Mike DelGaudio

Conducted By: Derek Powazek, Heather Champ

(These are my notes, they’ll be choppy.)

Derek - “Trying to apply technology to an emerging trend is like trying to paint a house that is still being built.”

So what is “User Generated Content”
- Derek:calls it “Authentic Media”. - is Big media inauthentic.
- Revised to “Hybrid Media”
But really it’s s”stuff people make because its fun.” Or they are good at it.

Step one 1: The Talent is out there.
When the web came to people first, it was trivialized
“It’s full of pictures of people cats. (but has that really changed?)”

It is accepted, that there is good stuff out there on the web., whether it is
Amazon.com reviews, or Wikipedia, or mass set pricing on eBay.

So how do you build a site that grows out there?
…. If you try to build a community you can’t (you can nurture them and help them grow) but they cannot be “built”.

But, You have to build your site for elasticity. — Heather
- Give them the tools that they want.
- Expect that they will do the right thing
- Reward the people who are doing what you want. (leading by example)
- Punish the bad. Make sure the harmful can be made to leave.
- Expect the unexpected.

An interesting side not about elasticity: Consider the GM Tahoe ad thing,
Some common thinking is that one of the reasons there was so much venom in the ads,
is because the people were confined into such a small box… they could not upload own video
own photos, they could not download the video, post it to youtube, email it,
it could only be seen on GM’s site. It was so limited, people, rebelled.
Alternatively, give many ins and outs..like flickr and Base and Delicious

When people use your system in a way that you do not expect, they are doing you a favor
They are showing you what they WANT to do. (Don’t assume they are stupid, assume you
are stupid for not giving them the tool to let them do what they want)

Give people a reason:
- Ego
- Toolset
- Monetary
- Entice participation.

Step 2: Finding the good stuff.
How do you separate out the good stuff.

1 - Editors, hire people who decide what the good stuff is.
it worked for newspapers.
- Non Traditional editors - Helpfulness, moderation. Reputation
2. Computers — what Google did, for example, have an algorithm
that determines the better stuff
3 - Hybrid: Flickr’s Interestingness.A secret sauce that evaluated what people
do with the stuff to devise a vote. But try to design against gaming.

Step 3 - Wisdom of Crowds — “The wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki ”
- Individuals a wrong, but if you average all those wrong answers together
You’ll probably get the right answer.

Communities Make money.
Communities form around commerce all the time. It’s ok to make money, if the community supports the money-making effort. Do it at their expense and they will abandon you.

Conducted By: Derek Powazek, Heather Champ

(These are my notes, they’ll be choppy.)

Derek - “Trying to apply technology to an emerging trend is like trying to paint a house that is still being built.”

So what is “User Generated Content”
- Derek:calls it “Authentic Media”. - is Big media inauthentic.
- Revised to “Hybrid Media”
But really it’s s”stuff people make because its fun.” Or they are good at it.

Step one 1: The Talent is out there.
When the web came to people first, it was trivialized
“It’s full of pictures of people cats. (but has that really changed?)”

It is accepted, that there is good stuff out there on the web., whether it is
Amazon.com reviews, or Wikipedia, or mass set pricing on eBay.

So how do you build a site that grows out there?
…. If you try to build a community you can’t (you can nurture them and help them grow) but they cannot be “built”.

But, You have to build your site for elasticity. — Heather
- Give them the tools that they want.
- Expect that they will do the right thing
- Reward the people who are doing what you want. (leading by example)
- Punish the bad. Make sure the harmful can be made to leave.
- Expect the unexpected.

An interesting side not about elasticity: Consider the GM Tahoe ad thing,
Some common thinking is that one of the reasons there was so much venom in the ads,
is because the people were confined into such a small box… they could not upload own video
own photos, they could not download the video, post it to youtube, email it,
it could only be seen on GM’s site. It was so limited, people, rebelled.
Alternatively, give many ins and outs..like flickr and Base and Delicious

When people use your system in a way that you do not expect, they are doing you a favor
They are showing you what they WANT to do. (Don’t assume they are stupid, assume you
are stupid for not giving them the tool to let them do what they want)

Give people a reason:
- Ego
- Toolset
- Monetary
- Entice participation.

