I received my invite to the beta of Newspaper Club the other day and ever since have been trying to work out exactly which of the many stupid ideas I’ve had are feasible (not many it seems).
As luck would have it Brian Suda’s always excellent optional.is has a great post today ruminating on print on demand and the PaperNet (a term originally coined by Aaron Straup Cope).
Needless to say, we thought about how memorable it would be if you went to look at a house and the home-owner didn’t give you a simple A4 sheet with an address (yeah, thanks we managed to find the house already, so you giving us the address isn’t much help) instead they gave you a 12 page newspaper about the area. How well the school system is compared to other areas, where is the nearest shop to get some milk on a Sunday morning, a list of restaurants nearby, information about the parking discs and council tax, etc. If a home owner gave me a newspaper about the area and the stats looked good, I’d be sold!
The post is full of inspiring examples of this intersection between The Internet, print on demand and hyperlocal data sources.
Now, if only I could come up with my killer newspaper idea.
Herding cats at Oxford Geek Night
Last night I gave an updated version of my talk on successful community management, “How to Herd Cats” (slideshare link), at the sixteenth Oxford Geek Night.
(Update: Al has posted his video of the talk on Vimeo, thanks Al)
It was a particular honour to be asked to give a keynote as it was almost three years to the day (give or take a week) that I did a microslot talk at the very first Geek Night (a little nugget that JP stole for his introduction. Damn your eyes sir!).
As usual the night was great fun. Thanks to JP for all the organisation and set up (it’s true, gaffer tape really does hold the universe together), and thanks to everyone who came. I received lots of nice feedback after I’d finished the talk, which is always gratifying.
For those of you who wanted to delve deeper into the subject, then as I mentioned during the talk, you really can’t do any better than Jono Bacon’s “The Art Of Community”. It’s available for free download under a Creative Commons license, but I would urge you to buy a copy too. It really is a fantastic piece of work.
I’ve also collated links to related sites and articles on delicious.com under the tag “ogn16″.
And finally, for those of you who kept asking me about the Stormtrooper slide, I present you with the most awesome link in the history of awesome links: Stormtrooper 365.