Here are some old images of Geneva in Switzerland taken over a century ago. You can see how the land used to look and how it looks now. You can see some of the old streets and the contours. Now it’s a mass of buildings and the relief is hidden.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Geneva many years ago"]
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Then
Such a contrast between the two.
And the gare de Cornavin
And to see how it is now
Today I had the pleasure of meeting Ornit Barkai, a documentary producer working on a documentary about the social media. Her project is one which I am particularly interested in because she is taking an exploratory approach through interviews to see what the social media are,
She told me that she has documentaries with Jeff Pulver and many other interesting social media people. This also includes some friends of mine, Phil Campbell and Chris of Ourmaninside.com. For part of the night I took her camera and was filming footage for her as I knew the people and which were the key moments.
The seesmeetup itself was great in that I was able to meet at least twenty to twenty five seesmicers I already knew and help make these friendships at least a little more passionate if nothing else. In saying passion though I mean that we know each other in the physical world rather than the two dimensional ethereal existence brought on by people behind computers.
You have to realise that the social media are not a nine to five thing. It’s not that you walk away and the social media fade away. The social media, are by definition about friendships, not about platforms, not about products, not about anything else. it’s not something that you should step away from when you walk away from your computer. It’s something that you should experience at all minutes of the day.
You know that I overheard a conversation by some young girls speaking about instant messaging on the mobile phone and one of them was surprised this was possible. She’s younger than me and she’s unfamiliar with this.
You, social media people, should think about this. If you’re working at getting people to listen to your brand and feel more connected you’ve got to take the time to converse with everyone around you. By converse I don’t simply mean answering when they message you. I mean that you have to take an active interest in who they are as individuals. You have to keep an eye on what’s going on at all times of the day. By this I don’t mean that you can’t do anything but social media but you do need to show an active interest. If I write about one topic or another as a tweet I really appreciate seeing people respond and that’s not just my feeling. A lot of people feel that way. I’ve seen it quite a few times.
I really feel the social media need more people to think of them as a lifestyle, communicate all the time, because if you don’t you’ll be flooded. Communicate one or two messages every hour an your audience will not rush to write to you during the ten minutes you’re online. It’ll help you not feel flooded.
I was really enthusiastic about the documentary idea although when thinking about the way the social media and it’s people are at the moment I feel slightly dissapointed. It’s not everyone that dissapoints me, just certain individuals.
Leweb for me was about two things, meeting my seesmic friends and meeting new people. It’s through meeting friends that are familiar to me on the web that I had the best times. In particular I enjoyed meeting with Alex, nutrisionist 2.0 as is mentioned in his tagline. What was great about meeting him is the amount of hours we spent just chatting about one thing, then another. It was fun to get to know the person behind the persona.
What was also fun was meeting someone like Tiil. I hardly knew him until Leweb but he’s a friendly person as well with some interesting ideas and a different point of view to my own. In particular it was interesting to watch as he described Seesmic to people that were not yet familiar with the social network.
Of course there’s Marion. She’s the one that asked me whether I actually wanted to come to Leweb and for that I’m grateful. It’s not often that you get invited to such an exclusive event to meet with so many interesting people.
After this of course there’s Whitt and Clare. During the actual conference we didn’t get to chat much but over the past few hours we were in Paris enjoying some organic food before some macaron at Ladurée and some very thick hot chocolate. That was a nice place. What was interesting about this meeting, aside from the food was the conversation, just hearing about things from a different angle and seeing why certain people should be appreciated more than we give them credit for.
Of course it was a pleasure to meet KDFA. He’s often on seesmic filling the timeline and he’s known for “Le Bar est ouvert”, an occasion which happens on a daily basis when he opens a bottle of wine and the community follows suit for a more convivial atmosphere.
Then there’s Dean. I know him from a few meetings in London and at a podcamp in England and he’s another interesting person to talk to. Another person that has some ideas and is trying them out. He’s the one that got John Cleese to give an interview to seesmic in seesmic style rather than the traditional kind.
Then there are Seb and Virginie, two seesmicers I see a lot because they live just 20 minutes away by car. They were both working on providing some coverage of the events in the form both of pictures of participants and the layout as well as of interviews that should be online shorty.
Then of course you have Valvert, Baptiste, Patrice Gabin and many other seesmicers who were present as well. They’re interesting to meet. I also met some other people of interest working on a number of projects.
Kate carruthers is an Australian friend I’ve been tweeting with for many months now and I finally got to meet her at Leweb and that meeting was pleasant. We sat in one of the lounges and it was an opportunity to discuss the social media and explore, at least to some extent how we picture the word within a broader context. Two words she liked to use together were Social computing. It’s not that I understand in depth what she means but it’s nonetheless an interesting branch of thought to be explored, in parallel to my own ideas.
Sandrine Passeriaud is a person I’ve met at a number of events in London but I never really got to chat to her till leweb. It might be because, as we were in a french speaking Environment, and away from London, we felt more comfortable. That’s another occurence I’m happy about.
Taylor Barr was often present on the seesmic booth but I didn’t make one connection yet. The day before he was meant to fly out to Leweb his plane was cancelled and so he was delayed. We exchanged a few videos on the topic and it’s only two days later, during the seesmic dinner that we understood that we actually knew each other from seesmic. That’s why seesmic is a great tool. It’s about meeting a few people you may not have known beforehand, even if at first hand you don’t remember why you knew someone.
Hermione was one, Stephanie booth was another, then people like Dan martell. We talked as we walked from the seesmic post Leweb dinner to the techcrunch party and that was long enough to get an understanding of what we both do. I’m speaking about this because I didn’t stay more than twenty minutes at the techcrunch party because it was overcrowded and I was too tired to spend much time present there. As much as networking is about the event and the organised parties, it’s also about the walking from one location to another.
