Late, disconnected, reawoken, a little confused.

But here’s something that’s been rattling around my head for a while, and it needs to get out.

Contemporary songs which capture the essence of a particular city. I have a burning need to compile lists of such things.

So let’s start with the easy ones… (more…)

Excuse me for a moment while I indulge in a bit of stating the obvious, but I’ve just had one of those moments where I stand back, look at stuff, and say “oh. wow.”

We’ve come a long way on the internet in the past 2 years. So far so fast, in fact, that when you’re living in the centre of it all and incrementally immersing yourself in it, it becomes easy to forget where you came from.

I was thinking along these lines because I was just tinkering with my account on Upcoming.org, adding a new event to the database and subscribing to some others. Having added the event in question, I linked in a freely-available mp3 by one of the bands. That done, I finally got around to adding the feed of my events on upcoming.org to my iCal calendar on my mac. And then I tagged some Flickr photos from Hack Day so that they show up in the event’s entry on upcoming.org…

In less than 10 minutes, I’d told the world about an imminent concert, filled my personal, portable calendar with events which I’ll want to attend, and shown people another angle of an event which happened last week. And none of this required any complex scripts, hours of screen-scraping or data-munging. It was all accomplished with a couple of clicks and a little bit of typing.

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I’ve been thinking a bit about geek conferences since “The Future of Web Apps” took place in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, a couple of interesting conversational threads that it inspired.

The first was best summarised by Chris Messina in his piece “The Future of White Boy clubs” (executive summary: “far too many speakers and attendees at these things are white men; how do we change that?”).

The second cropped up in multiple conversations. For a lot of attendees FoWA was an odd conference, because they’d seen most of the speakers giving similar talks before, usually some time in the past 12 months. This isn’t a criticism of FoWA as such - what they built, very successfully, was a cheap, quick and engaging “Best Web Conference Speeches in the world… Ever!” album.

I personally found it very rewarding, but I’m a latecomer to the conference scene, and haven’t done the usual round of SXSW Interactive, Etech, OsCon, FooCamp/BarCamp, etcetera.

One conclusion you could draw from this is that a lot of ‘alpha geeks’ attend too many conferences; that there are only so many things to talk about. But conferences are hugely useful in providing ‘face time’ with creative people from all over the world, and every occasion provides opportunities for new connections and conversations. Maybe the problem isn’t the number of conferences, but the fact that they’re all focussed around listening to clever people talk about… stuff.

There might be a solution to all this, though, and I think I saw it pioneered this weekend on the main Yahoo! campus.

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