Get on this: CaseCamp is back, huger than ever and this time for SickKids

casecamp

You might also call this CaseCampWorthTheWait, this one is bigger, huger and also larger than ever, featuring a full on mini-conference followed by a casecamp classic. The latter part is free as always, but your donations ($50 is suggested) is going towards SickKids. Eli Signer the superhuman behind CaseCamp and his team of rockstar collaborators have an ambitious target to raise $50,000 for the hospital for sick kids, specifically:

Funds raised at CaseCamp Benefit will go towards transforming the Critical Care Unit Waiting Room at SickKids Hospital in Toronto.

The Critical Care Unit at Toronto’s SickKids Hospital delivers round-the-clock care for children in urgent medical situations. The waiting room, located outside the unit, is a space designated for the families and friends who are visiting patients. Visitors use this room in a variety of ways: some are only dropping by en route to being admitted to the CCU while others will set up camp there for an extended period of time. The space must cater to a diverse population with multiple needs and preferences. Currently the space is in dire need of a renovation. –more

Great content, great cause, case closed.

When:

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Where:

CiRCA 126 John St. Toronto ON

What:

CaseCamp Conference

A grounding in internet culture and a crash course on social media strategy & tactics

CaseCamp Classic
The original! Four cases studies, followed by networking fun and drinks

LINK: CaseCamp.org

Posted in Archive, brandawesomeness, casecamp, conferences, events | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Are you backing up your twitter history?

machine-surfingFigure A: Typical Twitter experience /artist’s impression

Scoble has a great rant up today on twitter’s failing as a platform. This is similar to Jevon’s epic (and correct) rant on why you shouldn’t build a business on Facebook… or otherwise on someone else’s platform. At least not unless you are prepared to take the risks.

Risks being: did you know that twitter’s search history only goes back a few weeks? Did you think that all those pithy tweets and all those nice things folks may have said about you in @replies would be around forever as an archive or historical record? Don’t count on it.

Maybe, if we’re lucky, Twitter [see illustration] will be around forever, maybe if we’re lucky they’ll keep alive the archives of bit.ly and twitpic etc. so in the future we’d have some idea of what those links were pointing to. Maybe part of that business model will be the charging for access to the tweet archive. But there’s no guarantee.

To twitter’s fault/credit these problems relate to twitter being a little too good at what they do. It only becomes a problem once everyone (well at least all the cool people) pervasively filter a big part of our daily lives, our ideas, world events, our businesses through this single channel.

Does it make a lot of sense to route the western world’s realtime social backchannel through a single point of failure?

Historically, what is the life expectancy of any hottest new social platform? friendster, icq, geocities, hotmail* all had a good run while they lasted?

reminds one of an old haiku, the zen of 404 messages:

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

my advice? go out and invent the world’s next open-standards, distributed realtime social presence application. Or if you don’t have time for that, at least think about archiving your tweets. You never know when you might want them back.

more: Twitter’s platform shortcomings

more: tools for backing up your tweets. I haven’t tried them yet (I should probably get on that). tips?

*cough myspace, *cough* yahoo inc., AOL, compuserve, gopher the list could go on /for another deadmedia post

Posted in Archive, socialgraft, socialplatforms, twitter | Tagged | 8 Comments

New best-of indie podcast up Summer of 09

Rock show in Austin
It’s been toooo long since the last time I posted a real mix. What was once a once a quarter thing is now sadly stretched out to once every nine months or so. So my apologies that half these tracks didn’t have a release date anything like “summer 09”. Originally this was going to be the spring mix or previously the winter mix…

Nonetheless here’s the list of tracks and bands that have been piling up in my OMG great track, I gotta podcast this folder in iTunes. Consider this my autobiographical best-of music mix for 2009 so far:

enjoy:
toms09mix

Here’s the download link: In one big-ass 76MB zip file

If I’m organized enough I’ll also post the mixed-together streaming/podcast version for any of you still out there who subscribe to my podcast rss.

Posted in Archive, music, podcast | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments