where were we?? end of week musings..the WARC online conference, oranges and biometric suits..

I owe you a blog or two but I am suffering from the inadequacies of the iphone - I just couldn't blog with the iphone the last couple of days. BT network in the Waldorf Hilton was useless even though my tariff includes it. And when I called O2 to get them to fix it customer service explained to me that there are 2 kinds of BT openzone - one you can use and one you can't. Funny to call them both by the same name. It might confuse a customer.  The WARC online conference was great - a waterfall of ideas and casestudies about online research and a lot of it is really good - though there is still a lot of crap in the system and suppliers shifting from foot to foot. The frustration with a conference like this is that the anxiety of the organiser leads to overload. No one complains when there is too much content and we probably should.  Because there was too much to easily assimilate.

I'll share a dirty little secret with you. If you have to blog or teach it to someone else, it helps you remember it. Because you are forced to precis and assimilate it with what you already know. Bullshit won't assimilate easily. So it needs to be identified and discarded.  I'm exhausted after every day of a conference I go to. Because I am concentrating so hard. What has changed is that although I still won't blog directly from the conference - an opinion ferments beautifully over a few hours - I need to get a perspective.

But I found I was a) taking notes by hand. b) following the presentation on the laptop just to check that the presenter wasn't leaving out vital info in the leavebehind ( they often were).  And this time I was twittering as well! There was a surreal moment when I discovered that there were more people following my tweets than in the room. Not entirely surprising but slightly uncomfortable given the economics of conferences. Now tweets can't compete with really being in a conference but the chance to vicariously participate plus get your hands on the slides means that not going to the conference isn't as much of a handicap as it used to be.

Just bear in mind that the eccentric tweeting in the corner of the room may be getting more out of the conference than the individual letting it wash over and wondering whether to sign up for twitter because people just won't shut up about it. Its a recall thing.

Highlights for me - Tom Ewing saying that the outliers are carrying most of the weight - doesn't sound like kosher research does it?  Yup that's online for you..
Marianne Hardy fainting mid presentation and interpreting it as an online event - best demonstration of social media in the whole 2 days..
And I suppose Joel Rubinson of the ARF talking about getting 20 people to wear biometric suits in a presentation. Getting someone to tell a brand story involving a parable about an orange. Hand out oranges to conference delegates till the room is full of the fragrance of citric acid. Then track the poor dudes in the biometric suits whose engagement scores go off the chart. And they say that the US research scene is conformist and overly quantitative. I hardly  think so. Biometric suits???? really??? I want one :-)

I'll post you the link to the blog I am filing for WARC on Monday when its all safely posted. Rock & roll

Comments

[Tom]

Thanks for the kind mention. Always interesting to see what people pick up on - the outliers line was a total ad lib, so I must use it again!

I was following yr tweets AND at the conference: truly multi-tasking. I wasn't following them when I was on stage though: maybe that'll be a 3.0 thing.

[Dr Mariann Hardey]

John G, post WARC (and dramatic presentations - if you attended you will know to what I am referring, if not, then yes the Twitter-ed 'rumours' ARE true) great write-up of the event. Sadly I missed out on the full two-day conversations and full on discussions - but the summary here and on the WARC site have helped to fill in the gaps!

Really chuffed that you picked up on what I count as 'significant' in terms of social accountability, representation (representativeness?!), and the on/offline convergence of information and personal data. My impression is that 'we' - as we the 'pioneers' of social media have a long way to go in terms of the protection and privacy of information. For others following close in our tracks the outcomes of our own social actions will have much to tell the futures for a web 3.0, 4.0 and so on... Maybe in time for the next conference?

And always more fodder for the facebooketiquette blog!...

[joel]

thanks for the comment--actually it was 20 biometric suits and one could be yours!