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Suw Charman-Anderson

Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK's best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.

She recently launched Kits and Mortar, a blog about planning a green, cat-friendly self-built home.

Suw is also founder and board member of the Open Rights Group, a digital rights advocacy group which aims to raise awareness of digital rights issues, to campaign against bad legislation in Britain and the EU, and to support grass roots activism.

Her personal blog is Chocolate and Vodka, and yes, she's married to Kevin.

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Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson has been an online journalist since 1996, designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service.

Kevin is now the Blogs Editor for The Guardian, where he is responsible for management, strategy and 'leading by doing' for Guardian Unlimited blogs.

E-mail Kevin.

Member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup
Dark Blogs Case Study
Case Study 01 - A European Pharmaceutical Group
Find out how a large pharma company uses dark blogs (behind the firewall) to gather and disseminate competitive intelligence material.
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All content (c) Kevin Anderson and/or Suw Charman
Don't Miss The DrugSafetyHub, a new blog on counterfeit drugs and the evolution of the pharma industry

Strange Attractor

« Don't be afraid of Creative Commons | Main | FOWA07b: Heather Champ & Derek Powazek »

October 3, 2007

At the Future of Web Apps Autumn 07

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Posted by Suw Charman

So, I'm at the Future of Web Apps, and already feeling grumpy. The venue, ExCeL, is in London's Docklands, miles away from nowhere, and the conference opened registration at 8am, and the talks started at 9am. It took me over an hour and a quarter to get here, and I'm not a morning person.

Yet again, there are nowhere near enough power outlets for the number of laptops here. They have only a few power strips at the back of the room, and they just very cheekily said "don't hog the power", but if they had more power strips, then it wouldn't be a problem. I mean, who'd've thunk it - a tech conference with lots of people wanting power. Gah.

ExCeL is a big, big box of a venue, with a lot of sound bleeding through from stage to stage, and from the expo area. There are, after all, only curtains between them. That's not so bad when you're sitting at the front, but at the back in the power outlet ghetto, it's a bit harder to filter out the extraneous noise because you can hardly see them, so you can't focus on the person and use that to keep your ears trained in the right direction.

The seats are insanely close together, at least in the Entrepreneur stage. Both talks so far here have ended up having people sitting on the floor and standing - just not enough room for everyone. Given the size of the expo floor, I'd say that they haven't really planned this quite so well as they could have.

I'm still really miffed that all of the schedule information has totally the wrong talk title for my talk. I never even discussed talking about "The Future of Blogging" with anyone, so I have no idea where it came from! It concerns me a bit that people are going to not come, because the future of blogging is a way lame subject, and that people who would have come to hear about adoption in enterprise aren't going to know that's what I'm talking about.

It's a shame. FOWA's grown a lot, which is great, but I'm not sure that this experience is anywhere near as nice as the first FOWA I went to, which was one day, one track, and just really high-quality talks from people I respected. Now it's two days, two tracks, lots of short talks, in a hideous venue. At least some of the speakers are still high-quality, and that might just redeem it, but I've heard the phrase "jumped the shark" already this morning.

Comments (0) + TrackBacks (1) | Category: Conferences


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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference At the Future of Web Apps Autumn 07:

Short FOWA Complaint from Climb to the Stars (Stephanie Booth)
I’m here to live-blog, which must be a recognised activity as I got a “blogger” pass for it. However: the wifi is crap (sorry, I know it’s easy to complain, but it’s making my life difficult — uploading photos is a n... [Read More]

Tracked on October 5, 2007 1:48 PM

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