Does Podcamp Ireland want to be a SocialMediaCamp?

Loudspeaker?
Photo owned by Bohman (cc)

I love the energy of PodCamp Ireland. I love the people that flock to it. And I love the way it’s growing year on year, but I’m kind of confused about where it’s going. For example, the title tag-line on the site reads “Podcamp Ireland: Social Media Strategies, Social Networking, Online Marketing”. I find it strange that the word ‘podcast’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the title. Strangeness. I thought that this was a unconference about podcasting.

I understand that it’s interesting to show the importance of podcasting in the enterprise, but the spirit of the camp seems to be more about marketing and Social Media from reading the blog and listening to the podcast. Has the message superceded the media? I don’t believe it should, do you? And if it has, why is the camp keeping the moniker of PodCamp when it really wants to grow up and be a SocialMediaCamp? I think the message and the branding is a little confusing.

I’m skeptical about a lot of Social Media experts. Many of them that call themselves experts are the guys that are looking for bob-a-job gigs, while the real rockstars are actively using the technology as part of the daily toolset. We’ve come to a point where the term ‘Social Media’ almost equates to a black mark. So if PodCamp becomes SocialMediaCamp, what new things could the organisers bring to the table? A lot of the interesting and insightful commentary I read comes from the UK and US, isn’t the pool we have too small at present? I’m sure I’m not the only one that doesn’t want to hear tired, recycled commentary of how microblogging will solve the energy crisis or cure AIDs.

I don’t want this post to sound like I’m criticising the PodCamp Ireland team. They do trojan work every year. I don’t think I’ve seen such active work dedicated to podcasting, blogging and microblogging a message out into the ether. A testament to this, is the wide and varied group of attendees that go to PodCamp. They put on a great show. Notable amongst the team is Ken, who has worked very hard to grow PodCamp in Kilkenny. I’m just asking a question about where PodCamp is going.

So, where should PodCamp Ireland be moving? Is it really a SocialMediaCamp? Can Ireland even host a SocialMediaCamp given the lack of real Social Media expertise in Ireland? And how commercial should a SocialMediaCamp be?

August 20th, 2008 at 4:58 pm • 1 Comment • Filed in Geekery


O2 apologises

Alright, you must almost as tired of this whole O2 saga as I am blogging about it. Got a reply on my quibbles from O2. I have to say that it’s nice to get a response from someone that has a clue and it’s a pity I have to hit so many without one, to find them.

The support shortcode 1909 works from any mobile or landline, but this is unclear on the site. They are rectifying this. On my missing PIN/PUK, they don’t supply them with the unit as it’s insecure. Fine, but I didn’t get any mail (like I was supposed to) with the information I needed. On my activation issues, they are looking into it deeper.

An apology on this mistreatment at the O2 Experience store on Grafton Street and an assurance that it won’t happen again is all very nice, but the proof will be in the pudding. Angry customers and potential customers will be vocal about mistreatment. Retail staff treating customers like lepers won’t be stomached. I think O2 should be welcoming this. Aren’t we making them a better company?

O2, if you are reading this check out these posts by John, Damien and Pat. Get in touch with them. They have had very disappointing experiences with your retail arm and would like to give valuable feedback on it.

Update: And gave me one month for free as a gesture. Thanks O2. If anything, this incident has taught me that bad customer service needs to be repaid with noise and foot stamping. If I get bad service from anyone (yes, O2 as well) I’ll be making my voice heard.

August 20th, 2008 at 2:26 pm • Add Comment • Filed in Geekery


Red Links 20/08/08

A reminder that you still have two days to enter my book voucher competition. I will take Twitter entries too, as technically it’s a microblog.

Help out Raptureponies, did Ken Hammond have a moustache?

A nice review of Taste Kildare by Deborah.

Cathal spots Comreg posting the licensing details for the emergency services spectrum.

Dublin Fringe Festival is kicking off September 6th. Check it out.

Those Wheelers from Return to Oz are just around the corner.

