Cool Marketing Thoughts

I left early this morning to catch my train to Brussels to join about 50 other people for the first official BarCamp edition. Just my luck, the 8.11 AM train left the station early at 8.10 AM, so I had to wait for the 8.28 AM train which had an announced delay of 15 minutes and then actually arrived at 8.50 AM. Damn. It couldn’t have started better *grin*. I arrived in Brussels at the prestigious business & press center Residence Palace at 10.15 AM. Luckily they didn’t start at 9.30 AM as planned. So, I was just in time to grab a little breakfast and head for the first session, dressed up in the official (free) Barcamp t-shirt.

After a short introduction by Peter Forret and Bart Van Herreweghe, Tanguy De Kelver from TheseDays kicked off with an introduction about Nokia and their latest N series which contain the ‘LifeBlog’ application. Lifeblog is a moblog application which is installed in every phone from the ‘N’ series and is a weblog application which has a PC-side and a phone-side. You can choose which one to use. It connects to virtually any blog account and is standard set up for Typepad. You can upload any content like MMS, SMS, audio and video. All you have to do is customize the server url, your login and password. You can even connect to Flickr and send you pics right that way.

The phone has a smooth 4 Gig in storage, so it can save a lot of data and really long videos. The picutres you take are of a 2 megapixel resolution, so under normal circumstances you have really clear pictures. All pictures are sized 640×480, unless you alter the settings before taking a pic. If you have another phone which doesn’t belong to the ‘N-series’, you have to pay a one time fee for a licence, but after that you’ll be able to use the technology as well. You can also connect the phone to a PC and download all the data, because sometimes uploading video might take a while and can cost you quite some money. Tanguy had a few N91’s that he distributed amongst the attendees. We could play around with the phones and take some pictures or video and upload to the Nokia Lifeblogger blog so if you go there you can see a lot of pictures from today. If you were done toying around, you just had to pass on the multimedia device to someone else so they could try it as well. The blog has been set up synchronically with the Amsterdam Barcamp, where some phones were distributed as well. I think together with Amsterdam, we posted about 80 entries to that blog. Quite impressive stuff. A bit too expensive for me, but incredibly handy. Here’s a pic from me, taken with ‘the toy’, I must say the quality is quite good for a mobile device:

More info at the Nokia Lifeblog site | Nokia Lifeblog Blog

After this session I socialized a bit with some other bloggers I knew, talking about the weather and the world, while we were trying out this new multimedia device/phone. You can’t call it a phone anymore. It’s so much more than that. Then I started preparing a little because my presentation about the Internal Knowledge Network was at 11.30 AM. I don’t have a laptop yet, so Clo was really nice and borrowed me her Mac. I had never before presented anything on a Mac, and I must say I was a bit nervous. I didn’t had time to test, it had to go well from the first time. I Safari’d to GMail and opened the powerpoint I had prepared yesterday night. Everything opened smooth and after adjusting the screen resolution I was all set to go. More people showed up than I expected, which added to the pile of nervousness that was already there. Then I started the show.

The internal knowledge network is a project which has been on this blog a few times already, because it’s my graduation project for college. The IKN is in fact a custom designed tool for i-merge, where I’ll soon begin to work. The idea is pretty simple. Creativity and constructive thoughts aren’t always produced by a creative team and some strategists. In fact, good ideas can ‘happen’ anywhere and can also be produced by accounts (who are close to the clients and often know what’s ‘living’ there) or IT people (as weird as that sounds, they can have some valuable technical insights). You can have a cool idea all of the sudden, just to lose it again a few moments later. The IKN is designed to never lose a good idea again. In fact, the IKN is a tool to archive, tag and categorize good ideas. It’s a place where you can link those ideas to existing or future clients, where you can write some comments about them and put them in a different context.

The IKN runs on a Wordpress engine and is an upgraded blog, where some extra features make it specifically usable to do what it’s been designed for. Because an idea can ‘happen’ anywhere, it’s important that you can archive the idea from anywhere as well. That’s why there’s an SMS-to-blog posting fuction and an email-to-blog function as well. Maybe you’re in a traffic jam, or on the train… then it’s very good you can send the idea to the network, so it can be used later on. Besides from these remote posting options, everyone within the internal network receives a login so they can also write entries in a normal way.

