On this day in 2007 I was at the ALT Conference in Nottingham. This was the fourth ALT conference I had attended. What I really remember about this conference was how blogging became really big and important at the conference. We were blogging about the conference sessions, we were blogging about people blogging and lots of other stuff too. I think we were blogging because we didn’t have other tools that we could use, Twitter was just over a year old and most people were not using it (we didn’t have hashtags back then), so blogging was the only real online platform we could use.
I believe that people were blogging at previous conferences, but it was the first time that we had an RSS feed of all the blogs in one feed. This made it much easier to find blog articles on the conference and as a result the bloggers themselves. Importantly and this is why I think ALT-C 2007 was a sea change (and especially a sea change for me) was that these social relationships continued beyond the conference.
One of the sessions I attended at the conference was the Web 2.0 Slam – ‘Performing’ Innovative Practice workshop run by Josie Fraser, Helen Keegan and Frances Bell. This was (probably) the best session at the conference, certainly was for me and influenced a lot of stuff I did at later conferences.
They started off with the classic Web 2.0 Machine Video, which was shown at a lot of conferences I had been attending.
I think it still resonates today.
One of my early comments on this (and this was before Twitter really took off, so I did it on my blog) was
Josie Fraser is now giving an overview of Web 2.0, “think of it as a wave”.
Did Josie predict Google Wave, two years before it was launched?
As we were in Nottingham and we were put into groups to prepare something, I was in a group with Andy Powell, Agnes Kukulska-Hulme and Kath Trinder. We decided to create a Web 2.0 movement. We created a blog, a Facebook group and probably other stuff lost to time…
We called our idea Hood 2.0 (well we were in Nottingham, with Robin Hood) and are vision statement was:
A group that looks at how Web 2.0 services can be used to take from the “rich” and gives to the “poor” in terms of user generated content, advice, guides and case studies.
There were lots of familiar faces in the room. We did a fairy bit of arm waving if I remember correctly.
I was certainly one of the few people using Twitter, so I did a few tweets from the workshop.
At the web 2.0 Slam workshop.
— James Clay (@jamesclay) September 5, 2007
and
Hood 2.0
— James Clay (@jamesclay) September 5, 2007
You can see these were limited in scope and content. We didn’t do images or hashtags back then.
Though we didn’t win (we was robbed) we certainly enjoyed the session.
I can’t remember who won, but hopefully someone can remember and put it in the comments.
Having said that we didn’t win, the website we created for the session still lives….