Traveling Geeks

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Ubergizmo is Going to Paris with the Traveling Geeks

I (Eliane) landed in Paris yesterday, and I will be attending LeWeb next week as part of the “Traveling Geeks“, a group of tech bloggers and entrepreneurs, coming from the USA (mostly from the Silicon Valley), South Africa and Europe.

I have worked quite a lot to put this blogger tour together with Renee Blodgett, Traveling Geeks co-founder , Phil Jeudy, co-organizer, and Sky Schuyler, CTO. The Traveling Geeks include:  Beth Blecherman, Renee Blodgett, Matthew Buckland, Amanda Coolong, Kim-Mai Cutler, Cyrille de Lasteyrie, Olivier Ezratty, Eliane Fiolet, Tom Foremski, Phil Jeudy, Frederic Lardinois, Sky Schuyler, Robert Scoble, Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, David Spark, Ewan Spence, Jerome Tranié, and Robin Wauters. (Continue reading this entry…)

Building out infrastructure for a Traveling Geeks tour

The Traveling Geeks are at it again. This time the destination is Paris for LeWeb and some other tech meetings.

Organizing a tour for 15 geeks was a nightmarish task for TG Co-Founder Renee Blodgett, who worked for weeks to put this one together – much shorter lead time than for previous tours. And her co-organizers Eliane Fiolet and Phil Jeudy, plus two web developers, did a heroic job.

The online developers were tasked with creating the new web site, but I came in for the last few weeks to preside over one of my (current) specialties –  ensuring that we can mash information together in real time. Here’s what it required and what I learned:

{Eliane’s photo-mosaic of the geeks – at left.}

This trip is largely a different set of geeks than for the UK, with only Renee Blodgett, Tom Foremski, Robert Scoble and myself overlapping from the summer UK visit.

The issues: 1) mashup of geek blog posts; 2) Flickr photos; 3) conferencing.

Pickup geek’s writing from their own blogs: The biggest issue is to create a central web site that incorporates information from all of the geeks while they’re on the road. You can’t ask busy people to write up duplicate posts for a central blog — they’re busy writing for their own blogs. So the answer is to syndicate their blog posts — pick up posts from their blogs, copy them to tg.planetlink.com and insert them there, with a minimum of fuss. Ideally this is a 100% automated process. Well, surprisingly, this still is a very hand-built kind of process, although once you’re done, it can run 100% automatically. Underneath everything the site is built on WordPress, which supports blogging as well as more “static” pages. There’s a neat WordPress plug-in called FeedWordPress^[1] that lets the blog read RSS feeds from each geek blog and copy the relevant posts over to the TG blog for republication. But things have gotten more complex since the geeks visited London… now we need to not only bring in blog posts, but we need to deal with Twitter streams, Twitter hashtags, Flickr photos and YouTube channels. Our “bloggers” are no longer simply bloggers.

Mash multiple feeds together: OK, so some of our bloggers have several places where they interact online. The trick is that most of these now present/expose RSS feeds, and you can read and manipulate data from those feeds to create a single mashed feed that contains only the information that you want to use. Yeah, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, all present RSS feeds that let you get at your photo-stream, your video-stream, and your tweet-stream. The trick here is to use Yahoo Pipes^[2] to mash them together. Pipes will read multiple blogs’ RSS feeds, check to see if there are blog entries in a particular category, and then mash only those articles into a new RSS feed that Yahoo Pipes creates. The system is so flexible that not only can it recognize categories, but it can search through the text of a blog entry or any of the other characteristics that typically appear in an RSS feed. If one of our geeks has, for instance, three feeds, Pipes can filter each feed according to different criteria, and then can merge them together into a single feed, with things interleaved chronologically, that I can have FeedWordPress read and digest. (FeedWordPress can’t do this mashing of multiple feeds…)

Mashing the geeks’ photos: On the UK trip we used a couple of tools to help manage photos. One of those was MobyPicture, which lets you upload a photo once and have it copied to your accounts on multiple online photo sites. It’s particularly useful for mobile phone users, and there’s also an iPhone app, which I find very handy. Though I do love Moby, on this trip we didn’t need this kind of multiple uploading, so we gave all of the geeks access to a Flickr group Traveling Geeks, making the membership “Invitation only” but the viewing “Public.” They’ll upload to their personal accounts, mark the photos for the group, and we use the flickrSliDR slideshow maker to then include all photos, even the most recent, in a slideshow.

Zorap: This hot media-sharing space provides video, audio (mp3), photo and other media sharing within a common space (a room). The tech is rather demanding, so it’s not for the faint-of-heart and you’d better have a fast computer, but when it works it is marvelous. Multi-way (not just two-way like Skype) video conferencing is coming of age.

We are counting on broadly-available wi-fi support at most of the venues in Paris. Orange is supplying us with 3G connectivity to fill in when we can’t find wi-fi. Over the last two days (on my way to Europe) I have used a 3G iPhone tethered to my MacBook while on the California Zephyr (rail in the US) for 5 hours, and wi-fi on American Airlines (excellent bandwidth) within the US. So more and more I’m becoming accustomed to haveing a connection wherever I go.

[2] Yeah, I’ve used Yahoo Pipes for some time now.

