Here's why conferences suck
David Spark: “My main argument is everyone in the room is already a WordPress blogger yet many of the presenters are talking to us like we’re newbie bloggers and we’re not familiar with the technology or concepts of blogging. The reason I came and I believe the reason everyone else here came is to discover what’s new about blogging. I haven’t yet learned anything new, but I’m meeting some good people.”
If your conference or unconference (and there is a crucial difference, even though some people would like to blur those) is about teaching ‘the basics’, then you need to really, clearly explain that to people. Because for those of us who aren’t beginners, any type of education has to be worth more than Google.
This is why I chose not to go and get a MA/MSc (it could have been the former if I’d spent it reading Kierkegaard, the latter if I’d noodled around with computers) this year is because the costs are too high and the benefits compared with just Googling are too low. This is especially true for technology - with open specifications, open source, blogs, wikis and mailing lists.
What, then, for conferences? Provide actual vision. How is this stuff going to affect humanity? And that means all of humanity, not just Eric Schmidt and a bunch of Valley VCs. The fact that I can search the world’s libraries from my desktop has not returned on any VC investment, but it is important. And we need to talk as users about where we go next.
We really need BloggerCon London. Conferences are lumbering around. BarCamp and BloggerCon has sliced it’s head half-off (those who are ignoring their RSS feeds to read Harry Potter will appreciate that). We need to mercifully finish the job so that conferences can become interesting.
Tammy Faye, ex-wife of corrupt televangelist Jim Bakker, has died. Mandatory Wikipedia link: Christian televangelist scandals. But, of course, these people need God in order to be moral.
Arnold Guminski has a manifesto for “commonsensible naturalists”.
The (Canadian) National Post has an article on the rise of atheism in Canada. Jeffrey Shallit (whose excellent articles on ID were of significant interest when I wrote my dissertation last year) compares this piece of good reporting with a certain reporter incapable of even the most basic standards of journalistic integrity.
Isotype is thinking about a project called Sinapsi, a new WordPress plugin to make it more semantic and include more microformats. For upper-case Semantic Web, there is already the SIOC Exporter. Ryan also has links for those who want to add microformats to their WordPress blogs.
Dave has been exploring Apache on OS X. I find Apache to be utterly irritating on OS X, as with ipfw. In fact, my ipfw install is utterly borked and I’m probably going to have to reformat in order to be able to get my firewall working again.
Austin Cline gets someone barely literate writing in asking for ‘respect’. It’s quite amusing.
I wish that Slate’s Todays Pictures had an RSS feed - it’s quite interesting. I liked these pictures from suburbia (via Reason Hit & Run).
Another corker from Hit and Run is a list of the ummah’s stupidest fatwas. In other news from the absurd, Norm reports on the response from Saudi Arabia’s “National Society for Human Rights” to an execution of a nineteen-year old - it was humane because: “Allah, our creator, knows best what’s good for his people”. Such a shame that Allah can’t come and flick the switch himself and his appointed representatives have to do it for him. Still, even though they are executing teenagers, I’m betting nobody in the Axis of Good is going to bother reconsidering the position of Saudi Arabia…