Step 2: Finding the good stuff.
How do you separate out the good stuff.

1 - Editors, hire people who decide what the good stuff is.
it worked for newspapers.
- Non Traditional editors - Helpfulness, moderation. Reputation
2. Computers — what Google did, for example, have an algorithm
that determines the better stuff
3 - Hybrid: Flickr’s Interestingness.A secret sauce that evaluated what people
do with the stuff to devise a vote. But try to design against gaming.

Step 3 - Wisdom of Crowds — “The wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki ”
- Individuals a wrong, but if you average all those wrong answers together
You’ll probably get the right answer.

Communities Make money.
Communities form around commerce all the time. It’s ok to make money, if the community supports the money-making effort. Do it at their expense and they will abandon you.

Apologies for the light blogging recently. Things have been hectic. I’m in San Francisco now at the Web 2.0 Expo. I’m going to take a turn away from Picasa for the week an Blog some notes from the conference.

Apologies for the light blogging recently. Things have been hectic. I’m in San Francisco now at the Web 2.0 Expo. I’m going to take a turn away from Picasa for the week an Blog some notes from the conference.

Blurb Booksmart software is probably one of the easiest and cheapest ways out there to create a book for yourself. I’ve talked about it extensively before. A minor gripe I have about blurb, is in it’s ease of use, you have to constrain yourself to certain templates that they provide to layout your text and photos.

But, if you want a greater degree of freedom in your blurb layouts, and are willing to put in a little extra effort, you can always make your own pages using a photo editor such as Photoshop, Paint.net or the Gimp

Just layout the page they way you want it to appear, add your text right on the image, use overlays, rotate images, drop shadows, do whatever you want in your editor.

Then add that image to the Blurb library and place it on a full-bleed photo layout page in Blurb.

That’s it. An easy way to break out of the templates that are provided with blurb, but still dead-simple upload and publishing.

Do you have another way to do layout free hardcover publishing on demand? let me know in the comments.

I keep my MP3 library on an external drive, and sync iTunes to my iPof form there. So, when my external hard drive kicked the bucket after a power outage, I rummaged around the interwebs to see if there was a way to get the files off my Ipod and Back into iTunes.

So far I have had good success with iDump.

Here is how I recovered the music.

First, I had to get get a new external hard drive. Bummer. Luckily the prices have come way down since the last time I purchased one so I was able to get a much larger drive for the same money.

Next I downloaded iDump (Windows only, Free). They have a “just .exe” version, so there is no install. Just click the EXE and go.

I hooked up my iPod, then watched for ITunes to appear, and closed it as fast as I could after it opened. Since my Liabrary was gone from the drive, I wanted to make sure I tunes didn’t go and scrub the files off the iPod too. I don;t know if that would’ve happened, but I didn’t want to risk it.

iDump found the iPod and after a few seconds it displayed a list of all the files on the device.

Here is where a keyboard shortcut helps…. iDump, by default is set to NOT copy a file unless it is selected in the list. My list had around 2700 files. The Developers at iDump don’t seem to have a heads-down way to select a file, you have to click it with the mouse (boo!) BUT, if you want to recover EVERY file on the iPod as I did, you can CTRL+A to select all files.

Go over to the output options Tab and make sure that it is set to pull all the right file types off, and if you want the copy to go unattended (thich means you can set it to overwrite or skip files already on the disk.

Then click “Start Copy”

I did find that some files did not copy, apparently as a result of characters in the filename that iDump didn’t care for. Luckily these were all podcast files for me, so no great loss.

Best of all, since this is a zero-install app, I can put it on my iPod so if this happens again (and I’m sure it will!) I can grab the files again.

Do you have a better solution? Let me know in the comments.