Despite the legions of high fructose corn-syruped obese that I cannot seem to escape, my greatest source of annoyance when it comes to being in the US right now is that I am missing 23C3, a congress held by the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin. My friend BicycleMark is there and reporting on the event; and one of my favorite bloggers, Nicole Simon, delivers her usual great commentary on the happenings despite her somewhat irrational fear of her laptop being hacked. Not much else to say about an event I’m not attending, dammit, but from what I’m gathering 23C3 has turned out a lot less overwrought and douchy than a lot of those “unconferences” out there.

I have been disconnected from the net about 98% of the time since arriving in the US, and it looks like it’s going to be that way until New Year. I may have some surprises in store, though. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: : 23C3, chaos computer club, bicyclemark, web 2.0, barf

Click the image to watch video. (QT 7.93 MB)
Flights were canceled due to the foggy situation in the UK, but I am off tomorrow to Chicago and will be spending Christmas with old friends in St. Louis. So considering this is one of my favorite holiday songs from one of my favorite people, from a film about St. Louis; I thought this was the most indicative card I could send to all of you. Just transcode it into your favorite Festive Winter Holiday wish if you’re not a Christmas person, stay tuned for more from me in the US and have the happiest of holidays. Thanks so much for flipping to my channel this year.

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A lot of gay podcasters have been complaining of malaise, and there was a big discussion about that amongst the gay podcasters. In this show, Chef Mark and I complete the malaise conversation and attempt to pose new questions and start new discussions.

Associated Links:

John Ong

Jonas Luster (whose name I pronounced incorrectly), who made virtual worlds real for me at Le Web 3

Freevlog.org and Node 101 are how vloggers are creating more vloggers

Two most popular gay podcasts are done by Johnny McGovern (The Gay Pimp) and Perez Hilton

Towleroad Joe.My.God

The Long Tail

Pew Internet and American Life Project

Gilded Fork

Psychographics

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Technorati Tags: gay, podcast, videoblog, blog, podshow, queercasters, web 2.0, baloney, vlog, vloggers

At the request of Deirdré, I join the choir of vloggers in the “5 Things You Didn’t Know About Me”, Meme:

This took some thought, as I’m a bit of a babbling brook, but here goes:

1) I was all-state in the 100 Butterfly in my junior year of high school, but I quit afterwards due to lack of interest in that or much anything else.

2) I was returning from Amsterdam on a Singapore Airlines plane somewhere over the North Atlantic when everything went down on 9/11. We landed at Toronto’s Pearson Airport where we were on the tarmac for 4 hours, in immigration for 2 hours and I did not get in front of a television until 3:30/15:30 that afternoon. My partner was on a later Swiss flight that connected in Zürich, the plane ended up turning around over Greenland and returning to Switzerland. I didn’t get back to Chicago for two days, he didn’t get back for a week. Singapore was great to me and covered all emergency costs (and even offered a trip to Niagra Falls if we wanted!), Swiss was crap to my partner and we ended up losing 5 grand for emergency accomodations and the like. We have made a rule to never fly on different flights when traveling ever again no matter what the cost.

3) I am obsessed with airlines, air travel, and frequent flyer programs. I’m not avaition-obsessed, just obsessed with the whole environment of passenger air travel. I think it comes from loving to get from point A to point B, having strong connections to TWA’s hometown St. Louis and having an Aunt who worked for the superglamourous Braniff Airlines.

4) I detest all things automotive. I hate driving. I hate traffic. I hate cars. I didn’t get my driving license until I was 19 years old, I have only had a car for 4 of my 30 years, and I have not driven for at least two years.

5) My family history and my ancestors’ movements are greatly affected by three major historic events: the Irish Potato Famine, the Trail of Tears, and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the 1930’s.

And the ritual tagging goes to: Adam, Arthur John Ong, Miguel, and Wanda.

P.S. I just found out that this meme was started by Jeff Pulver, who has now turned this post into yet another Web 2.0 Bullshittery post because he is a douche. He’s even had this meme put on his self-promotional Wikipedia Page to garner publicity for himself and his company. Pulver is the head of Network 2, a company who is pulling videobloggers’ RSS Feeds without getting consent from producers first (Pulver calls it doing things on an “opt out” basis instead of an “opt in” basis), then obliquely trashing the content producers who don’t like this idea. Pulver and his associate Chris Brogan have been basically conducting a quiet viral marketing campaign amongst videobloggers via e-mail and on the Yahoo Videoblogging Group proferring this horseshit, and have gone about it all horribly wrong.

