Our paper will fall within a session called ‘Wikis and the Expanded Museum Community’, and will sit alongside two other papers on the subject. One is called Collaborative History – Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community and the other is The Quilt Index Goes 2.0: A Fiberspace Case Study, and I’m looking forward to hearing about both of them.

Registration for the conference, which takes place from 15th – 18th April 2009 in Indianapolis, USA, is now open, and the early bird discount last until 15th December.

Looking back, I think it went pretty damn well. We had a really great bunch of people turn up, some great talks, and a fun evening do, which included a trip to a local pub for a welcome bit of fresh air.

Despite the organisational hurdles, one of the things that surprised and delighted us about organising BathCamp was just how successful and popular the BarCamp format is. Between the 5 or so organisers, we only knew about a quarter of the attendees. Everyone else who came did so purely on the back of the BarCamp name and formula, which is pretty good for a meme that’s only 3 years old. Especially as BarCamps are totally decentralised and anyone can organise one.

Bath was nice too. We choose Bath purely because Mike lives there, and he was passionate about doing something outside of London. Since then, I’ve moved from London to Manchester. There’s already been a BarCamp Manchester this year, but I’ve already been to a GeekUp Manchester event, which are held regularly.

One thing that was discussed at BathCamp was the possibility of holding a ‘MuseumCamp’ for the cultural heritage sector (museums and art galleries), which Curators could come along to as well as ‘techies’. Indeed, this was one of the original ideas for BathCamp, but we decided to drop it and go with a no agenda policy. One problem is that we weren’t sure how to persuade Curators it was worth giving up a Saturday. Although perhaps it could be held actually in a museum?

Other BarCamps that look interesting include Social Innovation Camp. There has already been one of these, and another is scheduled for 5th-7th December 2008, with a call for ideas now open. I’m sure I have more than one idea that would be applicable to this event, so fingers crossed I’ll be there!

Then next week it’s the student radio conference at Southampton, which I’ve been helping to organise. The schedule has now (mostly) been announced, and I’m really looking forward to it. Hopefully the lineup of speakers and sessions will be interesting and useful for our delegation of around 150 students from universities aroung the UK.

Then it’s Easter weekend, for which I have absolutely nothing planned at all.

The first presentation was by Joshua Schacter, talking about del.icio.us, and some of the lessons he learnt from it. Lots of it seemed to be about ways to scale the application with caching, indexing, throttling, etc. However he also said that it’s difficult to know where the bottlenecks are going to be in advance, so lots of the optimizations aren’t worth doing until you know where the problem areas are. He also promoted APIs, RSS feeds, clean URLs, and making logins required only where neccessary and then as simple as possible. More interesting perhaps, for the site that making tagging so popular, is that he described tagging as being ‘not about classification but about user interface’, which doesn’t quite fit with my own perception. He also rightly pointed to the need for tagging to have some ‘transaction cost’ in order to be useful. ‘Automatic tagging’ is potentially harmful.

Next up, Cal Henderson talked about Flickr (Powerpoint file). Lots of the same stuff came up, like scaling, APIs (important so that people know they can get their data back if they want to) and thinking about clean URLs. He also talked briefly about AJAX, and how it can improve interactions and speed up the site, but needed to work nicely with the URL structure. Flickr also built in multi-language support from the beginning.

Next, Tom Coates gave a presentation titled Native to a Web of Data. This contained much of the same sort of information, but without being specific to a single website, and having been summarised in a much more cohesive way. The most important point was how it’s data that’s at the core of web applications, and so it’s important to start by looking at the data, identifying what he calls ‘first order objects’ and then working these up into URLs, then into ‘object pages’, ‘list pages’ and ‘manipulation pages’.

David Heinemeier Hansson gave a deeply impressibe presentation on Ruby on Rails. Obviously, I’ve heard lots of hype about Ruby on Rails before, but this was the first time that I began to understand what it’s really all about. “Motivation is the key to productivity”, he says, “and motivation comes from happiniess”. How do you make programmers happy? By allowing them to write “beautiful” code. Beautiful comes from allowing progammers to concentrate on the 20% that’s unique and interesting, whilst coding 80% that’s normal and boring in the minimum amount possible. He gave some examples of how Ruby on Rails does this, by using “convention over configuration” to define database tables and fields, code classes and URLs all at the same time. PHP is the devil, he claims, tempting you into doing hacks and clumsy workarounds, whereas Ruby on Rails is the angel. The functional spec is evil, he says, as web applications evolve with time rather than being delivered fully-functional and finished at the start. All thought-provoking stuff, and so I’ll have to try out Ruby on Rails sometime soon.

