kerimsatirli.com

It’s been five six busy days since CineKid 2007 (the main event) concluded and only just now did I find some time to talk about the event.

Let me preface this entry by saying: CineKid was great. I have never worked with children before, mostly because I did not consider it a good fit, I disliked crying and nagging kids and all the other lovely things that are associated with the younger members of our society.

However, after two days of helping children, explaining “big-people-concepts” to them and simply putting a smile (well, smiles) on their face, I find myself rather enjoying the whole thing, how about that?

Thanks to some shuffling with Anna and Laura, the chief-volunteer-managers, I was able to spend most of my time in the Medialab, which is just a fancy name for a building chock full of interesting interactive installations and games.

Right at the entrance for example, was Eddie Enter, built by Daniel van Gils, a teacher of mine.

While Eddie and the free spaceship you could get from him was great, the single one installation that I liked the most was the Funky Forest, a piece d’art that taught children the most basic concept of nature: life requires sustenance.

Said concept, however, is rather abstract for a five year-old and coming up with an easy way of teaching it, in my eyes, is no small feat. Still, Theodora Watson and Emily Gobeille managed to come up with an easy to use and easy to understand solution, the above mentioned Funky Forest:

The whole experience is pretty straightforward: step one is to go stand in front of the screen for about 10 seconds, until a camera scans you. The shape of “your” tree will mimic the way you were standing at the time the tree was planted and, from what I could tell, the way you are built also affects the process.

Once you have a tree, you need to ensure that it is being supplied with enough water. There is a stream of water coming from one side of the field and the water interacts with many large objects on the ground. This makes it possible for the children to channel the water towards a certain tree, or even deprive the nature of any water at all.

In order to keep the whole experience educational, the Funky Forest provides the players with visual and aural feedback in the form of good / bad insects and happy / sad sounds. The better you treat your tree(s), the more happy-bugs there will be and the more beautiful your forest will look like, obviously.

The whole game is very responsive and is still capable of handling individual shapes (for the tree-creation) with as many as eight players on the field. The water itself can be controlled by up to twelve players and I am quite certain that it would scale up to twenty, if the field would have been bigger.

All in all, this was a great implementation of an abstract concept, done the right way. Children just kept coming back and some even grew so entangled (get it?) in the game that they had to be dragged away by their parents, to go watch a movie.

Funny trivia on the side: while the installation is actually geared toward a younger audience, we had a couple of 40+ year-old (children?) “plant” trees too and crawl across the floor to get some water to their trees. I guess that it’s true what they say: men stay children…

Apart from the Funky Forest, there were a couple of stop-motion set-ups that allowed children of all ages to experiment with stop-motion films. All these set-ups were manned by professional animators / illustrators, such as Marieke van Middelkoop, amongst others.

For older children, CineKid had greenscreens set up where you could record your own dance video, there was a mini-studio where interviews with Dutch VIPs could be conducted and the Waag Society even provided a few people that taught children the basics of a Foley stage

That said, there is way more to it than just the things I mentioned here and if you are interested, you can probably get a general idea by browsing through my gallery or reading the thoughts of another volunteer, Jolien Merks on her blog.

Also, thanks go out to Bas van der Linden for providing me with a few additional shots and there’s even more at his site.

It took them long enough to come around to my corner of the woods, but finally, they are here: Room Eleven, one of the better bands of this time is in concert tonight, in De Effenaar in Eindhoven.

From what I have heard, Room Eleven always has great shows and therefore I more than plan on enjoying every single minute of it; the fact that I am being accompanied by a lovely friend of mine is just additional icing on the (delicious) cake.

CineKid 2007, heralded as the biggest children’s festival across the globe, opened its doors last Sunday, October 14th, 2007 and has had a pretty eventful week so far - just about every national (and probably some international) newspapers have written articles about the whole happening.

This time around, the beautiful Westergasfabriek was chosen as the main even location, which probably is my favorite spot in all of Amsterdam and, apparently, also the favorite spot of many things Mediamatic, the company behind evens such as PICNIC’07 and, obviously, CineKid Festival.

If you have any children, or still feel young enough yourself to attend this kind of event, do not hesitate - the festival is only going for another two days, till Sunday, 21st of October 2007 and there’s a good chance that you will have a great time.

In fact, a huge team of volunteers, including myself, will be making sure that you have a great time at the 2007 edition of the CineKid festival, so see you there!

It is no secret that I love NRC.next, a newspaper that is aimed at people aged 25 to 35 with little to no sparetime. NRC.next is my main source of up-to-date information and provides me with the latest happenings in the world that I did not pick up through CNN.

One of the great things about NRC.next is that ever so often, there is some way to participate in the creation of the newspaper in one way or another; this time around, students from sister-college St. Joost Breda were offered a shot at getting their work published on the front page.

The guidelines were rather simple: students were tasked to come up with two pictures, one for the front page and one for the actual article.

