If you had suggested to me, three years ago, that I would be blogging a conference, I would have said, “Wha…?” Yet, I think that the potentials of conferences that are wireless, with reflective participants blogging their notes and their insights about what they are learning ** IS HUGE **. The information, ideas, and even some of the energy, will escape the orbits of our best conferences, a further infect us with the viruses of change.
I tried, a few weeks ago, to tap into the digital exhaust of a media conference in Paris. Alas, I could not find any reference to suggested tags on the conference site. I’m sure that attendees were blogging the event, but they were probably agreeing among themselves on how they would organize and reference each other’s blogs — a closed conversation.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have a place to go, where we, the bloggers, could suggest to a broader community of readers and conversers, the tags that we should use in writing, podcasting, and shutter-clicking the events we get to attend. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could hitch hike our way to these conferences.
OK! So I started building. It’s the Lego geek in me. I must build. For your consideration and free use, I present hitchhikr. That’s three Hs, no “e”, dot com. Point your browser to:
[The DNS is propagating now, so access may be spotty for the next couple of days. If it doesn’t work, try http://72.32.88.194/hitchhikr.com/]
It’s a conference aggregator for lack of a better phrase. You’ll see two lists of conferences in the panel to the right. The top list includes conferences that will be happening in the next month (in red), conferences that have already happened in the last month (gray), and any conferences that are currently going on (blue). The longer list beneath includes all of the conferences that have been registered on hitchhikr. They are sorted by popularity.
You can click any conference to receive its report. Reports include a brief description, submitted by the person who registered the event (any registered hitchhikr can add a conference), a logo, a link to the conference web site, dates and suggested tags. Only the person who registered the conference can edit it.
Beneath this area is the aggregator. There is a primary default tag that it searches on initially, displaying thumbnails of any tagged flickr images and a list of the latest blog articles. There’s also a link to an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite aggregator. Other suggested tags are listed, and will be search when you click them.
Any logged user can add a tag, by clicking the plus (+) symbol. Any logged user can also delete a tag. The suggested tag for NECC is NECC06. It would also be a good idea to also tag blogs with just NECC as well. It may also be useful for presenter to add tags with their names. For instance, I’m doing several sessions and might suggest that bloggers in the audience tag any entries about my sessions with necc06warlick. I could then add that tag to hitchhikr so that they can be aggregated there.
For the pictures, you can click “See Collage” to view all of the images, as thumbnails, on a single page. Or you can click “See Slide Show” to link directly to flickr’s slide show feature for some real fun. I love this part.
This may be a really dumb and useless idea. If so, I have, at worst, lost some hours in development, and, a best, gained some new programming knowledge. But if hitch hiking to conferences seems to make sense to you, then please stick your thumb out, and hitch a ride, on hitchhikr.
2¢ Worth.
Hi David,
Very cool. Like you I hitched into Elive on day one (I attended day 2) I even put together an eLive 2006 RSS experiment on my old box at home. hitchhikr is what I really wanted.
This is great Dave…. I blogged about it yesterday on my site when I listened to your podcast. This is so helpful for folk like me who are overseas and can’t get to these great events. I am attending a presenting at a big event here in Australia later this year so I will add it to your site. Actually I am at an Apple event all about podcasting on Friday!! I will have to give it a run.
I don’t like plugging myself on other’s blogs but I just posted one of those teacher inspirpation thoughts on my blog this morning. http://blog.brettmoller.com/?p=109 I think you may like it!!
Thanks again for all the hard work!!
Man, this rocks! I hope we can get folks posting links here to keep up virtually, for those of us who only get to one or two conferences a year. I agree with Brett – thanks for all the hard work. DNS is still propagating (or, at least, the NCSU guest access here in McKimmon Center doesn’t have it yet!)
Dave,
Playing around with this a bit and have run into some trouble. I may be doing it wrong but I submitted a seminar for this Friday with the tag applepod06 but the post I just did on my site including the tag applepod06 is not showing up on the hitchhikr site…. Any idea of what I could have done wrong?!?!
Cheers,
There could be an issue with this, Brett, but it’s probably waiting for Technorati to find it. I’m using Technorati’s API for the blog searching, but Technorati has to have found the blog first. If you have an account with Technorati, and your blog is registered there, then it finds it faster.
Also, my aggregator caches feeds for an hour. This keeps technorati from getting angry at me. 😉
Great idea Dave – however I have had a problem logging in – I get logged straight in as a user by the name of Julie Lindsay, but would obviously like to be myself and submit a conference. Any ideas? Jedd.
Ingenious!! However, it automatically logged me in as Jedd Bartlett. Right initials, but I too would like to be myself.
–Joe
Mom, a bozo stole my nick, i’m famous now !!!
Wow, brilliantly executed ideas….. an aggregator of conference aggregators. I was able to log in an add an entry for our New Media Consortium conference which was earlier this month:
http://www.hitchhikr.com/index.php?conf_id=49
and it was easy as can be. I had made an effort at this conference to have folks tag consistently:
http://www.nmc.org/events/2006summerconf/tag.php
Getting people to tag in flickr is easy. Technorati is a bit more complex, especially for bloggers using public sites that cannot be configured to ping the big T- having to manually add a hyperlink with a rel tag AND then manaully pinging Technorati was a lot of extra steps that a few missed. I was please others managed to tag conference related sites in del.icio.us (though some un-related sites got tossed in, tag spam?).
The tihng is, while we had some success, I know it is still a rather small, long tail edge height number of people actually participating– I saw many more photographers than are represented in flickr. But it is cool when you can pull together the content automatically from disparate sources.
Tag on!
This is great! I was able to easily add conferences to the list. I have only 2 suggestions.
1. If the image you link to is smaller than 200px it shouldn’t be resized.
2. We need a library interest area for library related conferences.
Great idea! I love it! Keep up the great work.