Next, Shaun Inman, the designer/developer behind Mint, gave a fairly short and timid presentation on ‘10 reasons why you need to build an API’. It was a bit weird as his stats software is paid-for, with the source delivered, but without being free. So the conversations in his Q&A about Mint piracy seemed a bit irrelevant.

Following that, the whole room seemed to switch off whilst someone from Adobe practically delivered a sales pitch for Macromedia Flex, which delivers AJAX-like functionality in Flash. It’s quite interesting in that it allows all the rich graphics capability of Flash, but really this is a step removed from web developing, and is closer to regular client application development, albeit using HTTP requests.

Next up, Ryan Carson, the dude behind the whole event, gave a very open and honest account of how he’s set up Dropsend. Other people have written comprehensive notes on his talk, including the figures he mentions, so I won’t repeat those. It was refreshing to hear someone talk about the actual day-to-day practicalities and finances of setting up a web application business, which in some ways was more useful than the higher-level talks that had been given before. Hearing him say how you should “stop and think before you spend even £25″ really brought home how much web development can be a shoestring affair.

The final presentation was by Steffen Meschkat from Google, talking about the nitty-gritty of AJAX. This was quite code-intensive, and brought home just how traumatic doing any coding in Javascript can be. He pointed towards Google AJAXSLT though, which is interesting in that it allows you to transform XML in javascript using XSLT templates, rather than having to learn the horrid XML DOM stuff.

There followed a Q&A session with all the speakers present, which I can’t remember much about.

All in all, it was a good, and useful conference, and Carson Workshops should be praised for pulling it all off, and making it fairly cheap…

Over the few weeks and months we’ll be busy planning the conference, which takes place from Monday 10th to Wednesday 12th April. We’re expecting around 200-250 delegates to attend (up on last year’s conference at Edinburgh, but about the same as the year before), and so it’s quite an organisational task.

We’ve already asked for suggestions on what kind of sessions we should hold, which I think is really important. I’m personally quite in favour of getting more students to take part in the panels/presentations (as well as radio professionals) – the student radio awards has shown that there’s a lot of talent out there.

The student radio conference is also infamous for its evening entertainments, so that will be a big deal too. I know that one member of our Exec committee has already starting thinking about the pub quiz…

The conference isn’t quite like new media conferences (radio geeks are different from internet geeks), but I’m wondering whether it’d be a good idea and feasible to set up wireless internet access for anyone who brings their laptop.

It’s all going to be great fun…

9:30am – Welcome

Neil Dixon introduces the conference and warms up the crowd. He says he does stand-up, and it shows. Nothing seems funny at this time of the morning on a Saturday though.

9:40am – BBC Radio Podcasting

Amusingly, the conference starts with the BBC’s Chris Kimber introducing what the BBC has done with podcasting. I say amusingly, because the BBC clearly didn’t get podcasting started (and there is some debate among delegates over whether early BBC trials really were podcasting, or just MP3 downloads), but the BBC has arguably been the first UK institution to bring podcasting to a wider audience.

Chris Kimber’s analysis of podcasting (as time-shifted, de-coupled from the station brand, on-demand, etc etc) was pretty accurate, but hardly ground-breaking. I was intrigued when he says that podcasts feel ‘tangiable’, as opposed to the ephemeral nature of traditional radio, as clearly digital MP3 files aren’t that tangiable in the physical sense, but I see what he means. When thousands of people download the BBC’s Beethoven MP3s, for instance, do they want to listen to them right away, or just get the satisfaction of ‘owning them’?

Interestingly, this latter behaviour is encouraged by the BBC, more than other podcasters, by the fact that its podcasts (MP3s) are only available for a limited time-period for some unknown reason (the Beethoven download page even talks about a ‘7-day license’, with no real explanation).

Overall, though, the BBC’s bottom-line reason for embracing podcasts is sound: it gives better value to the license-fee payer. This is an incentive that commercial operators simply don’t have.

10:15am – Podcasting as a Business Tool

Quite a good overview of the principle of using podcasts to benefit a business by the articulate Neville Hobson. There was a good list of ideas (PDF), and an interesting audio compilation (MP3) of existing business podcasts, including General Motors and Warner Bros.

He suggested that podcasts would almost certainly become ‘monetized’ at some point, but that a few people will probably try and fail in the process (hmm, I can spot those already). The question of ‘how’ was left open.

Neville’s Hobson and Hultz report looks incredibly content-rich, with detailed show notes and a very regular schedule. There was no mention of how exactly this podcast fits into a business model. Perhaps they do it to boost their own profiles, enabling them to get well-paid regular work?