So as someone VERY familiar with marketing campaigns, let’s review the strategy/tactics:

1) Jeff Pulver starts “5 Things You Didn’t Know About Me” Meme and tags some buddies/vlog “idols”

2) At the same time, Chris Brogan is engaging with Chris Weagel on Evilvlog

3) At the same time, Chris Brogan is engaging with the Yahoo Videobloggers Group

4) Oh look! Brogan’s got a speaking gig he’s shilling, too!

5) Oh look! Pulver’s using the “5 Things You Didn’t Know About Me…” meme we all fell for quite quickly as a claim to fame on Wikipedia!

6) Steve Elbows Says: “If you do a google blog search for network2.tv and sort by date, there are a cluster of posts to various forums that occured on December 13th. They look like typical viral-marketing forum-spam stuff, do you think they could of been stupid enough to use this technique?”

These guys have done bad business, and have wasted an opportunity by insulting our intelligence and creating people that are openly hostile to their brand. The first thing any trained monkey of a salesperson knows is to create a relationship with your target. I don’t know Pulver or Brogan from Adam, and don’t want any of my content on their business’ site without knowing exactly who they are, what they’re up to, what their business model using my RSS feed would involve, and where the money is changing hands. Since they didn’t do that first, they can go fuck themselves. I may very well would have supported them if they had handled the little “opt in” thing, but it seems Pulver & Co. haven’t read the fine print on Creative Commons licenses and such and really only care about making money off of people who don’t know better. If they had spent their time in the right channels that they had already doing this in a far better “opt in”, full-disclosure fashion everybody could have won. There’s nothing wrong with creating a succesful enterprise. The problems come when you’re duplicitous about it. So much for that Web 2.0 principle of transparency.

Update @ 17:41 GMT Monday 18 December:

Sent to the Yahoo Videoblogging Group:
Thanks for this great discussion and your passion.

We clearly don’t have all the answers, but we’re learning as we go,
and we appreciate your feedback. For those people who are interested
in working with us directly to make it work, please stay in touch with
us.

We’re taking steps to move from opt-out to an opt-in model. We hear you.

We’re learning. We’re processing what you said. Please keep your
channels open.

Respectfully,

-Chris…

Thanks for listening. Muchly.

Technorati Tags: 5things, vlogs, vloggers, silly but why not, now I know why, Jeff Pulver, Chris Brogan, Network2, marketing, video, vlog, videoblog, videobloggers

We’ll get back to regular TGE multimedia programming in a bit, but I agree with Adam Tinworth’s sentiment concerning feckless bitchery for feckless bitchery’s sake and calling for suggestions for a hypothetical Le Web 4. In pursuit of making the bitchery found in my previous post useful, I’m creating a “living post” that I will expand throughout the day as I continue to peruse the fascinating reaction to Le Web 3.

1. Make the audience and the speakers your #1 priority. Don’t trust yourself by thinking you know what they want, but conduct deep research and inquiry into what speakers and attendees want concerning issues as large as theme and content and as small as water availability. Don’t just do a technorati search of last year’s event and try to fix those problems, but identify different types of people attending the event (blogger, VC’s, start-ups) and interview them or use web-based means to get one’s finger on the pulse of Le Web 4 attendees and speakers. Give attendees and speakers the feeling that it’s all about them.

2. Never, ever, ever center the organisation of a conference around one personality. As the day went on yesterday and the blogosphere’s Le Web 3 reaction exploded, it seemed as if Loïc Le Meur had become the Frankenstein for the blogosphere’s villagers. Despite my strong opinions regarding Le Meur’s douchebaggery, nobody deserves to be ganged up on like that. This phenonena will never change and is something even the most saintly can’t avoid. What can change is the offline behaviour. The public face of a conference should not be a human face, but an organisational face, and whomever is “in charge” must be clearly accountable to someone or a group of someones before, during and after the event.

