Yesterday I attended the third annual Podcamp Halifax at the Alderney Gate Public Library along with 370 other Atlantic Canadians with an interest in social media. The event is a free “unconference” where any panelist can set up a discussion and attendees are encouraged to join in the conversation. The event draws a broad mix of experts and social media novices and covers a spectrum of topics from online authenticity to trends in coding and development.
I started off my morning at John Leahy‘s demo of an augmented reality fitting room that allows consumers to try on bathing suits using a webcam and crude 3D rendering. I’m a bit skeptical of AR for web cams as opposed to AR on smart phone applications – it tends to be gimicky, requires bizarre makers, and users need to install additional software. I was impressed that the bathing suit demo used facial recognition instead of requiring a maker and allowed users far away from the computer to navigate the software using physical hand gestures similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect.
I popped in to Chris Campbell‘s bizarrely titled talk “Using coffee and oatmeal to build an audience on Twitter.” Campbell literally made oatmeal for everyone who attended his talk and proceeded to talk about how he uses Twitter. The subject matter is typical of most Podcamp talks I’ve attended over the past two years. I left Campbell’s talk to see what was going on at Brad Touesnard‘s “HTML5: Why aren’t you using it?” discussion. Touesnard observed some of the trends in HTML5 and clarified what HTML5 is and isn’t.
Jeff MacArthur put on my favourite talk, “Usability & User Experience”. Last year he did a similar talk at Podcamp, but there are so many good examples of bad usability that he had plenty of new material to work with. MacArthur ripped apart pretty much everything wrong with Air Canada’s in-flight movie systems from asking your language preference too many times, to having buttons for features that do not exist yet.
Finding lunch in dowtown Darmouth with 370 Podcampers and only 3 restaurant options made it difficult to eat and chat with people from the conference. It would be nice if next year they had an area in the library where people could grab food and network.
The planned keynote after lunch fell through, so organizers decided to host a loose panel discussion about social media that took questions via a giant projection of the #podcamphfx twitter feed. It was fun, but the discussion centered too much around how small businesses should use social media. I look forward to the day when this is something we just take for granted instead of dissecting the nuances of online authenticity for people who sell pancakes. The twitter feed behind the panelists provided a lot of laughs and was a welcome distraction to some of the talk.
The last talk I attended was also related to online authenticity, but this time it focused on embracing your inner jerk. Dan Culberson‘s “Sh*t Disturber” slide show was an entertaining argument demonstrating the value of being disruptive online to try to improve things. Culberson’s perspective was an excellent defense of trolling with a purpose. It rang true with a lot of the research I did for Moderation Town on anti-social behaviour online. I empathize with trolls because sometimes they just care about something too much to be polite about things that bother them.
The organizers did an excellent job, and I’m looking forward to Podcamp Halifax 2012.
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