There’s a tag engine available in AJaX which returns a SERP with ‘living tags’. The plug I used is called ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior’ and was created by Neato. This is a very cool plug for Wordpress which, after some modification, is in fact the best tagging tool I ever saw. It adds an extra slug under the ‘write’ interface and adds a drop-down menu with all existing tags. It also has a very extended configuration page which is also added to the dashboard. The only thing missing is LiveTagging, where other people can add tags to the existing tags. Somebody should really come up with that.

The other thing that adds value to the IKN is a voting tool which is the GaMerZ WP-PostRating plug. It looks really cool and has quite a lot of variables you can play with. This way, posted ideas can be voted on and in the sidebar you can see the highest rated ideas and the ideas with the most votes. Hence, the best idea is the one which has the highest appreciation from the community, and the most votes. So if the creatives want to check the archive for good ideas, they can start there.

I also used Gabbly’s AJaX chat and demonstrated how easy it is to set it up. Using Gabbly you can create instant channels to talk with your collegues, then if you should have to go in the middle of conversation, you can subscribe to the RSS of the chat, and access it later on to see what has been said after you’ve left. Also very handy.

Because it’s important to follow-up on an idea after you’ve launched it, I’ve added some extra tools to stay in touch with the network. There’s a ’subscribe to individual post’ function, which is an automated function that only sends you the comments of a certain post per email. This co-exists next to the general comments-RSS function. The ’subscribe to post’ feature has an easy overview page to see which ideas you’re currently tracking, and easily allows you to manage your subscriptions. Then there’s R|Mail which pings the posts-RSS feed once every hour and sends you an email of each new idea that’s been posted.

The network isn’t a tool that will deliver instant good ideas, but it’s a great start to get one. That about concludes what I’ve been explaining at Barcamp. The IKN is live at ideas.coolz0r.com, but it’s a Dutch version, because I still have to do a presentation about it at college. You can see my keynote powerpoint here (9 slides, 129kb).

After the lunch, I went to the Ruby On Rails presentation by Dennis Lamotte from Shoob.com who did a nice introduction about the easiness of Ruby and the possibilities. (Ruby On) Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. From the Ajax in the view, to the request and response in the controller, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-Ruby development environment. To go live, all you need to add is a database and a web server.
The application is database-universal, which means all you have to do is change the driver, and it will run on virtually any machine, from MSSQL to the regular MySQL and everything in between.

Ruby is designed to keep things simple and has DRY written all over it. DRY: Don’t Repeat Yourself. If you’ve done it once, re-use it. The syntax is really simple and clear and quite obvious. Which is trop cool. I think I’ll be exploring Ruby pretty soon, after the fuzz for college, somewhere in July. Ruby is to the web as spinach is to Popeye. Yummy.

More info about this: Ruby On Rails | wiki.rubyonrails.com | api.rubyonrails.com

After this presentation, I went to the presentation from Denis Balencourt & Clo Willaerts about the History & Future of the web. This presentation was a fast one, but they’ve managed to pick out the interesting details of the story and never stood still too long about one single fact. That’s because the internet is already around for quite some time. Fast-paced and still detailed enough to make sense. Denis looked to the future of the web, but I didn’t quite agree with what he proposed. I’ll have to look to the presentation again, because it all went so fast a didn’t really had the time to think about it thoroughly, but I do know we have a different idea of what the future of the web will be. I’ll make a separate post about it as soon as I can lay my hands on the keynote documentation, so I can clearly mark the differences in opinion.

That about concludes the report for today. I had to leave a bit early because I had other things to attend to at home, so I left at 15.45 PM. I was home around 6 PM because some way or another the Belgian railways can almost always cause the unexpected to happen and I had one delay after another, causing me to miss my transfer at the Antwerp station so I had to wait there for another 40 minutes for my next connection to my hometown.

BarCamp was really fun to participate in. I like the concept and I loved the people I met and talked to. The only thing I regret is that some great sessions actually were going on at the same time, and that switching session in between is apparently a no-no, which is too bad, because it’s a great way to see more and learn more. If there’s a next BarCamp, where can I pre-register myself? Is there sign-up page already at the wiki, Peter?

List of attendees
BarCamp Brussels Wiki

Pics Pics Pics ! (Also on Flickr)