As I left the University halls for the last time so it signalled the beginning of a new era in my life. No longer would I go to the student bar or the editing suites to chat with friends and see what they were doing. Now it was time to move to another part of London where new friendships would be made. Some of these friendships would be helped along by twitter.
Playing with technology is a great way of learning new skills but occasionaly you are let down by it. This happened to me tonight when I wanted to do episode four of twittervox. The entire day I had an excellent connection and things were downloading at a good speed. Wait until it’s time for twitter vox and the connection crashed down to just 500 bytes per second up and 1.5 kilobytes per second up.
During two other main conversations in other rooms a group of people of which Phil Campbell, Loudmouthman,Jeff Buckley, Jason and others talked about what they thought web 2.0 was about.[
](http://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/pccv.jpg “video name”)
View the video This is no more than a cursory look at the type of conversations you could be a part of by joining the next Podcamp UK. It’s there among my other video
There are many podcamps but Podcampuk was my podcamp. This was an event which was similar to just one previous experience. It was an event where everyone you talked to had at least one website and others may have had several. They also used twitter and prepared radio programs. What is great about the podcast UK crowd is that they’re a creative entrepreneurial group. Rather than take a 9 to 5 job some work as freelancers.
It’s been a good evening at Podcampuk. The afternoon’s sessions were quite funny and the band was good. I enjoyed filming the band thanks to the diversity of shots I could aim to get. We had some interesting interviews of which two were with teachers. One was a University level professor whilst the other was a teacher for 7 year old children. The children were podcasting for students in Australia as well as America therefore we see a nicely different use of the medium.
Today has been an informative day where there have been many conferences to participate in. The morning saw the introduction of the event whilst later on a great discussion took place about social networking and I’ve got the footage to give you an idea of the direction the conference was taking. On a side note we were introduced to vlogsnapz, an application designed to make video blogging simpler. So far I’ve seen that you can upload to a number of popular video sharing website and the interface is simple.
Ten years ago if you met someone and they gave you their visit card you’d put it away somewhere and eventually you might have come back to it but the information would need updating. Over the years social networking tools on the web have evolved from simple mail clients to web forums and finally to Myspace and Facebook. With Facebook we find what I think of as an enhanced phonebook. When you meet someone at a party today there’s a good chance that this individual has a facebook presence.
As you’re painfully aware by now there are hundreds of social networking websites but none of them have a communal database. If you’re on orkut your data stays there, if you’re on yahoo communities your data is there. All these social networking websites are very similar in what they ask of you but different in how they link you. Loudmouthman got me thinking about how you could use a database like freebase to share this data between networks, sort of like openid but with more data.