[FOWA 2009] – Round Up Day One (Workshops)
This year was the first time I attended the FOWA workshops. The term «workshop» is actually a bit misleading because basically it’s just a platform for longer talks (3 1/2 hours) and therefore the opportunity to get a bit more into the detail about a topic.
So much in theory. In reality this can be handled very differently. The workshop I attended in the morning started one hour late but was very interesting. I learned about the framework Cappuccino already a year ago – but this year it all made much more sense to me because in the meantime I had played around a little with Objective-C and Cocoa. Objective-J is pretty much the same thing, just for the web. But hold on, not only for the web. Atlas is going to change this. But more about that tomorrow, we had to promise Francisco from 280North not to blog about it today… Very interesting stuff, I’ll have to dig deeper into this!
In the afternoon it was all about marketing. Well, let’s no waste to many Kilobytes here about it. It was not good.
Anyways, the Atlas workshop was it all worth already. And hey, the location was just awesome! Plus we got tons of free food, snacks and all kinds of drinks.
Looking forward to tomorrow when the conference will start.
[FOWA 2009]: Kick-ass Online Marketing Techniques
Ok, after a very short lunch break (due to the last sessions late start and therefore late end) I’m read to hear some ass-kicking stuff about ass-kicking online marketing techniques! Speaker is @cubedweller.
- 45mins «how to become part of conversation» – 45 mins «SEO and bustin SEO myths» – 45mins «… something else». And this is supposed to be a discussion, not a one-man-show. I see structure in this talk, I like it!
- Promise: Measure everything!
- Listen to what people are saying about you: Google Alerts, TweetBeep, Google Blogsearch, etc. Or paid tools: socialradar.com, radian6.com, trackur.com
- Don’t just monitor your brand name, but things related to it (competition, industry, partners, clients, represantives, etc)
- People expect you to respond to what they say about you on the web. Saying nothing says a lot. Respond to blog, forums, etc.
- Good example on Twitter: @JetBlue
- @comcastcares had terrible reputation in US, opened up and started replying to customers publicly – it worked!
- Mashable -> search for successful Facebook fan page article
- Benito’s Hat takes feedback on Qype very serious, replies to each one!
- Users are NOT homogenous.
- Use demographic data, preference and opinion data (profile data, and reward users for giving you optional information), behavioural data to personalize your website.
- Building loyalty: connect to real life. Digg created Diggnation with live shows and meet with fans. Qype invites users to go out for dinner together.
- Think about communities that do/could exist around your brand.
- Extend into existing communities, it won’t kill you.
- Make it easy for your users to add your stuff to Twitter/Facebook.
One question that came up in my mind: On some websites you see those «tweet this» buttons. Have you ever actually used them? Why yes or why not? Let me know on Twitter!
SEO – Search Engine Optimization – Jonny Scott from them.
- Think like a Google Engineer!
- So far blah blah… about links. Heard a million times.
- says, Google said that h-tags no longer affect your Google ranking. (seems to originate with @thatadamguysays)
- Domains stronger than in past.
- Enhanced Search Snippets > add descriptive anchors and tables of content
- Rich Snippet Testing Tool
- Know what? This is not helpful at all… Talking a lot about little details which have more or less influence now than in the past, but not once mentioned that good content is a main key to a good search engine position.
Who the f***k are we? – Social media stuff by @envirograffiti and @gnewsrules
- This tweet says it all about the beginning of this part.
- Social media is NOT Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc. This is social networking.
- but digg, reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.
- Survey in room: How many on Facebook? Everybody. How many on Digg? A lot. How many on Reedit? Some. How many on Mixxt? Just one. But what’s point of this question?
- If it was a movie, this presentation would be R-rated for language and graphics
- Typical social media user: 70% male, Caucasian, geeky, above average intellect, smokes marijuana, atheist, propably never had a girlfriend. Are they serious??
- Sorry guys, those two are just ridiculous. I’m not any longer going to write about those teens.
My opinion:
Online marketing is definitely still a very developing and also challenging part of any business. There are many ways to get your message out to the people, unfortunately this workshop proved not to be helpful at all. The first part was interesting but focused on large companies (while this conference is about web apps and startups). The SEO part was just plain useless, there was not a single tip which could be used in real life. And the last part about social media was just ridiculous nonsense. Disappointed. At least @cubedweller tried to get it back on track towards the end of the session. However, how come no one ever even mentioned Google Ads or other paid online marketing strategies? This workshop was about online marketing, not about how to get clicks from lonely geeks.
