Accept no substitutes

At BarCampRDU

We’re off to a great start! Plenty of people here — over the 150 but just slightly so the spaces work well. T-shirts given out and mostly good sizes. Needed more XXLs than we guessed. Bagels on the Hill did a great job of getting up fed. The coffee makers ran into a snag, but quickly rebounded by being very resourceful.
Having brief descriptions of the sessions by the leaders was really a great idea and put people in a place to sign up readily for their sessions. That’s working very smoothly.

Nice write on of BarCampRDU on page 2 of the NandO Business Section this morning.

Started out going to the GWT session led by Ryan Cox who works at NetApp. On the Google Web Toolkit. Nice developer oriented talk with good interaction. (filled room of maybe 35 – 45). Since my brain has solidified and can’t take in new developer ideas without actually being a developers, I did the two feet thing and headed over to —

Reputation on line lead by Terrell Russell of claimid.com – this was a rousing discussion between/among about a dozen people. We wandered in the best ways over a lot of territory including identity, reputation, eBay, Amazon, of course claimid. I pitched a few books and authors — Steven Nock’s Costs of Privacy: Surveillance and Reputation in America>, Nan Lin’s Social Capital:A Theory of Social Structure and Action, Ronald Burt’s Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition, and Mark Granovetter‘s “Strength of Weak Ties” (restated here for those who wanted to write them down).

Next session — Mugshot and design-thinking – Define, Research Ideate, Prototype, Choose, Implement, Learn (DRIPCIL). More of a talk about how Mugshot.org was created, implemented and tuned. From Design thinking see DRIPCIL to a somewhat detailed talk about many of the ideas and processing specific to mugshot.org. (about 30 folks here)

Great lunch from Neomode Deli in Raleigh coordinated by Ryan Daigle and sponsored by rPath. Good conversations all around.

Tara Hunt and Chris Messina introduce us to Mozes.com an SMS listserv or as they call it “Flash organizing site.” Really it’s listserv for SMS more or less. Very nice and very easy to use.

On to Fred’s Social Networking Sites. Good discussions here. Hard for me to do an Ethan Z level of blogging this session tho. Possibly 2/3rds of the attendees are here. Talk of core values as essential. Fred pushes for a more complex mathematics than Reed’s Law states (as Reed is mostly binary — or entirely binary).
Fearless group prediction: Flickr will last because of strong core values and lots of data while MySpace could be killed quickly by a new competitor. Quality of connections is important. Flickr offers opportunity to move thanks to opening their API. Speaks in favor of MySpace and its ability to change to maintain share.
Are MySpace and FaceBook the same? No. But why? Motivations are often different. FaceBook is gated so that you must be part of an existing network such as those that have a UNC.EDU mail address. 95% of FaceBook users logon at least twice a day.
Fred on Situational Relevance. Going to college causes reforming of social networks in a new context. Lots of college students first join FaceBook in the summer before coming to school. They want to explore their new world in advance of going there.
Older folks in 30s say don’t need FaceBook in the same way. People use social networks to explore their world for their own needs.
MySpace is open to all so that it can be used for a number of uses based on content. LinkedIn doesn’t get used daily, but do people need daily interaction. Fred talks about how LinkedIn and Friendster tweeked their sites after bottoming out and sent their access back up. How? By adding content that their folks wanted. In LinkedIn they made it much easier to connect. That worked for me. I had left LinkedIn idle for a long time. Then suddenly I got a lot of link requests and I went back and updated my profile and accepted friends etc.
Craig’s List gets props as social network for serving the needs of older (than college) people.
Discussion of gated (ala FaceBook) v open (ala CraigsList). How would you make sure that someone is actually in a bounded network? Send them a letter?

At WillR‘s social activism/Kirk Ross’ Journalism futures session. About 25+ people. WillR is more interested in hyperlocalism than national activisms. What does tech add to the equation? Bit of digital divide added to the conversation. Is tech at a local level useful? Most folks have experienced positive effect of neighborhood lists and web sites. How to engage citizens? Who subscribes to the WashPost RSS feeds on their congress criter’s votes? No one.
Someone says they have a company that is creating a site to provide like services with authentication but it will have some anonymity.
Fiona talks about OrangePolitics.org a little and about how to cite and how to verify etc. GeorgeE talks about his experiences on OP etc also about the difference of filters and summaries and commentaries and full tapes/text.
Greg. All about access and personal use but also using the tools together in a wikiworld to create a game plan. Bret and WillR about long tail. A bit about agenda setting and about framing. Trust transativity discussed. Jacob says need votebook aggregators that combine say Sierra Club ratings and Christian Coallition rating.
TomZ profiles of contributors. Self and citizen created.
How to reach out to general public and give general filtering? Raleighing.com guy talks about his site and what they do to make local political issues cool.

1 Comment

  1. jjb

    Looks like a great conference. I wish I could have made it down.

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