a different tune

Last weekend Perth hosted Australia’s inaugural Podcamp, a community unconference on new media, blogging, podcasting and social networks. There was a great turn-out from the Perth web community. Great to see some visitors to Perth too: Cameron Reilly, Duncan Riley (are they related?), Stilgherrian (I’m over it), Leslie Nassar, and the friendly face of the evil empire Nick “professional geek” Hodge.

My impressions of the day are a little coloured a little by the fact that my attention was split between the sessions, the video camera, and playing dad to Mr5 and Mr9. Podcamp was a bit like Barcamp, with a little less focus on detail and a little more on “big pictures”. At times there were up to 4 sessions happening at once, which means that you’re bound to miss much of what’s going on. Hopefully, the videos here will help fill in some of the gaps. Given the number of contributors it might have been better to spread the sessions over two days. I liked the informal feel, though many of the presentations were pre-prepared which is not strictly “unconference” style. Most of them managed to include the audience in the discussion which is great.

Here are my videos from the day. I’ve put them on Viddler because it supports long videos and has some nifty tagging and commenting features. Feel free to be social : if you see something fun or interesting just click on the green “+” button and add a comment. That way, if people don’t have time to watch the whole thing at least we can check out the highlights. If you see the word “PROGRESSIVE” in the bottom left, click on it to switch to STREAMING mode. You can skip to any point in the movie by clicking in the seek bar, or on a comment point.

The Blog Session, in which Kathryn Greenhill gives some ideas on where to get your “Blog Fodder”, and Tiang Cheng presents an introduction to VideoBlogging.

Podcasting in/as Education with Tama Leaver and Sue Waters: Exploring the role of podcasting in education, not just the ‘record and spread existing content’ but also how we can engage students by getting them podcasting, too! Sue likes to walk around, so she’s not always on camera.

The social network in your pocket. Nick Cowie looks at mobile devices and social networking.

Social Media and the Federal Election. Stilgherrian talks about the Australian federal election on social media. Unfortunately, I lost the end of the talk when the camera battery went flat.

MP3 audio files for these talks are available here.

Simone van Hattem set up a Flickr group for photos from the day. Nick Hodge has some geek stories from some of the participants. Check out other reactions to the day from: Bronwen Clune, Richard Giles, Nick Cowie, Simone van Hatten, Tama Leaver, Nick Hodge, Duncan Riley, Stilgherrian, Cameron Reilly. My personal favourite is the Boomtown Rap (more here). Who is that mystery guy anyway? Update: Ross Buncle. Check out his geek story here.

Podcamp was a great community event. Its good to be able to match some faces to the avatars. Many thanks to those who helped make this happen: Bronwen Clune, Richard Giles, Tama Leaver, Rene LeMerle, and Gary Barber.

Its the time of year I’ve been dreading. Daylight savings in Western Australia starts today. In its wisdom, the state government decided to trial daylight savings from three years. Previously, daylight savings had been resoundingly rejected by the people in a referendum. But obviously, we don’t know whats good for us so a little daylight savings therapy will help us make the right decision next time.

Last year daylight savings created all manner of problems for us. In order to manage an increasingly complex schedule with work and family commitments my co-pilot and I have been using iPAQ rx1950 PDAs to maintain appointments for work and home. By syncing with the same PC, its possible to keep the devices more-or-less up to date with each other.

With the introduction of daylight savings we had to put the clock forward one hour at the end of October. You would think that you could just adjust the PC clock by 1 hour. Unfortunately this does not work - it keeps resetting to the “correct” (not) time. OK, well maybe we can just change the timezone to GMT+9. Bzzzt! Wrong again. If you do this all of the appointments in the diary are now wrong by 1 hour. I guess they are stored in some absolute time format, rather than being in local time. Eventually, Microsoft released an operating system update to fix the clock under Windows. But no fix was available for PocketPC, so the calendar on the mobile devices were still out of sync by one hour. Depending on where an appointment was entered it may or may not have the correct time in the Outlook database. Eventually, we had no confidence in the appointment time and resorted to writing the time in the appointment description.

Thankfully, this year Microsoft has released a fix for the problem. Unfortunately, it seems to only partially work. Read on for a tale of woe, or skip forward to discover what I learned.
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