[FOWA 2009]: Building Web Apps Using Atlas
There we go… FOWA is starting today with the workshops. One workshop in the morning, one in the afternoon. I’m attending Building Web Apps Using Atlas in the morning session. The group for this session is rather small and a nice mixture between deliberate coolios and obvious nerds. I don’t classify myself for now… ;-)
Oh, and we’re off for a real good start since the speaker is already 30 minutes late because he’s stuck in London traffic…
- 09:50 – Speaker Francisco is supposed to be here in 5 minutes, almost one hour late… We will work thru lunch break, I’d rather have slept a little longer…
- 09:58 – He made it! Let’s get started…
- Interesting, 280 North guys used to work for Apple software development (Mobile Safari, iTunes Store, etc.)
- Cool, during the session we’ll use etherpad.com to share links and questions in realtime. Well, WiFi problems now…
- Evolution of web: New York Times > Amazon > Facebook > Google Maps (pages to applications)
- Cappuccino (cappuccino.org) is a framework to create web applications (like 280slides.com). So you don’t have to do it like Meebo who has 40 employees and 20 of them are just there to write code for buttons, windows, etc.
- Objective-J: New language because HTML/JavaScript/CSS can never be perfect (hope I got that right). Any feature in JavaScript also works in Objective-J.
- Javascript:
object.method()– Objective-J:[object method]– and showing some other code snippets. Basically just like Objective-C («Its syntax is nearly identical to the Objective-C syntax» source). Idea: «Cocoa on the web». - Goal: Code you can read aloud!
- Showed lots of code examples, is going to do live coding demo now. > Interesting stuff.
- Quick snack break. When does Atlas come into the game? Well, Objective-J is the language, Cappuccino is the framework, Atlas is the development environment and visual editor.
- Haha, Francisco (the speaker) is kinda gathering monentum about the web not being based on commonly accepted standards (like in building browsers).
- Fundamental thing in Cappuccino: Views! It’s about GUI, not just maths.
- «CSS 3 is useless if you have no taste…» :-)
- Make stuff look nice with Aristo – Photoshop File
- Mac Interface Builder to Web with nib2cib!. I’m getting happier and happier to have had a closer look at Mac SDKs lately. This stuff is really becoming the same!
- Cappuccino debugging and logging stuff. Nice, as everything.
- Now, finally Atlas! But… not supposed to blog about it because Francisco is gonna talk about it at conference tomorrow or day after. Sorry!
I like how Objective-J is so close to Objective-C and Cocoa (which I kind of learnt over the last few months). So the approach to use the same style for web apps as for desktop apps is very appealing to me! I’ll definitely have to get a closer look at that stuff.
[FOWA 2009]: Let’s go learn some stuff!
Introduction in German before we get started in English:
Vom 30. September bis 2. Oktober werde ich die Future of Web Apps FOWA in London besuchen. Ich werde auf diesem Blog live darüber berichten. Allerdings auf Englisch, da dies auch die Sprache der Konferenz ist und es daher einfacher fällt, auch gleich in dieser Sprache mitzuschreiben. Und Englisch spricht zudem ein grosser Teil des Zielpublikums, das diese Einträge dann hoffentlich in Google finden wird.
Today is the day I’m heading off to FOWA in London. I am looking forward to an interesting event which will hopefully give me some insight in new, undiscovered technologies and some good tips and hints on how to make an online plattform successful.
For all of you who stay at home there is an interesting website which was created for just this event. It’s called HelloApp and let’s you see who is in the audience and who’s talking to whom. I’m curious how this will work out in real life. It obviously seems to generate quite some traffic on my Twitter account which might not be liked by my other followers… Therefore I created a brand new Twitter account just for that reason: sprainFOWA. Smart idea? I don’t know, but we will see.
Anyways, let’s talk about the schedule. On September 30 the workshops will take place. For the morning session I signed up for Building Web Apps Using Atlas – simply because I don’t know what it is and because it comes from the same guys as Cappuccino, which I was fascinated by last year. In the afternoon I’ll go listen to Kick-ass Online Marketing Techniques. Let’s hope they’ll live up to the session’s lofty title…
The schedule of the two conference days on October 1 and 2 contains some goodies, too. I’m curious to hear Kevin Rose, founder of digg.com, talking about Taking your Site from One to One Million Users. He promised to tell us «how to encourage users to tweet about your app». There will be a talk about current online payment trends which can be very interesting – if it’s not too much influenced by the speaker’s opinion (he’s from Paypal). I’m also looking forward to hear about The Future of HMTL5. There’s a lot to tell about, therefore also the warning «The speaker cannot be held responsible for your head exploding.». Let’s hope we’ll get close to that point!