The students had a mere week to find a solution and in the end, Sophie Verstappen, sophomore student of St. Joost, came through with an interesting picture that fit the overall theme of the article very well.

In more personal news: I have never been a photographer nor do I see myself ever becoming one, apart from the occasional snap I take just about everywhere I go, yet two of my pictures of this year’s Edu-Fair in Utrecht were used for a short article that gave a short account of the event.

… to all of those that congratulated me today. I have received comments via email, text messages, a very funny voice message and even a handshake from a train conductor - how about that?

The two items that stood out the most though, were the ones I did not expect at all:

Dorien Aerts, whom I met at the European Bloggers Conference last Thursday sent me this:

And Olga Gachko, from Spb, maker of fine Windows Mobile Software sent me:

Spb’s message was totally unexpected, yet a very kind gesture. It shows that the company is committed to keeping their customers ( = brand multipliers) happy and that is what counts in business.

To all the others that did not make the blog - thank you all, too!

Someone just asked me what the best thing about the whole (un)conference was and while this is a tough choice to make, I would most probably have to say: equality.

No matter if you were a student, like Anne, Rina or me, a Web 2.0 business owner from Uzbekistan, like Serhiy, an A-List Blogger like Luca or a journalist like Dorien, Paul or Nick - you were as important as the next person.

Background ceased to matter during any and all conversations and people just took you for what you were, no one showed any arrogance at all and in that kind of setting, conversations can keep going for hours - like they did with us.

Dear EJC Team, thank you very much for a great two-day conference. You did a fabulous job with speaker selection and, incidentally, managed to attract a great audience and I will certainly be back next year!

On a related note: the EJC team is finally starting to upload some of the video clips their Austro-American Team shot at the conference - the first part is available here - while all the interviews they did are available here.

And for those that are interested, my interview, on censorship, embargoes and politics can be viewed right here.

After a short night’s sleep and still a bit groggy, most of us returned to the Friday sessions of the European Bloggers (un)conference which were kicked off with an Ideas Bazaar.

The stage was cleared and everyone interested was offered a chance to pitch his / her project or evangelize a service they believed in:

Luca Conti started out with his presentation of Buzz Paradise, a service that is not unlike to Buzzer.nl. The site provides influencers and evangelists with access to (yet) unreleased technologies, media and the likes in return for coverage.

However, contrary to what other services do, members of Buzz Paradise are not getting paid (at least - not in a financial form) and are not forced to write in a positive way.

Serhiy Danylenko, co-founder of the Ukrainian news site h.ua, gave a short presentation on his project as well and was followed by Bektour Iskender, creator of news service KLOOP, more explanation on this service can be found on Wikipedia.

Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog gave some insight into what it takes to be a Journalism student. actually invited attendees to share their experiences with blogging and citizen journalism so that Paul, in turn, could share them with a Western audience.

After the Idea Bazaar was concluded, Gabriel González gave an introduction on the subject of the International Weblog Awards, powered by the Deutsche Welle.

The awards are available in a number of different categories, such as Best Weblog, Best Podcast, Reporters without Borders, the Blogwurst Award as well as national awards for a number of different languages, all the while Vanessa Witkowski kept (live) blogging for CafeBabel.com, that is what I call motivation.

After a short break, the three groups from Thursday met up again to conclude the various tracks and more or less prepare some kind of presentation.

Our group, led by Luca Conti, was so lost in the application that, in the end, we had no time to create any slides at all, but thanks to Kathlyn, we still managed, and managed well enough. I was invited to join Luca during the presentation, which is an opportunity that I just could not resist.

All too soon, the first annual European Bloggers (un)conference ended and we all went our separate ways, which just happened to be a restaurant at the Westergasfabriek that provided ample opportunity to discuss anything from Web 2.0 to Identity 2.0 to the upcoming xolo.tv service.

During this year’s PICNIC week, the European Journalism Center conducted the first European Bloggers (Un)conference

The (un)conference was a two-day event, with a number of showcases, discussion panels, a pitching session and with only about 50 attendees, the whole conference was actually a great place to make new contacts and possibly even friends.

The first showcase on Thursday was presented by Evgeny Morozov of Transitions Online, who discussed the differences between East and West, which also happened to be the main focus of the whole conference.

Mozorov used a handful of great items to show how distorted the European / Western reality sometimes can get - for example:

The above image shows search engine results for pokemon, a toy / game franchise versus Václav Havel, last President of Czechoslovakia and first President of the Czech Republic.

Pokemon wins by amount of results, whereas the contributions of Havel seem to be a lot less important and since many of the results were from Wikipedia, one could easily assume that Wikipedians love trivia a lot more than substantial facts.

Mozorov continues his talk by pointing out that Web 2.0 actually evolved around LOLCats and even though this statement was made on a lighter note, the success of the most famous LOLCats site, I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?, speaks for itself.