3. Contextualize the event. As yesterday’s complaintfest dragged on, many bloggers were decrying the lack of stated intent for Le Web 3. Other than point 1 above, I think this lack of declared intent may have been the biggest reason why the afterbuzz regarding Le Web 3 went into complete meltdown. People were left with no clear idea of what the conference was about but Loïc Le Meur, who I think in the end attempted to fulfill many undeclared missions with mediocre-to-bad results instead of fulfilling a few declared missions with astounding results

4. Listen to Nicole’s suggestions regarding connectivity issues. While everyone is heaping boatloads of criticism on Le Web 3’s organisers and sponsor Orange for the connectivity disasters both on and offstage, I am willing to bet the farm over the fact that there were some bandwidth hogs playing World of Warcraft and downloading torrents that were ruining the connectivity party for both speakers and attendees. Others were innocuously running bandwidth-hungry P2P programs like Skype without realizing they were P2P, or stealth bandwidth-hungry tasks like sending photos to Flick (thanks Ian). Read Nicole’s post to get an explanation of this that is far better than any I could give.

5. Increase the tech-hungry population by adding educational/outreach events to targetted towards technophobic populations. All of the startups, VC, development, and creation of stellar technologies is for naught if we keep trading the same population of benevolently geeky users and content creators and don’t add to the food chain. It’s to the point now where I am wondering if the community needs new faces more than it needs new technologies. The general conference going population could take a hint from the videoblog crowd that already gets this and are doing something about it. It’s high time we expand the markets for everything that’s being developed by creating them ourselves.

6. Have smaller breakout sessions along with general sessions. When everything is centered around the main event, there’s always going to be people who are disinterested and drain energy from the room as a result. Serve as many people as possible by creating as diverse of a program as possible. A system similar to that used upcoming LIFT conferenece, in which people propose workshops beforehand and those with proven interest are held, would probably be best.

7. Don’t make Le Web 4 an invitation-only event. Although I hate much of the Web 2.0 puffery, I do have great respect for the notion of transparency. Perpetuation of the notion that information and connections are avilable to those who pay their way into conferences is far more valuable than any quality or crowd control. Some of the notions I outline in #5 concerning expanding markets and seeing new, unknown, and undiscovered faces apply as well. I understand the organisers may be greatly tempted to close Le Web 4 to invites-only in the face of this post-conference blogstorm, but my greatest hope here is that they show us what they’re made of by creating a better conference open to anyone willing to pay the registration fee.

Nicolas from Politicshow did a quick, off-the-cuff interview with me about the whole thing here (click on the video pane under “Vous Parlez Anglais?”)

Technorati Tags: leweb3, leweb4beta, loic le meur, sixapart, web 2.0

Poor Loïc Le Meur! He really took on too much with Le Web 3 – from speaker recruitment to organization to hosting duties – and has found himself understandably and deservedly exhausted. Le Meur was so exhausted that his first appearance on the web, amidst a firestorm of criticism, was to leave a one-line comment calling conference sponsor TechCrunch UK’s Sam Sethi an asshole. (Sethi’s response is here. He confirms that the comment is indeed from Le Meur in the comments.) I thought Le Meur was one of many self-serving, egotistical, namedropping techwhores unworthy of pity before this brouhaha, but it wasn’t until I read that not-so-pithy quote that I felt truly bad for the man. So much work goes into these events, and the look and feel of the conference spoke to Le Meur’s hours of labour. I can only imagine how he feels right now, and can completely understand why he lashed out in such an unbecoming fashion last night.

Poor Audience! After reading heaps of blog posts about this situation, I conclude that Le Meur’s fuckups have brought to the fore what is probably the most important lesson yet to be learned by technologists and/or web content providers: “Work tirelessly to find out what your audience wants and how they want it – then respectfully and seamlessly give it to them.”
So what did he and the other organizers of Le Web 3 not give them?

Value For Money. For a host of reasons, both personal and business expense budgets just aren’t as large as in Europe as they are in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. When the promises of a conference are not kept, this becomes the top issue. When the promises are kept, money becomes no object.

Ability For Technologists to Use Their Technology. The Wifi provided by sponsor Orange at this conference was unacceptable. I spent 20% of my time trying to find a worthwhile signal that worked at a deadly slow pace when it did. Presenter after presenter were embarrassed as they attempted to connect to the internet only to be given publically-disaplyed error screens. The backchannel, which brought much attention to last year’s conference, was pretty much nonexistent. The power points were at the end of every other row, with only three power points available, and many of them didn’t work. There were precious few places to sit and work outside of the main conference room, and people were sitting on the floor.

