Podcamp Montreal 2008 – Debrief

Those of you that have been reading this blog for a while now, know just how much of an avid supporter I am of the unconference movement. This week I was once again blown away by the quality of yet another PodCamp, this time in Montreal (Podcamp Montreal 2008). While I’m not a big fan of the name for numerous reasons (often alienates non-geeks among other things), I am inspired by the passion of speakers and quality of content each and every time I attend.

I’m going to attempt something a tad different with this post by not summarizing this year’s speeches. Instead I will provide you with a condensed list of my top takeaways, thoughts and/or notes from each presentation I attended over the last two days. Please note that more take-aways do not necessarily signify better content (and vice-versa). I benefited in one way or another from each and every presentation.

Please don’t suck! – Sylvain Grand’Maison

• Be a storyteller when you present. Even boring stories can be made exciting!
• The aggregate online persona of a person can often be richer than a face-to-face meeting.

My “ooVoo” social media video chat recap!

What the heck is ooVoo?

A free video-chat application that lets you connect with up to 6 users at once (see last week’s post). Over the last few days, participants from around the world logged on to try it out and chat with various social media experts as part of a promotion put on by the social media consulting firm crayon. I signed up for 4 sessions, all of which went flawlessly (aside from a few minor sound issues some people had). I had a great time meeting and chatting with both people that work in my field and others that work in completely different areas (film, music, writing, legal, medical, to name a few) but share a common passion for social media. Here are some screenshots:

The conversations were completely organic/spontaneous and didn’t follow any particular format, which is what made this experience so interesting. I found this to be a great tool to quickly put names to faces of various business contacts I’ve amassed either through email or by following their blogs and podcasts.

These last few days really got me thinking back to the origins of video chat and the choppy frame rates in the 90′s (remember “Internet Phone” anyone?). The reality is that those days are long gone for most people. Broadband is here to stay, and most modern mainstream computers have all the necessary processing power and video memory to handle real-time video efficiently, and then some! The technological barriers have been obliterated. You can chat with multiple people around the world, (often times with better sound quality then on a phone) and see them on your screen at 30 fps–>FOR FREE!

So why isn’t there widespread adoption of these tools? Why aren’t organizations using them for quick meetings? Why are they paying monstrous fees for proprietary software that’s often just as buggy? I don’t have an answer for you there. You may say that it’s lack of features and security, but I beg to differ since most people that I seen using WebEx, SVI, StreamLogics, and the likes often aren’t aware of 90% of their software’s potential.

Sure, ooVoo has certain limitations such as lack of a whiteboard and application sharing. However, at the moment that’s not its purpose. Communication simplicity is meant to be its prevalent theme. That being said, there are many competing applications popping up every day, and effective differentiation is going to make or break many of these start-ups. Let’s just hope ooVoo finds a solid business model for itself to ensure sustainability.

My verdict: I will be ready to support it even at a minor fee (which should be expected at one point or another unless affiliate advertising proves to be a sufficient source of income). In the meantime, try it out for yourselves while its free! You can add me by searching for “Mike Kujawski”.

Blog Transfer Complete

Ok, I think I finally got everything up and running. For those of you thinking about transferring your blogs onto your own domain, I’d say the hardest part was having to re-do all the tags and embedded videos. Other than that, if you have basic FTP knowledge (for file transfers) you should be fine. Please let me know if any of my links do not work or if you have any trouble whatsoever navigating this blog.

Why did I transfer?

For those of you that have been subscribing to my blog up until now, you probably noticed that I was using the WordPress.com domain (mikekujawski.wordpress.com) even though I owned www.mikekujawski.ca as well ( it was simply re-directing to the WordPress domain). The disadvantage of this (other than personal branding reasons) was that I had limited control over the presentation and programming aspects of my blog. I am now in full control of every aspect of my blog (you may see some custom widgets showing up soon).

The only temporary disadvantage is a loss of existing subscribers and initial traffic (the wordpress.com domain has a very high search engine ranking). In order to offset the effects of this, I would like to ask all of my existing and new subscribers to be sure to subscribe to my new blog domain. The two options are as follows:

• Subscription to Public Sector Marketing 2.0 via rss
• Subscription to Public Sector Marketing 2.0 via email

Cheers!