Gotta Love the In-Person Stuff! Ottawa Geek Dinner

Tonight was the Ottawa Geek Dinner and I was thrilled to see some old pals and meet some new people who, until this point I had only known through their tweets and blog posts.

There were a good 20 people who came out, which made for a long table. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to meet and talk to everyone.

My friend Andre and I discovered a jet lagged Jeff Parks of I.A. Consultants and the Boxes and Arrows Podcast sitting at the bar when we arrived. We didn’t immediately suspect that the rest of the group had arrived so we sat at the bar and had a beer, and Jeff told us all about his trip to San Francisco’s MX Conference.

Eventually we ventured up to the second level of the Blue Cactus (who knew they had a 2nd level?) and discovered our geek friends had already settled in. I received a warm welcome from my Podcamp Toronto and Ottawa pal Mark Blevis, whom I hadn’t seen since Podcamp Ottawa in November. How is it that we live in the same relatively small city and never run into each other?

At our end of the table I had the pleasure of sitting with Bob LeDrew of Bobcat House Concerts and Flacklife. (He’s shown above with Chamika who I met at Podcamp Ottawa) He and his wife open their home once a month and host amazing musicians like Penny Lang, Tony D, Suzie Vinnick and David Gogo for intimate musical events.

I also got to meet Jay West (that’s him on the left, and my good friend Andre on the right), who I had come across on Twitter, and he had many interesting and insightful things to say, including what I think might be a record for number of consecutive years developing the same web site for the Ottawa Jazz Festival – he’s been doing it for 13 years. Would love to see the various iterations of that site over the years!

Also I was able to meet and chat with Twitter pal Simon Chen from Ramius, they are doing some really cool stuff in the enterprise/communication/community space. Check out their site if you get a chance.

All in all it was a great evening, and I’m really happy I went. I love meeting new people, especially those who I have only “virtually” met before. Thanks to Mark Blevis and Robin Browne for organizing the evening. Can’t wait for the next one!

Curiosity Killed the Confusion

I’ve recently come into contact with a lot of people who don’t know a whole lot about the whole social media thing. When I try to explain the stuff to them, I either get a yah, but….or just a blank stare. It’s true, there is SO much going on in this space right now that it’s hard to even know where to start or who to listen to.

A year ago, much like many other people, I barely knew what a podcast was let alone an RSS feed. I didn’t see much point in having my own blog. I would read the odd blog here and there, but I really couldn’t distinguish between what was worthwhile and what was a waste of bandwidth. I too, was confused.

The shocking part was I’d been working as a web designer since 1998. I was there when all this World Wide Web business started! I’m an oldtimer! I was an “industry professional”! How did all of this social media stuff pass me by? How come nobody told ME about it? I realized very quickly that if I didn’t get out there and learn about it I’d be left behind.

So I went to Podcamp Toronto.

For me, that was where this new world opened up. I learned about WordPress, Twitter, Talkshoe, Skype, RSS and a ton of other stuff, and realized the future of the Web. I met some great new friends who answered all my silly questions (and they still do, thanks guys!), and what I didn’t have answers for I figured out on my own. I farted around with it. I set up blogs and broke them. I mean, I really screwed them up bad, man. I made RSS feeds that didn’t work and played with them till they did. I clicked on every link I saw. Read every blog post I could, till my eyes went blurry. And I figured it out.

We have some new interns working at our office. Great bunch of guys, fresh out of college. Unfortunately the educational system always seems to be about 1 year behind the real world in what they teach, particularly when it comes to technology. The reason is that curriculum is set too far in advance. By the time they are teaching the classes, the technology has already changed. This happened back in ’98 when I graduated from my college Multimedia programme. We were focused mainly on CD-ROM development. We had only ONE DAY of HTML coding, using Notepad and Netscape version 4.7 because our school computers had not been upgraded to the new version 5.0 yet. We had a couple of in-class demos from some company we’d never heard of called Macromedia, showing us these new tools called Flash and Dreamweaver, but we really didn’t see any practical use for them at the time.

Within weeks of graduating, I was hired by one of my instructors to – believe it or not – TEACH web site design! So me, with my demo versions of Dreamweaver and Flash and my “Teach Yourself HTML in 7 Days” book, set to work to learn everything I possibly could about this stuff. 3 weeks later, I successfully taught a class of 20 students how to make their own web sites and put them online. I succeeded, not because I had any special training in it, but because I was curious about how it worked. And I sat there at my computer, and frigged around with it for days, till I got it right. Thank God I had no social life back then.

I sat down with “The Interns” today and had a serious talk with them about social media, something they (remarkably) haven’t really touched on in school. Told them everything I know about it. Got them excited about it. Gave them a bunch of links and said “Just go in there, play around with this stuff, listen to these guys, they know what they are talking about, and have fun with it. Explore it. Get curious about it. This is going to be your career.”

There is no magic tool that is going to make you an expert about the Web or about social media. All you need is a computer, a web connection and a browser…and extreme curiosity. Oh, and lots of coffee.

Oh, and by the way? If you want to figure out what all this social media stuff is about, click on some of the links you see in this post. That’s a GREAT start.

Making a Case for Social Media

James Koole from Tucows presented this afternoon at Podcamp Toronto on enhancing corporate communications through social media.

Tucows is doing some really neat stuff as far as creating a social media focused web presence. He’s showing the group that it’s not rocket science and all it takes is some creative people willing to invest a bit of time to improve their company’s profile.

At this session, they were talking about how to convince “the powers that be” in companies to embrace the power of social media.

It’s a challenge I come across often when talking to clients. How does one make a good business case for social media? How do we communicate the real value of social media to our clients, to convince them that their corporate communications can be greatly enhanced by not only getting online but getting linked in to the industry through blogging or podcasting, or even Twittering and Uttering?

As podcasters, bloggers, media creators and storytellers…what do you think our communications strategy should be?

How to Explain RSS to Your Mom

I am a virtual attendee of Podcamp Toronto 2008. Sadly I was not able to be there in person, so this is the next best thing.

I just sat in on a session lead by social media guru Chris Brogan. One thing Chris is great at is putting things into a context that anyone can understand. This means he has some great quotes. Here are my Brogan-isms from the past hour:

“Mainstream media is not afraid of social media, they just don’t know what to do with it.”

“No one has to be granted the authority [to make a blog, a podcast, or contribute to a conversation].”

“The thing about social networking is, the more we help people feel good about themselves the more they do good things.”

I’ve been troubled by something for the past little while. I now consider myself to be an “intermediate” level user of social media. I’m at the point where I’m pretty well versed on many of the popular tools and sites, I have a pretty good network of social media experts around me to answer my questions and open my eyes to new things, and I now have the confidence to start talking about what I know with other people.

I get RSS. I get Twitter. I get podcasting, Oovoo, and WordPress. But I can’t figure out for the life of me how to explain it all to my Mom. Ok, my Mom is a bad example because she has a Facebook page, reads blogs and uses Instant Messaging. But she is the exception of her generation, not the rule.

This morning’s Podcamp session has got me thinking…social media is now becoming more mainstream, because mainstream media is starting to catch on. Fast Company is doing it. USA Today is doing it. Now, people who get their news the old fashioned way are being given an opportunity to take advantage to the biggest thing to happen on the Internet since …well…ever!

My challenge is not in explaining the technology, but in explaining the VALUE. The value in using an RSS aggregator like Google Reader. The VALUE in using Oovoo to host a conversation. The VALUE in posting your own blog and contributing to other people’s blogs.

Social networking is one of those things that people don’t get until they try it.

So maybe, the question is..how do we get them into the social media space in the first place?