Author Archives: nephthysnile

Running a conference or convention? You need to read to read this.

Why?
Every conference.
Every single conference…

“Here is the wifi password: XXXXXXXXXX1234.”

The hamster starts running in the wheel…

Aaaaaand, has a heart attack.

Conference attendees beat their heads against their iThings and other devices.
The tweet feed slows to a dull roar, then a trickle … Then … Stops.

Every time.

Why?

Venues do not seem able to comprehend the idea that while they may deal with conferences all the time, that more people are bringing more devices to a conferences in order to record all their brains may not be able to capture. Not only that, but they still want to be able to keep up with their own tweet feeds and Facebook pages. Needless to say, while it may be a good enough wifi service for small numbers of people, it simply cannot shingle the load of attendees carrying two or three devices, all to which have notifications on for multiple apps, and are trying to get their emails at the same time as tweeting and blogging.

I’m not sure what the solution is to this. I know in the past, I have worked for events at have one dedicated wifi for the official bloggers and one for the rest of the attendees. Even then, the strain was too much, it broke on a few occasions, and I was forced to resort to using my cellular data in the interim while the problem was solved.

Another pet peeve, and some may well see this as a bit of “gimme gimme”, with all the different devices being employed, and with the drive to tweet away to your heart’s content, or “follow the event on the following hash tag”, why do events not think of setting up a bank of power boards. I’m not suggesting that they supply an array of various charge cables for the different devices out there. People should bring their own! What I am suggesting is that we admit that we are a power-hungry society, meaning electricity but you can read into that what you will, and cater to that need. Want people to tweet? Let them, but provide them with a means to charge their devices so they can.

Ahem…

I will now return you to your normal programming.

Where Did It All Go Wrong?

Social Media. It’s a catch phrase that used to carry with it so much promise. You could keep up to date with friends across the world from the comfort of your home and in your own time. Then came the social games, which offered the chance to play games with all your online friends and gain in-game rewards for the amount of people you had attached to your “friends” list. Then came the gamification of knowledge, with its badges of honour for depth of knowledge as awarded by your peers. Then … Then came this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=D5fB5d2mqnc

Now, at first I suspected it was a parody, or a prank being played by a group of hilarious friends… Not so. I went to the website and had a look around.

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Looks fairly innocent, right? Well, let’s look further…

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Ummmmm… So, you’re just the platform on which this craziness can occur, but you accept no responsibility if anyone gets hurt, or if anything illegal happens.

THAT’S MADNESS!!!

See, this is the fundamental flaw that most people seem to not realise about the interwebs. All that stuff we skip past called the Terms Of Service? Yeah, that actually is just a document (for the most part) about how we, the user, accepts all responsibility for the stuff we do through these various services, but that the services themselves accept no responsibility for … well … much at all really.

Service outages? Not their problem.

Damage occurring from use of service? Not their problem.

Illegal activity performed on their service? Not their problem.

Making sure that all challenges are sane, safe and not illegal? Completely the user’s problem! Because we users have been so good in the past at keeping that in mind when doing stupid things on the intertubes.

I think this situation deserves:

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Now, I know that writing about this will provide the site with a multitude of hits, which is exactly what it wants in order to justify its existence. The reason I’m writing, rather than ignoring, is that people I know will sign up to this stupidity and then I’ll be forced to hear about it more… Also, people will sign up without reading the ToS (because that’s what we all do) and will get hurt, try to sue and be slapped in the face with the stupid fish.

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