The last day will start off with The Future of Frontend Engineering – Learning from Twitter. There’s definitely a lot to learn from Twitter, looking forward to it! A surprising talk for a web conference is The Future of Print. However, with my background of having worked very closely with a prepress company I’m curious what they’ll have to tell. Then I expect Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR! and Practical Advice for Managing the Growth of your Web App to give some very practial real-life ways to apply in a startup.
This is just a glimpse of what will be awaiting me for the next few days. As said, I’ll be blogging along. You can find all the related post right here.
London-Tour à la Mark
Da ich morgen nach London an die FOWA fahre habe ich mal bei Mark Howells-Mead auf Twitter nachgefragt, was es denn in der englischen Hauptstadt abseits der grossen Touristenmagnete sonst noch zu sehen gibt.
Die Antwort ist … wow! Ich glaube, ich muss meinen Aufenthalt noch etwas verlängern.
«Primrose Hill, Barbican, Smithfield Market, financial district (architecture), Victoria & Albert museum, Science Museum, Green Park, Battersea Park, Clapham Common, Hayward Gallery, South Bank (touristy, but cultural stuff to do), Finally, a walk along Victoria Embankment in the evening… then fish and chips and a pint of beer on this (stationary) ship.. Oh, I nearly forgot: Camden Lock Market. Very busy but lots to do, see… and buy!» (mhm72)
Vielen Dank für die Hilfe! Übrigens, Mark ist nicht nur ein hilfsbereiter, virtueller London-Guide sondern auch ein toller Fotograf.
Coop’s Heuchelei im Beauty-Magazin
Interessant, wenn man auf der Titelseite des Beauty-Magazins von Coop einen Artikel angepriesen bekommen, wie man sich von falschen Körperkult-Vorbildern lösen könne.
Und tatsächlich, ein vierseitiger Artikel plädiert dafür, sich nicht dem Druck der Medien und der Gesellschaft zu beugen und sich sein eigenes, gesundes, positives Körpergefühl zu erarbeiten. Gute Sache also, könnte man meinen.
Doch leider ist alles nur heisse Luft. Denn es folgt gleich der nächste Artikel mit dem Titel «Starstyle». Es geht um Frisuren und Coop meint dazu:
«Diese Star-Cuts sind die perfekten Stylingvorbilder und wollen nachgeahmt werden!»
Schade, Coop. Glaubwürdig wirkt dies leider nicht.
sprainTV: Jetzt als Podcast in iTunes!
Die erste Folge von sprainTV ist gut angekommen, das macht Freude!
Umso mehr Freude machts, dass sprainTV jetzt als Podcast in iTunes abonniert werden kann! Zwar hab ich noch gerade Probleme damit, das richtige Bild dazu in iTunes zu integrieren, aber das klappt dann schon noch…
Folge 2 ist in Vorbereitung… bis bald!
«177 Meter gross»
Die neue Miss Schweiz ist eine Riesin! – derbund.ch
Die besten Miss-Schweiz-Tweets
Die Wahl der Miss Schweiz ist ja nicht ausserordentlich spannend, die Kommentare der Twitterer helfen allerdings, die Show gut unterhalten zu überstehen.
Gerne gelästert wurde über Kandidatin Carmen Hediger:
Hat Carmen heimlich Wanderschuhe angezogen? Also laufen kann sie nicht… (odi86)
Dachte nur, weil sie mir so wie ein #bauerntrampel vorkommt… :-) (bloggingtom)
Und die neue Miss Schweiz Linda Fäh hat sich im Interview bekanntlich nicht sehr geschickt angestellt total blamiert. Der Kommentar liess nicht lange warten…
Blond? #missschweiz #antwortfail (rootix)
Abschliessend kann man also sagen:
Comment on #MissSchweiz by my father: eine Blondine wie aus dem Witzbuch (weissegiraffe)
Und eine Aufgabe gibts auch bereits:
Jetzt soll #missschweiz Linda Fäh die Schweizer in Libyen befreien (Amber_Steele)
Danke Twitterer, hat Spass gemacht ;-)
«genauso witermache & weniger tele bärn luege»
Feedback von DRS3-Moderator Reeto von Gunten zur ersten Ausgabe von sprainTV. Merci!
Bill for Bill
