We Make Our Tools And They Shape Us: Presentations From Berlin
I gave the following in Berlin, as a 50 minute talk.
I guess I should really record audio, because the slides don't say anything.
I found the cultural differences in Germany pretty significant. Very few women in the extremely nerdish attendees, and while the group seemed oriented toward building and using web apps, the German web culture is jammed with German language knock-offs of English language applications. As a result, it seems relatively insular, inwardly focussed. The same seems true of their blogging community.
Perhaps its just me getting burned out on the lecture circuit, again.
Here's the preso from my workshop, which is equally useless without audio or crib notes, I think:
I am more than willing to do my 'Building Social Applications" workshop, but I think in the future I will limit the size to 50 participants, make it a full day, and charge a lot. The combination of too many people, 3 hours, and not paying much makes for a strange chemistry. In Berlin, 1/3 of the group -- more or less -- just opted out of the group exercise in the workshop, and sat in alienated silence, reading email or surfing the web.
I had one disaster at the show, when I was asked to participate in '5 great ideas in 10 minutes'.
I created a speedo Lessig sort of presentation, one word slides that I was going to flash past at blinding speed. The well-meaning but techno-challenged folks at the conference screwed up the slides. At the last minute they were gathering files on a USB drive from the various participants, like me and Tom Coates. Knowing how PPT can screw things up, I actually checked how my slides looked on the PC. Looked fine. Then someone collapsed all the slideshows into one file -- to make things 'easier'. So I lost all my styles, including the fact that my titles were in dark blue on a light blue semi-transparent rectangle above the images. Instead, I had black text, no rectangles, on top of images. In fact, even up in front I couldn't even read some of the slides, and I know others couldn't.
When I asked the unfortunate soul who had smooshed the presos into one file whether she had looked at the result, she said yes, and that mine had looked pretty bad. "Did you look back at the original?" I asked. No, she didn't have time. (Note that I sent her a copy in the afternoon, but her email had overloaded, so she couldn't receive it.) So 700 people (or more) heard me wave my hands around in front of an unreadable presentation. At least it was only 2 minutes long.
Oh, by the way, the last slide, that I couldn't read? It said "Discovery" -- which is what users of social tools are really after.
<update>6:04 am
In my email this morning was a message from my friend Tina Kulow -- who I hardly got to talk to in Berlin -- about a new study of German companies adoption (or lack of adoption) of Web 2.0 technology. You can download the report here. Basically, Germany is not adopting these technologies very quickly, and only half of those that are aware of Web 2.0 (about half) believe it will be beneficial.
</update>
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