[3] Yahoo Pipes has a problem with Typepad-generated “categories” that took me some hours to puzzle out. Typepad “categories” have an extra layer that appears with the XML of an RSS feed that makes filtering impossible if a post has more than one category. Rather than create a whole inscrutable article about it, let me point out that a solution has been developed, which consists of breaking the categories out into a list and then processing the elements of that list rather than trying (unsuccessfully) to parse the malformed feed. I’ll have to write an article on this later.

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DEMO Innovation / Alumni Tour

Social Media Hour #34: Shredding Conventions and LeWeb 2009

What do Beethoven, Geeks and Paris have in common? All three were topics of discussion on this episode of Social Media Hour. Cathy starts the show with The Great Kat, a classically trained musician who’s shredding stereotypes, and music. Then it’s all croissants and crepes as the discussion turns to the upcoming LeWeb conference in Paris, yes Paris France. First up, Eliane Fiolet and Renee Blodgett of The Traveling Geeks, a group of which Cathy is an original member, talk about their plans and then it’s Chris Heuer and Dana Oshiro of ReadWriteWeb to talk about La Social Media Club House. So don your berets, pour a glass of Bordeaux and take a listen!

The Show:

Want to know more about the guests … then read on…

Comings, Goings, Doings: Events & Activities at La Social Media Club House at LeWeb 2009

It’s official. I’m so excited I may very well explode.

Given the amazing activities that lie ahead for the gaggle of geeks who will be setting up camp at La Social Media Club House in Paris next week, it’s no wonder.

During this morning’s Social Media Hour, Chris Heuer and Dana Oshiro joined me to talk about some of the fun we have planned. (Today’s episode also featured Eliane Fiolet and Renee Blodgett, two of the Traveling Geeks – another posse of pals also en route to Paris for next week’s LeWeb conference. (Continue reading this entry…)

Chris Anderson on the democratization of manufacturing and distribution

Every five or ten years, myself and my colleagues reflect on how much we used to pay for technology and how we’re able to do things we couldn’t do before because it was cost prohibitive.

• It used to be too costly to produce a video, then we got non-linear editing on the desktop.

• It used to be too costly to produce a live television program and distribute it, then we got tools like the TriCaster.

• It was unheard of for an individual to produce and broadcast a 24 hour video channel, but then we got a web tool like LiveStream.

These are just a few examples. There are tons more. Technology and the social web have lowered the barrier for so many things that simply weren’t possible without a huge cash investment. The net result is more people with more talent are able to create more products (e.g. music, games, movies, applications, Internet companies, etc.) just as long as they’re digital. The analog world hasn’t had a chance to see this kind of innovative renaissance, until now, said Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired, during a presentation at the Supernova conference in San Francisco.

We’ve created the model for distribution, now let’s use it

If the past decade was about finding new post-institutional social models on the web, then the next decade will be about applying those models to the real world, explained Anderson. In the video production examples above, cheap non-linear editing, video cameras, and online connectivity democratized video production and distribution, making it affordable to all. And as Anderson argues, when you democratize creation and distribution, you vastly change the world. And while we’ve seen this happen again and again in the digital world, we’re now seeing the trend bleed into the physical world, as Anderson demonstrates with a few examples:

• 

  3D Printer

  3D printers that can duplicate nearly any object, which used to cost thousands of dollars, are now available for $750. Anderson has one in his basement.

• Access to manufacturers in China that companies like Sony use is now available to everyone using the manufacturer directory Alibaba along with its international real-time communications tool, TradeManager.
• While it’s still expensive to open up a brick and mortar store, distribution is possible through ecommerce.

What all this means is individuals now have access to manufacturing and distribution and they can compete with Walmart. Anyone, not just major manufacturers, now have affordable access to platforms for micromanufacturing the long tail of physical goods. This is how the web revolution hits the real world, said Anderson.

Small companies filling market gaps

Micro manufacturers are also filling niche markets that major manufacturers don’t want to fill for a number of reasons, such as brand affiliation. In another example, Anderson talked about the squeaky clean image Lego maintains. They’ve got a very wholesome product with a wholesome brand and they want it to stay that way.

While wholesome-only products is what Lego wants to put out, there’s an audience that wants more. Enter Brickarms Covert Weapons Pack, mini toy weaponry for your Lego characters. Anderson spoke with Lego and asked them what they thought of Brickarms. Turns out they’re totally fine with Brickarms making these Lego weapons. Lego just doesn’t want to be in that market. They’ve got a brand to maintain.

With micromanufacturing, small companies can fill unmet market gaps.

Vertical integration is no longer necessary to reduce overhead

Anderson closed his presentation talking about two very different philosophies of production. Before the democratization of the Internet, the manufacturing model required businesses to internalize all transactions so as to minimize costs. But today, manufacturers can minimize transaction costs through a web of connectivity.

Creative Commons images by Roo Reynolds and G-Sta on FlickrDavid Spark helps businesses grow by developing thought leadership through storytelling and covering live events at Spark Media Solutions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen regularly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvorak, and KQED in San Francisco. See his business profile, contact David, or leave a comment below.

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Traveling Geeks on Blog Talk Radio This Morning (THANK YOU team)

Les Geeks de travel @ le web

I’m off to Paris this weekend to attend Le Web (agenda here). I also need to come clean about something: I’m part of a top secret, Illuminati-type organisation known as the Traveling Geeks. The TGs know everything about everything. They knew you were going to read this post, and have also just taken your DNA […]

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