Maybe a ‘first time campers’ session at the beginning of camps is a good idea…?

Absolutely, it sounds like an awesome session, can’t wait to hear it.

BTW, does a session about “How to move to a new city / country and win friends and influence people” make sense?

What surprises me is that, apart from this post (and a mention on the Nesta site) there is no other mention elsewhere on the web. I would have thought this kind of thing, in order to attract the correct crowd, should be pretty much everywhere (with 2 weeks to go).

I hope I get to go!

It doesn’t clash with BarCampSheffield, does it? The event is on Friday 28th, and the camp is over the weekend. You might get there late friday night / early saturday morning, but still doable!

Granted I am in love with the BarCamp format, but I honestly believe this open concept is the best concept for sharing knowledge and generating new ideas in many organisations and communities.

It would be fun to try to write a replacement for it. It could be done low budget, expect to see something of that ilk sooner or later on YouTube.

Where could I submit a script?

Great article - and thanks pbizzle for the link check!

I’ve writtten a lot about how the banks aren’t serving us well, and this mess proves it. Take a look at my blog (shameless plug - no that’s not what its called) for details.

It’s ironic that when Nick Leeson exposed Barings to a fraction of these losses, he went to jail. While the bosses who precided over this disaster draw huge bonuses. Ironic or what?

I wonder how he feels and why hasn’t anyone seen the injustice in that. At least he tried to sort things out!

I’ll put a link to your blog on mine. Keep up the great work!

http://www.blog.lanzen.co.uk/?p=233

However, when you’ve got the budget and impossible remit of BBC THREE, I doubt it’s easy to do any better.

I can imagine the libertynews site getting “hacked” live on screen and seeing it reflected online. Propaganda spewed out on twitter. Facebook “events” in the future. It could be a first for British TV.

In the end, that’s perfect for the ADD generation - TV on, phone twittering, laptop surfing, red-button pressing. Just a pity that the story itself was so week.

You kinda did Ah Twitter Public Timeline!

Taking a look at our personal and relationship data. One way this could be solved is decentralising the information. Rather than your data being at facebook.com/users/emmapersky - perhaps it should be held at facebook.emmapersky.com.
Facebook, myspace, linkedin, all “social networks” should be aggregators reading our personal data. They could deliver a database schema, some easily deployable PHP/ASP/JSP and let us host our own social networks. With open and standard APIs, the same db could be used to propogate many social networks.

The usual argument against this is that Social Networks want you to visit their site and click on their adverts. You want one aggregated place - it might as well be your domain rather than Facebook’s.

It also means your data is portable. If you grow bored with one network, or if you dislike it, you can move your data and relationships trivially. Capitalism suggests that this would make the market work harder to keep on your good side - *capitalists* think that this would destroy their business model.

There are several arguments against decentralising.
Central data storage and processing is very fast and very cheap compared to what an individual can obtain. It’s more efficient for a Facebook to run one big database that have the server at facebook.emmapersky.com run queries against all of its friends.

Security. How easy would it be for a malicious “friend” to poison your data?

Ease of use. It would be hard for most people to install and configure a database and sub-domain - if they even have their own domain. Which leads us back to large, central organisations looking after that data…

Google’s Opensocial is a start. We need to find a way to easily (and regularly) extract our data and relationships from centralised system so that we’re not at their mercy.

Tools like http://www.zyb.com do a good job at merging contacts from (some) social networks and backing them up on your phone. But it’s still far from perfect.

Payment from subscribers may well help. At the moment, most social networks rely on advertiser revenue - meaning they serve the advertisers, not you. Of course, as advertisers want large visitor numbers - and visitors only come if they’re happy - that should keep them from screwing you over…

Paying directly for a social network(if only for a pro version like in flickr’s case) won’t stop mistakes. But it should focus the provider’s minds if they suddenly lose a lot of revenue or get hit with a lot of breach of contract lawsuits.

Perhaps it will take a serious outage or corruption of data at one of the major Social Networks before people take the issue seriously?

(Disclaimer, I work for Vodafone - the owners of zyb. I’m speaking in a private capacity. So there.)