danah’s talk this morning was great, someone told me last night, after the e-lit readings and the open space workshops and the lectures and so many things that I was astonished to realise that danah’s talk happened that very morning and not last week though it felt as though days and days must have passed I had done so much. I was exhausted and I’m just as exhausted now and completely happy that we’re almost done. The last speaker’s speaking and in half an hour I’ll be going out the door to pick my daughter up from school.
I haven’t blogged a lot from the conference. I’ve spent my time running round and organising and remembering and introducing and trying to make sure people are looked after and happy and meeting people. I think it’s gone well, but you know, it’s hard to tell when you’re organising it.
If you want more, look at the video blog for the talks. There are full videos of presentations by Cory Doctorow, Lisbeth Klastrup, Scott Rettberg, danah boyd, Howard Rheingold, Torill Mortensen, Eirik Newth and others, as well as from the e-lit readings last night. I also have some notes in the wiki, as do some of the other participants.
H?•kon Styri
I’ve still got to make up my mind about the video blog. In general I’m kind of a sceptic regarding the usefulness of long, unindexed video clips on the net. Still, it’s a great service to all of us who couldn’t attend.
However, in order to make up my mind it would have been nice to be able to get sound with the videos. Somehow, my computer is silent when playing the clips. It may of course be a problem at my end, but I guess it’s a good idea asking if others have the same problem.
Jill
Hm, someone else asked about that, but I get sound fine.
I think video archives of conferences are great. No, I don’t think most people will watch the videos, but a few will, and since it’s almost free to just leave them there, a few people over a good space of time makes the videos a useful resource.
Also you can rewatch the particularly interesting bits. I’ve already done that, for snippets.
H?•kon Styri
I identified the problem. It seems that my computer gets confused by the main page with several video links and doesn’t find the correct sound channel. By viewing each post of the blog it works fine, but I have no kind words for the person who left the “next” and “previous” links out of the template. 😉
“you can rewatch the particularly interesting bits”
That’s why I mentioned my opinion about the video clips not being indexed. Having a few links to key points of each video clip would be really useful.
Jill
Absolutely – videos like these would be far more useful if it was possible to search them, deeplink into them and so on. And it would be far more costly in time and equiptment to produce them. It’s even more difficult to search or index a talk that’s not been videoed and put online, though…
Oh, and since the talks are out there under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons licence, anyone can take them and add features to them if they like. With attribution, sharing and for non-commercial purposes.
🙂
H?•kon Styri
“it would be far more costly in time and equiptment to produce them”
Not at all. It’s a standard QuickTime feature. (Look up “Add Chapters” in your favourite QuickTime manual.)
Making the chapter-feature more easily available to the readers requires more work, but not much since QuickTime also includes some handy SMIL features. 🙂
The CC licence makes it possible for others to add the features, but the cost of hosting video may be an obstacle to sharing.