There are many more people I met but I’m pretty tired now and I wanted to mention by name or nickname those that I found most interesting to meet during Leweb. If you’re not mentioned it’s not that you’re not interesting. It’s that I need to get to know more of what you do before being able to speak with any authority on the topic
Loic Lemeur giving an interview to a journalist with a nice big seesmic logo behind him.
There’s also the social side. Hermione of Techfluff.tv and Alicia L’americaine
. There’s a video I should upload of Hermione dancing with three mariachi but I’ll do that once I get access to more bandwidth.
The stage isn’t even ready at Leweb but already the networking started this evening as a few companies presented their companies and what they can do. At the same time i got to meet two London friends as well as some others.
It’s seesmic that invited me so there’s a good chance you can find me at the seesmic stand at various moments of the day. As I’ll be online from there you should see my tweets and even my seesmic videos. I know I don’t seesmic much anymore but this particular week may be a little different as you might guess.
If there’s anything you’d like me to find out more about then let me know and we’ll see what I can do to help.
What I’m looking forward to is meeting the people behind the avatars whether from twitter to seesmic to a number of other platforms.
Tomorrow I will be in Lausanne once more, this time to meet the people from Bloggy Friday. It’s Switzerland’s bloggers and social media types coming together for a chat and the traditional fondue (or so it’s been for the past few weeks) and an opportunity to hear about new projects.
Last month it resulted in me hearing about minsh and going to a demonstration of what the website will provide for users of twitter. i’m not going into details just yet but when it comes out some people might find it quite interesting.
The second event is the TGIO (Thank goodness it’s over) party for the National Novel Writer’s month and the Swiss writers that participated. it’s a sleepover right next door to where I live and that will be interesting.
The main event comin up is of course LeWeb which I will be attending this year through a great piece of luck. I’m looking forward to the presentations and meeting many new people. It should be an interesting to pick up ideas for how to develop and re-wrte some parts of the book I’m currently working on.
The culmination of the week of course will be on Friday when 30 of the French Seesmic community will meet for a dinner.
In all it’s going to be a very social media week and it’s refreshing for it to take place in a place like Paris. I will take some video and photographs and blog what I think is of interest. For now it’s a restful evening whilst looking forward to the fun week ahead.
I saw a tweet saying that Americans now send twice as many text messages as Europeans and this makes me think of just one thing. It’s obsolete.
What I mean by that is that now that I have a data plan and skype and gtalk on my phone I refuse to send sms which I have to pay for when everyone I know uses at least one IM client. It’s so much cheaper (free) for me to chat with you on gtalk. There’s also more chance that I’ll get an answer.
I really don’t like the idea of sending sms when there is a better contemporary technology out there costing far less money 🙂
Just to give you an example. I’ve been with friends in Geneva and Lausanne chatting with other people via gtalk from bars, restaurants and the living room couch. I’ve even skype called a friend with the N95 and she’s in the US. All of this is free, inclusive data within my contract. I want you to modernise, let’s use mobile communication in a more creative way than missed phone calls and unanswered SMS.
I was in Pully this weekend for the fifty year celebrations of the City Club Cinema celebrating half a century of existence. There were a number of special events, from a silent film being screened with a live orchestra to a number of documentaries being screened as well.
I particularly enjoyed the documentary screenings because the documentary producers and some of those interviewed in those documentaries came to the screenings and presented their films before the film and answered some questions at the end.
The documentary the I enjoyed, or at least found most interesting was “La Citadelle Humanitaire”, a documentary by Frédéric Gonseth and Catherine Azad. It explored the work done by André Rochat when he worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Yemen in the 1960s. The documentary explored the interesting work carried out by these humanitarian workers and the challenges they faced. It was told as much by André rochat as those that worked with him.
It showed some of the challenges they faced, from where to situate the hospital to having more mobility, facilitating prisoner exchanges up to the point of hostage releases being negotiated successfully. It’s a great piece of documentary making and within the next few days a few of the Q&A questions should appear on this blog as well as my own.
A second documentary that I watched, but that did not appeal to me quite as much was La Reina del Condòn by Silvana Czeschi and Reto Stamm. It confused me. I couldn’t see why an East German would come to Cuba to speak about Sexual liberation in a machist country. I couldn’t see any of her motivations in carrying out such a project. If I had produced the documentary that’s what i would have concentrated on. I would have interviewed her more extensively, spent more time exploring the personality and the motivations behind what she did.
What we had instead was an exploration of three or four people’s views which did not make the documentary uninteresting so much as that famous “So what?” question that an English teacher used to always ask me to elaborate on. It’s the same with this film. I simply think the exposition could have been more researched.
Umare Te Wa Mita Keredo (Les Gosses de Tokyo) by Jasujiro Ozu is a 1930s film from Japan looking at two children at this specific moment in time. It’s a silent movie where the two main characters are Children and a few days out of their lives. What made this screening special was the live four piece orchestra playing live at the front of the Room.
Finally Lars and the Real Girl was also screened. It was a strange topic to be explored but it made me think of the Film Parle Avec Elle to some extent, the role of online and offline relationships as well as dealing with people with certain characteristics. It’s a comedy and as a result you’ll spen some time laughing but at the same time it’s a reflective film into how we behave. I found the film to be quite interesting but another individual said that it was a little too slow so it’s hard to say whether you’d enjoy it.
Overall I enjoyed being at the City Club for their fiftieth anniversary, having interesting people to meet and good documentaries to watch.