamp, not a big food based party, but hands on classes followed by a bloggers dinner, cooked by bloggers. The germ of this idea seems to be Laurent Haug. He proposed the idea of getting Grandmas to cook a dinner for bloggers. The Grandma who loves to cook gets to take over a restaurant, kitchens and all, and cook up dinner for a hoard of hunger bloggers. I found out about this due to CBC’s Spark podcast, who are trying out the first Canadian Grandma Dinner on June 9 in Toronto.

So I asked certain food blogger, Ms. Grannymar who pointed out the obvious; she didn’t think she would be able to cook for a clutch of toyboys let alone a hoard of bloggers.

So I have a slightly different position… a FoodCamp (I’m sure that a CampBar for wine, and cocktails is possible). This is there food bloggers get together, and offer to teach the making of a single dish to a group within an hour plus clean-up (baking and roasting which take longer could be timed so that another session could take over the kitchen in the meantime). So a lot of people who love food, get to learn how to make their own good food.

It sounds odd, but try pasteurising eggs without scrambling them by working from a book.

So at the end of the day, there is a lot of food. So let’s have a bloggers dinner to get everyone around, alternatively arrange the food to be delivered to a charity (or invite a few reps from the charity in question to present and pick what they want).

The first solution to be found, is to get an idea if there is any interest?

Is it a wining idea?

And the next thing is, should this take place in a restaurant kitchen (which tend to be small) or a school or college with better catering facilities? And would or could you suggest a location?

take care,
Will Knott

“I love BarCamp. I’ll support anything with camp in it.” — Joe Drumgoole

Late in the day, so I don’t think he knew how it sounded.

Well that’s the last of the BarCamp quotes file (unless you want to send me something!)

tags : Barcamp, Barcamp Dublin, Joe Drumgoole, overheard

“The first 10 guys who hit on me also went out with my brother. Thats not homophobic, thats just creepy” — Ryan Alexander

In fairness they do look alike.

tags : Barcamp, Barcamp Dublin, Ryan Alexander, bears, overheard