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