Other examples included the use of Google maps in the Western world (mapping chocolate stores) versus the use of maps in the fight against dictatorship and abuse of power in the Eastern world:

During the talk it also became evident that the future of the web will be based around mobile appliances / devices - for example, the OLPC already employs built-in social networking technology that shows any other devices in the vicinity, without having to connect to the Internet.

Nokia’s MOSH, too, is a step toward that kind of development, as is the evolution of phone usage in general: cellphones are used for Sex Ed in Indonesia and for payment services in rural areas as well as monitoring votes in hotzones.

Mozorov then asked a simple, yet powerful question: what is more important? a hundred pictures of a gas explosion in NYC on Flickr, or one blogger discussing the use of technology in Africa? and finally, the talk was concluded with a quote that makes you go hmm:

[...] technology is not a thing in the ordinary sense of the term, but an “ambivalent” process of development suspended between different possibilities. This “ambivalence” of technology is distinguished from neutrality by the role it attributes to social values in the design, and not merely the use, of technical systems. On this view, technology is not a destiny but a scene of struggle. It is a social battlefield, or perhaps a better metaphor would be a parliament of things on which civilizational alternatives are debated and decided

A very powerful talk indeed.

Next up was Vanessa Witkowski from CafeBabel.com. Cafebabel.com was created in 2001 by Erasmus students and back then was already based around an energetic community. The site is based around the principals of participatory journalism and many of the articles are available in up to seven languages.

Their ultimate objective is to help people create an European Public Opinion which basically comes down to giving people a way to voice their opinion(s) in a suitable environment as well as propelling local debates to a European level.

Witkowski states that Cafebabel.com is building bridges between various countries, trains of thoughts and even though they are “just” starting out, the site has performed nicely so far.

The best way to grasp the concept of Cafe Babel however is to just visit their site, no matter if you are a teenager, student or manager - their articles will captivate you either way.

Website skoeps.nl was the focus of the third talk, given by Michael Nederlof. The site describes itself as the world’s first national news site that consists entirely of eyewitness accounts and while I have to agree that the concept (seems to) work well enough - after all, there are more than 14 internation versions of Skoeps, I strongly disagree with Nederlof’s analysis of YouTube and Flickr.

Nederlof claims that Skoeps is totally focused on providing news, news, news whereas all other sites are based around fun, fun, fun.

Yes, YouTube has a strong fun-component, but contributions such as the clips from user asiansociety, guides on how to do CPR or the discussions with political candidates definitely count as serious content in my book. Really makes me wonder how Nederlof defines “news” when clips such as this one are considered news too…

That said, their business model is great: upload a clip and if it gets sold, you get 50% of the total payment. Very nice, mostly unheard of (compare: Google AdSense publishers receive between 20% and 30% of the revenue).

Nederlof concluded the morning sessions with additional information on the future of Skoeps and a look behind the screens - Skoeps, a Web 2.0 site, is powered by the very-much-web-1.0 software PostNuke.

During the short break, I came acrossDorien Aerts from Hasselt Lokaal, a Belgian micro-journalism community. Very interesting project and definitely something more cities should have.

I also discovered the birthplace of Fleck and the original Fleck Man.

The highlight of the day for many people was certainly the session with Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame:

Doctorow talked about blogging in general and offered some great suggestions such as: write about the things you are passionated about instead of the things that others are looking for

He also elaborated on the way BoingBoing goes about their business: hardly no meetings at all keep the editorial overhead (very) low and enable the writers to focus on the important things: writing and discussing great ideas.

When asked how BoingBoing became as famous as they are now, Doctorow simply answered that it is the good taste of our bloggers combined with good writing skills - ain’t that the truth?

Anne Helmond of PICNIC’07 photo booth fame has a lot more on the Cory Doctorow session.

The remaining part of the afternoon was used for discussing the various tracks, such as Securiy Issues while blogging, How blogging affets societ and politics, and viceversa as well as Building Successful Web 2.0 application.

With three very interesting topics, it was hard to choose between the various groups, but in the end, I went for the Web 2.0 discsussion. Interestingly enough, so did most of the Eastern bloggers and contrary to popular belief, they spoke more-than-fluent English - which was great. One generally expects a thick accent - well, “expect again” I’d say.

Our talks ranged from copycats to mobile payment solutions, but I will blog more about that later.

In the late afternoon, after the EJC teams conducted a couple of interviews, we were treated to a boat trip across and around Amsterdam which was not only a nice gesture, but also a great place to network with others and in the end, networking is an integral part of any conference.

The evening programme consisted of an ad-hoc buffet / dinner at an Indonesian place where many of the conversations from earlier on were continued and even a couple of new ones were sparked.

My thanks go out to the whole group at my table, especially Luca Conti and Kathlyn Clore for sparking a great many discussion topics.