Love this photo on the Flickr blog.

Little Gordon. Via AdFreak.

August 20th, 2008 at 10:32 am • 1 Comment • Filed in Red Links


Reason #231484 I love Twitter

Live traffic updates. There’s a truck on fire in Ballsbridge this morning, Eske grabs some fantastic photos and posts them to Twitter.

August 20th, 2008 at 7:59 am • 2 Comments • Filed in Geekery


Girl Geek Eats

Girl Geek Dinner

Girl Geek Dinner season is back! This time it’s bilocational. A Dublin dinner is organised for August 26th in Herbstreet, while Proby’s Bistro of Cork will host one on September 7th.

The tables are filling fast, why not check out the site and see if you’d like to pop along to either of the dinners?

August 19th, 2008 at 12:54 pm • 2 Comments • Filed in Geekery


Curse of the Little Red Hen

Ursula and Mimma
Photo owned by BruceTurner (cc)

When in the belly of mayhem and project managing a hundred things at the same time, my mother likes to call herself “the Little Red Hen”. It’s the “fuck you, I’ll do it myself” trigger she sometimes pulls.

Now I sometimes do the same thing and I know people that do it too. Stubborness, pride and lots of other deep feelings are wrapped up in the Little Red Hen attitude.

How can we a) learn when to ask for help and b) know when to offer it? Are you a Little Red Hen?

August 19th, 2008 at 11:43 am • 1 Comment • Filed in Brainstrobing


CreativeCamp Belfast

The CreativeCamp Belfast site went live this morning for their event on September 6th at Blick Shared Studios. CreativeCamp Belfast is a unconference in the vein of March’s highly successfully CreativeCamp Kilkenny.

CreativeCamp Belfast is focussing on new media, design, photography, web and mobile. Basically, any medium that creative folk hover about. The format is just like a BarCamp, so you can signup to speak on a topic that you fancy.

It’s shaping up to be a nice event, with some great photographers already signed up. Congrats to Andy for all his hard work and best of luck on the day.

August 19th, 2008 at 11:02 am • 1 Comment • Filed in Geekery


Meteor’s magical €60 roaming charge

Meteor wanted Terry to pay €720 in roaming for a year. €60 a month direct debit, just for the roaming switch to be pushed on a Pay As You Go account. It is a fucking disgrace.

Just last week Meteor wanted my housemate, a new Bill Pay customer, to pay €60 as security in her first month, so that she could roam while away in Sweden. Meteor told her that they don’t enable roaming on new accounts until after the second bill. And that if she wanted to pay the €60 security, it would not be refunded until the second bill.

Smells of rank mistrust of customers. If new and Pay As You Go customers are trusted to pay charges incurred nationally, is it not discriminatory to blacken them with a cloud of mistrust when they roam? How about the revolutionary idea of charging customers an eat-as-they-go menu?

Do Meteor have trust issues? And isn’t it weird how the amount in both cases is that round figure of €60? Coincidence? Do other mobile operators do this?

August 19th, 2008 at 9:17 am • 5 Comments • Filed in Geekery


Muxtape on life support?

Muxtape Closed

Sad to see that Muxtape has temporarily closed pending RIAA problems. Blurb from the blog:

No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.

Beta users of Muxtape For Bands: you are unaffected by this outage.

But how about all the brilliant playlists on there? I wonder will we ever see them. Muxtape did the whole Mahalo thing for music, in the best way. Human-powered playlists. Come back soon, Muxtape.

August 19th, 2008 at 7:58 am • Add Comment • Filed in Geekery


Red Links 19/08/08

Gotta love the standard of US geography education. Via Sinéad.

Sabrina has the juicy topic of ‘How to Market Your Website or Blog (Without Making the Internet Hate You.’ to speak on during PodCamp Ireland. Have any observations or hard-won experiences on this yourself?

I’m not a PR-head but I love this post on supposed death of PR. It’s an alarm bell. Wanna add something, but every good base is covered.