11:00am – Podcast Technologies

Rather misleadingly, this talk was basically Chris Ritke demonstrating his own rather crappy-looking audio and video aggregator website, www.49media.com and weirdo pirvate p2p application outhink.com [sic]. Maybe I’m being thick, but I didn’t get it, and the presentation didn’t really provoke much thought.

As the only ostensibly tech-related talk, I thought this could have been a lot better. Where was the discussion over whether MP3 would always be the format of choice? Or on which is the best podcatcher? Or the finer points of RSS enclosures? Or even some tips on recording and editing techniques.

I read my O’Reilly Podcasting Hacks book (free to me as one of the first paid delegates) during most of this speech, and learnt much more from it than the speaker. Sorry.

11:40am – The Podcast Safe Music Network

This was a good talk by Mark Hunter of the Tartan Podcast, who appeared to my mind to be one of the only small-scale, locally-minded podcasters actually represented on the speaker’s panel. Unfortunately, the talk seemed to be a bit mis-titled, as there wasn’t a huge amount of discussion about the podsafe music network, and the speaker didn’t have the knowledge to be able to answer some of the questions.

I think this is one topic which would have benefited from having a panel of speakers, perhaps including member of a band who had benefited from having their music included on podcasts, a Creative-Commons type person, a music industry representative, a music podcaster, and someone to chair the panel, asking provokative questions.

12:15 – Community & Educational Applications

This was a pretty thought-provoking lecture (in the traditional sense, he bravely didn’t bother with powerpoint) by Milverton Wallace, giving a different side to the podcasting concept. He told the great anecdote of a technology project set up for disadvantaged kids, which filled a room full of high tech gadgets, but failed when kids soon stopped turnin up. Milverton’s analysis to the confused project leaders was ‘because it’s still a classroom, despite the gadgets’. A great example of how community workers can sometimes be blinded by technology and fail to really engage the people they want to attract.

Mind you, I’m not too sure that the idea of giving out iPods and hoping that your audience will download your maths lesson podcast is completely the solution, but Milverton rightly qualified this by saying that it was ‘in addition’ to traditional face-to-face teaching methods, not a replacement. A form of high-tech revision. And that could work.

Milverton also points to the lack of a decent return-path for podcasts, and the difficulties in directly peer-to-peer sharing podcasts from MP3 player to MP3 player (is this possible with an iPod? What about others? WiFi? Bluetooth?).

An inspiring talk, although I did get the feeling he was preaching to the wrong crowd.

2:00pm – Richard Vorbes Live

This was an interesting ideal, well executed, but with poor content. Whilst I was impressed with the sound quality and technical set-up of this live podcast, and the fact that they’d managed to turnaround a package of clips from earlier that morning, it was all I could do to keep myself from cringing through most of the show.

It wasn’t amateurish, it was just, well, the kind of stuff you might expect to hear on local radio at drivetime. The show fell into every radio cliche pitfall, from ‘kerr-razy voices’, through overuse of reverb effects, a honky-honk horn and a ‘guess the tv theme’ feature, all the way to over-explaining technical faults and excessive talk about drinking beer (apparently a regular feature). He evens drags his teenage daughter onto the show (who is actually pretty confident) and makes embarassing comments about his divorce.

I could go on, but I needn’t slag it off any more. The only useful outcome of this session was that it neatly answered the question of whether podcasts are different from radio shows. Yes they are, and now we know why podcasts shouldn’t be second-rate imitations of your local radio jock.

2:40pm – Podcasting & Commercial Radio

This was the session that will no doubt be the most talked-about, largely because of a now-infamous comment to the speaker, James Cridland, of Virgin Radio and MediaUK, that he ‘didn’t get it’. It was a great way to kick of some good debate, and raised the tension level a little, but in some ways the discussion was a bit confused? Is podcasting a revolutionary new platform for the independent media producer, or a revolutionary new content-delivery mechanism for the consumer? Of course, it’s a bit of both, but I’d say that it’s more of the former than the latter. Consumers can already get access to commercial media in a huge number of ways, from terrestial broadcasts, to digital platforms, to internet live and listen-again streams. Naturally, if you also make your content available as downloadable MP3 files, consumers will also flock to that, but that’s perhaps a lesson in the value of DRM-free downloadable media, than anything else. Package the same content up in some propriatary formats, with some bloated client program that downloads the content and dumps it onto an iPod, and the number of people consuming the content would probably fall (although that has arguably been a description of iTunes).

