LUGRadioLive 2008 by sheilaellen (cc-by-2.0)
One aspect I didn’t mention in the LugRadio Live Event Review was how old-fashioned it seemed in some ways.
I guess I’ve got used to seeing conferences experimenting with various web2.0 toys like live-blogging, feedback walls and so on, or the excellent live video streaming of DebConfs, but it was a bit of a surprise to find myself the only person in the audience who connected to the IRC channel from the event.
One possible reason for that was that the wireless network was a bit difficult, or at least that was what I was told. I felt quite smug with my 3G smartphone IRC client (which I’ll blog about later) until Rufus Pollock mentioned the 800+ patents involved in 3G. Damn – I guess I hate freedom.
In one way, I guess it’s appropriate if the network wasn’t up to the task. Broken networks were a regular feature of early ALUG meetings, as the end of this email hints.
Web2.0 was there a little bit. There was a facebook page (which I accidentally spammed while travelling to the event), flickr:lugradiolive and a twitter link of #lugradiolive – but how does that work? There’s no user called lugradiolive and you can’t have usernames containing # Update: twitter:#lugradiolive (thanks to Dave Briggs for the explanation in a comment).
Anyway, seeing as there will be another LUG Radio Live, maybe we can arrange something more interactive but free-software-friendly for 2009?
More reviews I’ve read: davee: Lugradio-in’ makes me feel good…, Peter Cannon: The party’s over for LugRadio Live and No’: Lugradio Undead – but why aren’t more people writing about this event? There seemed to be enough there. Or are they out there but I’m just not seeing them?
Re: Twitter – the # thing is for a service called hashtags – http://www.hashtags.org (I think).
Basically, you follow hashtags on twitter, it follows you back automatically, and anytime you stick a # next to a word, it generates a page and an RSS feed for that keyword.
Rendered pointless by http://search.twitter.com though now.
The twitter thing: the idea is that you put “#lugradiolive” in your tweet, and then people can find it later (using search.twitter.com, for example). Using #something to refer to an event (or anything that isn’t a person) seems to be an emerging Twitter convention.
On the wifi front: we deliberately don’t have a network at LRL, because we want people to talk to one another and not spend all day on IRC 🙂
Dave Briggs – thanks for the explanations. I guess it didn’t work for me because I don’t run twitter on my phone (facebook status seems to do the same job).
Stuart Langridge – yeah, but horses for courses: people in the audience talking to each other during the talks (as happened in a couple) seems like a bug not a feature. Some sort of feedback channel could enhance the talks and allow the discussion to happen without disrupting the session. You could always switch the network off outside of the sessions 😉
Having a twitter backchannel works really well at geeky events, and doesn’t get in the way of conversations, IMO. Think of it more like passing snarky notes round class…. 😉
Maybe the audience were talking instead of passing notes around because pen+paper was so low-tech that no-one had any? I noticed that pens were provided for the low-tech wiki by the entrance.
I found some more reviews at http://forums.lugradio.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4258