This is begging to be a t-shirt. Or maybe a tattoo.

WTF, T4 gone to pot already? McG hands out The Road to motivate T4 cast. What no Mad Max 2 3: Beyond the Thunderdome DVDs? If that’s the only motivating factor then T4 will bomb. T4 can haz isolation?

Swimming nerds get popular. Only after eight golds, mind.

Bloody Empire. They want our wimun and children, starting in the Bay Area.

August 19th, 2008 at 5:34 am • 1 Comment • Filed in Red Links


Ripoff is a rose by any other name

So, we’re had umpteen cases of newspapers picking up blog bits and pieces and using them without attribution, but don’t you find it annoying when blogs reprint the entire text of a piece without linking back or acknowledging the original source? You can be damn sure if they were reprinting a blog post, that a fuckoff flameware would start. But how about when newspaper articles are reprinted? Are newspapers supposed to somehow swallow it?

Case in point, the Soapbox Ireland blog. Why on earth does this blog exist? Who is reading it? Where is the honesty? Original. Reprinted post. It goes on and on and on. There’s a whole raft of newspapers that have had their articles stolen.

Reprinting the * entire text * of articles is wholly dishonest. It’s equivalent to sawing open the skulls of journos and scooping out their brain juice. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’m kind of disappointed in planet Ireland blogging that this blog hasn’t been stamped on already? Is stealing the intellectual property of pieces okay when it’s the press? Even mere rags?

August 19th, 2008 at 12:34 am • 4 Comments • Filed in Blogging


Scenes from a post-photowalk pub

So the Moo cards hit the table last Saturday in the Porterhouse after the photowalk, and I couldn’t stop thinking about this scene throughout. Of course, Eco Moos trump bone cards.

August 18th, 2008 at 11:39 pm • 1 Comment • Filed in Design, Geekery


Ireland gets Live Mesh Tech Preview

I don’t usually do Microsoft tech posts, but there’s some interesting news on Live Mesh today with its technical preview hitting Ireland. Just to explain, Live Mesh is a Microsoft service that synchronises information across your PCs and laptops - kinda like a vault for data sitting on your devices. So you can sync files from laptop at work up to Live Mesh, where they are stored safely and then access them at home on your PC in the evening.

Ireland, India and Canada are today joining the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand in the Live Mesh technical preview club. This means that you won’t have to join a waitlist to mess with Live Mesh and are good to go. No excuses for not playing with it, right? You can signup on the Live Mesh site.

There are bucketloads of resources on the web for Live Mesh, but here are a few I like:

Thanks to Martha for the heads up!

August 18th, 2008 at 5:01 pm • Add Comment • Filed in Geekery


Finetuning your design with Fine Tuna

Photobucket

It’s a little under a week since the Tuesday Push, but I really want to blog about Spoiltchild’s web baby, image feedback site Fine Tuna. Fine Tuna is a simple way to share images on your computer or on the web and solicit feedback on that image.

For example, I have a snap I took last Saturday. Suppose I wanted to get one of the photoblogging rockstars like Red Mum or Gingerpixel to give me advice, I could upload that snap to Fine Tuna and send them a link using the Fine Tuna site. I would then wait nervously as they grade my efforts and dole out sound advice. Feedback is registered on the image using Post-It notes-style comment bubbles, highlighted regions and underlining. Intuitive controls that any email user can easily manage.

Fine Tuna is beautifully designed too, as you’d expect coming from the Spoiltchild design stable. Very cute and useful, give it a go and see if works for you.

August 18th, 2008 at 1:21 pm • 3 Comments • Filed in Geekery


Foodie Qualms

We all have our personal qualms, don’t we? Some of us can’t sit in rooms with open doors and others find even numbers just plain wrong. For me, I’ve got some foodie issues. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

What are your foodie qualms? C’mon we all have them!

August 18th, 2008 at 11:07 am • 12 Comments • Filed in Life


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