Last June I started Dopplring, sharing my trips abroad and around the UK with those friends who were lucky enough to be on the Beta version. Today, in Paris at LeWeb3, Matt is launching Dopplr for all, so I'd like to extend an invitation to connect with me and see whether any of our trips or my trips to your hometwon coincide.
It's of particular interest if my American and Canadian pals want to connect while I'm in North America this coming year. I'll be there for almost two months out of 2008, presenting in Florida, South Carolina, Boston and Calgary, sitting in on NECC for the first time in Texas, making a film in Hollywood (I can't believe we're actually going to do this one) and having some holiday (or is it vacation?) in New York.
Since going self-employed earlier this year I've been able to take advantage of far more opportunities to travel than previously, most of them coming to fruition in 2008. It means that my principal and public service employer, Learning and Teaching Scotland, need only foot minimal expenses and I pay for the rest, thanks to the generous support of those who invite me to consult or talk in their 'hood.
It means that, over the next year, there's more than a serendipitous chance that I'll be near you, so take a look at my trips once you've signed up and get in touch if you have a sofa/spare bed/bath to spare.
Roo's been great at posting the audio and some visuals from last week's panel session where I moderated on how organisations could and should harness the 'Facebook generation'. He had quite possibly the best quote of the week: "World of Warcraft is the new golf", courtesy of Joi Ito.
You can see and hear Roo's excellent presentation on virtual worlds and how he and others have been using them at IBM, listen to my 20-minute rant on how we should harness the Bebo Boomers in our organisations instead of having them make the coffee and Mary Ellen gives a wonderful overview of the importance of playing instead of training (her slides are here). It's worth tuning in, too, to the panel Q&A that had been conducted both on Twitter, the blog and F2F.
Hillside Special School teacher David Noble is one of my favourite listens each week, Booruch being an educational professional development podcast you just can't afford to miss. Even if, like me, you're a few weeks out of date by the time you find a train journey to catch up.
Booruch's Education Podcast Reflections No. 46 highlights some of the new developments at Learning and Teaching Scotland, in Connected Live, the online side-serving of award-winning Connected Magazine. Interestingly, David had found our old YouTube clips before the print magazine that been sent out with a DVDRom on the front cover last summer.
Good news is, this is what we call a transition period (i.e. just playing about). We now have a burgeoning Blip.TV channel, which is hopefully somewhat more accessible than YouTube and whose latest videos get plenty of comments. We still need to iron a few glitches out before anyone will be prepared to make this a mainstream, marketed, higher profile project, but we also need more talented bloggers to share their posts, their thoughts and takes on the world of the classroom. Send your (virtual) postcards to me...
As David points out, the video revolution has taken hold at LTS, with Learning about Learning and Journey To Excellence featuring some world class speakers and thought-leaders speaking - for free - about their thoughts on where we could go.
It's not quite YouTube, but using our own LTS flash video player. Hopefully, given that our content is likely to be relevant to educationalists, any LTS video player video will be free to access within school. The flash player still needs some development to make it embeddable in your blogs but at least it's viewable, providing fly-on-the-wall potential for watching other professionals at work. Soon, I hope to be able to add videos to our Connected Live podcast feed.
I guess one of the things that's not exactly pushing the embeddability of the LTS Video Player for your blogs and websites is that, with the BlipTV channel, we've seen relatively few embeds elsewhere on the web. I wonder why that is? Is the content just not of interest to other bloggers?
What kind of video is most useful to people, though? Are we getting it (almost) right? I'm still keen on keeping video really short, really punchy, offering access to people and objects most of us just can't get on a regular basis. Should we carry on down this route, or just concentrate on more text blogging and website content?
Wikia is a separate organisation from Wikimedia, concentrating on how the conversations around content can help change the future of our web searches.
I heard about it this time last year and it didn't make much sense - too early, not enough there to see why it works. I wonder if, after hearing the boss speaking about it this time around, our joint examinations of Wikia this week might prove more fruitful.
Search results are already dominated by content from conversations: blogs, Flickr images, forums and, of course, Wikepedia. The problem is the sheer quantity of content. On a search for the Muppets, Wikipedia returns 300 pages.
If you're a die-hard fan of the Muppets, though, where is the best place to go? On Wikia, we can see 15,271 articles about the Muppets, created under a framework of fans in a separate "Muppet Wiki". Its Muppet fan founder says: "This is just the beginning". In World of Warcraft, the game's creators simply don't have the manpower and expertise to document the game, so under the framework of fans in Wikia they have found a way to keep things up-to-date.
It differs from Wikipedia in the human element that has been added: a social network. To take part you have to create a Facebook-like or LinkedIn-like profile, where other users assign you trust and see whether you really are a spammer or just occasionally wrong in your edits. This, in turn, helps search become more viable, helping to push the most well-written, most admired content to the fore, not through algorithms so much as through human beings.
The Wikipedia Academies, set up in Africa and India and documented in a forthcoming Wikipedia film The Truth in Numbers, reveal some of the reasons behind the success of Wikipedia.
There are 280m speakers of Hindi yet only around 14,000 articles written in the language on Wikipedia. On a trip to an Indian slum, where parents have to create their own schools in the absence of any government services, Jimmy had thought perhaps it would be useful for more articles to be published in the local language, Hindi. However, the parents, who pay handsomely and go through hardship to send their children there, are desperate for their children to learn English, as this is the way out of the slum.
On the other hand, the 'father' of the Swahili version of Wikipedia saw it as an opportunity to start documenting the oral history of his country and culture. Until that point stories were deemed not to "be true" unless they were written down. He was able to hand that power to the people by kicking off the home-language Wikipedia.
And although the net is exploding, it remains a huge challenge to get the most basic connections into areas like this, and the challenge of hardware, poverty and connectivity remain the basics if we are ever to achieve freedom of information to all.
This is why Jimmy has travelled to these places, trying to find nodes, or 'fathers' and 'mothers', who can work day in and day out to create content, build community, take ownership of their pages. These five or ten people then go out, thinking about their own connections to find nodes, and help build expertise in editing and managing Wikipedia, and achieving something for the good of everyone in their communities.
Who would the potential 'mothers' or 'fathers' in your community be? Could you set up an 'Academy' to get these nodes working for the good of the community?
Related posts: The Red Cross of Information
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