A universally-accepted, seamlessly executed “damn good reason” for not sticking to the published program and shortening the presentations of scheduled speakers that people came to see. Shimon Peres’ presentation was a damn good reason. The man is a Nobel Prize winner, a former head of state, and his speech was well-received by most. Turning Le Web 3 into a forum for French presidential candidates in a conference attended by nationals of 38 countries was not a damn good reason. Having the candidates speak only French in a conference otherwise conducted entirely in English, and having real-time headset translation for the candidate for which you have openly declared support was not a damn good reason. The move was not a “risk”, as Le Meur characterised the move in the waning moments of the conference. The move was transparently self-absorbed, uneven, and rather unintuitive.

A feeling of being valued and heard. Don’t tell your audience how to act. If a speaker warrants laptops being closed, then it will happen naturally. Don’t tell them how to react. If a speaker warrants a standing ovation, then the audience will give the standing ovation naturally. If you secure what you consider a high-profile speaker for your conference, don’t block the audience’s view with like scenes like this. If there’s even the slightest chance the audience is going to be searched and asked for identification, be sure to bust your ass to let them know far in advance. But most of all, don’t stack the speaker list with your friends and people that YOU find important, stack them with people your audience finds important.

Bottom line, I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to let one person have so much control over so much of a conference as Le Meur did. To whom was he accountable? Was he bouncing his ideas off of anyone, or was he relying on his legion of yes men that populate his blog comments with lemmingdom? We’ll never know, of course, but I strongly advise myself and others to think twice about attending a conference over which one person has so much control.

Poor France and Europe! I really wish I could say otherwise, as there is such a resounding need for decentralization when it comes to all things tech. Nevertheless, Le Web 3 presented a massive opportunity that has turned into an embarrassment not only for Le Meur personally but for France and Europe as well. Le Web 3 did nothing to obliterate the French reputation for self-serving disorganization and the use of French exceptionalism to the continue the nasty French cultural habit of avoiding personal responsibility for mistakes and unhappiness. I echo the constructive sentiments of many bloggers throughout Europe – let’s learn the lessons of this one and create a conference in Europe that’s really worth going to.

UPDATE:

The plot thickens. Loïc Le Meur has emerged to say this, and it seems that Techcrunch has fired Sam Sethi or asked him to resign (or somewhere in between):

1. This comment is true and I apologize for it. I will post more on my blog later, take the insult as an exhausted organizer after a few crazy weeks. I was only referring to your post in the context of Techcrunch helping us since day one on this event, not to your opinion. Basically I would have not reacted if it would have been on your personal blog, I felt really weird to see it on an official Techcrunch blog. I should not have commented that.This being said I note that you do not consider email as private communication which I find surprising.

[tags]leweb3, loic, le meur, france, europe, technology, blogs, bloggers, techcrunch

…talking about Le Web 3 (or Le Web Twat, as we called it), why sweet tea makes people’s backs hurt and much, much more. Listen here.

I’m doing one last pose on Le Web 3 in a little bit, then we’ll get back to regular programming.

Technorati Tags: lebwe3, yeast, radio, madge, weinstein

…read Nicole Simon’s post about it. She says it far better than I can in my present rage.

Technorati Tags: leweb3, rude, mal, éléve, nicole, simon, Loic, Le Meur, Sarkozy, UMP, Web 2.0, Paris

Much more meta than usual, but I just wanted to let you know I will be posting a video later than usual today because I am at LeWeb3, which I will be podcasting about tomorrow. Venue is pretty. The rest…well…notsomuch. Putting it succintly, it’s kinda diluted and ass-kissy. Nobody is really asking serious and challenging questions, and it’s the Loïc Le Meur show for sure. (look him up)

Technorati Tags: leweb3, food, good, lighting, good, content, mediocre, loic, le meur, france, embarassment

 GEP 31: No Silos? [13:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In honor of Karmabanque’s Max & Stacy having their first program, “Death of the Dollar” aired on Al-Jazeera English (click on this text for details on online viewing). Discussion on how rigid boundaries between academic disciplines screws humanity.

Saturncast

Trannywreck

Bicyclemark

Wanda Wisdom

Archerradio

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Technorati Tags: karmabanque, max, keiser, al jazeera english, podcasting, gay, queer, malaise