The fact that podcasts can’t legally contain commercial music is also a bigger stumbling block for commercial radio stations than James Cridland made out. He argued that consumers only wanted the speech-content parts of commercial radio shows as podcasts, as they could get the music from the station live. Whilst this may be true of some people, I’d bet that if you made both a full-content podcast and a links-only podcast of a commercial radio show available, both would get a substantial portion of downloads.

As commercial music is never going to be allowed in podcasts any time soon (trust me, it’ll take years, and won’t ever be in free, DRMless downloads), this is a pretty big barrier to the level in which commercial radio stations can tip their toe in the podcast waters. And as pretty much all radio is commercial music radio (BBC Radios 4 and 7 excepted), all radio stations can do is produce ‘taster’ versions of their full content, or additional speech-based ‘extras’, which could still be a big deal in terms of marketing and listener value.

James took it all the criticism well though (and it was already fairly good-natured anyway), although seemed disappointed that his Firefox t-shirt hadn’t done enough for his geek cred to fend off the crowd.

3:15pm – Legal Issues Facing Podcasters

This session was lawyer wanking, if ever I heard it. By avoiding the big issue of music licensing completely, Paul Nicholls was left muttering about defamation this, slander that, quoting a few obscure cases where someone was successfully sued for calling the kettle black. Or something. Add to that the dubious claims that ‘alledgedly’ is enough to keep you out of court (err, no) and that broadcasts are covered by the legislation of the country in which they originate (contentious), and overall it wasn’t too useful a talk. Even the stuff on defamation was too confusing to be useful.

His ultimate advice of ‘consult a lawyer’ could have perhaps been replaced by ‘don’t be stupid’, ‘tell the truth’, and ‘hope for crissakes that you never have to consult a lawyer’, and I could have done the whole thing in thirty seconds.

The only positive thing to come out of the talk, which otherwise suggested that you could be sued for just about anything, was that you can’t defame a class of people. So I can comment, as someone did from tha back (was it James Cridland?) that ‘lawyers are thieving bastards’, and be completely safe. Of course, we all know that that’s not defamation because it’s true anyway…

4:25pm – A Word From Our Sponsors

Tsk, I’m not going to bother commenting on this one, they’ve had enough marketing material out of the event already.

5:00pm – Simulcrum Live!

Another live podcasting experiment, this one more successful. Unfortunately, had I actually been listening to this as a podcast, I would have hit fast-forward a few times. Maybe there’s a reason why podcasts are time-shifted…

Closing Remarks

Well, the closing remarks from me are that it was a really well put-together and successful confernce. Although there are some lessons to take away for next year (and this is already going to be a next year, apparently), there was a definate buzz from the conference and plenty of thoughts and ideas to take home. I want to give a final credit to the organisers for making it a non-profit event, and keeping the costs down to thirty quid (including food). Easy to overlook this fact, but it really made a difference to the type of event it was.

I’m not going to bother blogging my reactions to any of the individual talks just yet, thoughts are still buzzing around my head, but I will add some general comments.

One of the most obvious observations to make about the event was that there was a definate division between the people there because they love podcasts as a ‘bottom-up’, community-born form, and those who were there in a more professional capacity as mainstream commercial broadcasters interested in how they can leverage (exploit?) new platforms. Whilst this wasn’t an absolute line in the sand, the ensuing tension between the different agendas did bubble to the surface on a few occassions, most notably during the talk by Virgin Radio’s James Cridland.

It was really nice to catch up with a few people I either haven’t met before, or haven’t seen for a while, including Jo Twist (BBC News journalist), who called me ‘a real early adopter’, Ben Metcalfe (who I ranted at about something to do with the BBC’s iMP, for some reason), James Cridland, Matt Deegan, and plenty of others whose names I’ve already forgotten.

I didn’t bother to jot down copius notes or take many photos of the event as I figured others would do that, as they have. Heck, there’ll probably even be a podcast of the whole shebang.

As to whether I’ll start a proper podcast of my own any time soon… Well, maybe.

I’ve already signed up, in fact I was one of the first thirty, which means I apparently get a copy of O’Reilly’s new Podcasting Hacks, so I’m looking forward to that, even though I have no idea what it’ll be about.

Podcasting is something I really want to investigate, properly. I had a go a while back using Rare FM resources, but I found recording the show live, in a hot sweaty studio with a creaking mixing desk, to be a bit painful. So now I’m hoping to be able to set something up at home within the next couple of months.

Anyhow, if you’re going to conference, see you there. Hopefully, I’ll get some inspiration.