During this years HighEdWeb 2009 Conference there was a bit of a debacle with one of the keynote speakers. The speaker was David Galper.  Here is a quick run down of this keynote presentation:

College students are an interesting bunch. Everyone thinks they know what they want and the truth is no one knows not even the students. David will share his trials and tribulations building a school sanctioned legal digital entertainment service for college students. He will share how he has successfully reached and interacted with college students online. David will present a general understanding of what does and does not work with college students as well as specific recommendations for University sites. Bring your questions and fun ideas.

This sounded honestly, like a pretty good presentation.  I was curious to see what he had to say, as did many others.  Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out as well as we would have hoped.  Mr. Galper was once an enterprising entrepreneur who knew of a niche (the out of control download of music), and tried to exploit it.  He helped start a company called Ruckus, that helped curb illegal downloading on college campuses, but allowing students to download music legally.

At this time, this was a novel idea.  His ideas were definitely cutting edge back then.  Unfortunately, in today’s world, his ideas have already been considered mainstream.  None of this was news to those of us in the room.  In fact, most of the ideas he presented were in fact, out of date.  He made mentions of older programs like Kazaa and ICQ.  Programs that saw their limelight and have since faded into the interweb.  This caused quite a ruckus, no pun intended.  Read it yourself.  Now you can read lots of other opinions here, here, here, and here.  What I want to talk about is whether this is really as “uncommon” as many people think.

I honestly, think that we see this all the time.  I just don’t think that anyone has really thought about it before.  Most of the time though, we haven’t seen it.  Many of these back channels have been closed to us.  The advent of twitter has changed this.  Twitter gives everyone a place to post what we think, in real time.  I think this is something that has been coming for a really long time.  People flock to places where they can share ideas with like minded people.  Why do we think places like myspace or facebook have become so popular?  This kind of thing can be amazing.  However, it can also be a curse when things snowball.  So is this That’s the amazing thing about this instance…  unlike most flame wars, comments were completely one sided.  No one had anything good to say about the speaker.  No one defended him and at the time, no one questioned the etiquette of those making the posts.  What does that say?   That people inherently are snarky and sarcastic?   I don’t think so.  I think that it does say that the crowd can be a powerful thing, especially when they are completely united against something.  Will we see this more in the future?   You bet.  I do think that it will make presenters think twice about their audiences before they present to them.

Why?  I’d say that in the future, the presenter/audience dynamic will change.  No longer is the audience passively listening to a presentation.  In the future, they will be participants.  Which is amazing and scary at the same time. It will certainly make presentations better.  What does this mean for all of us?…

Social Media FTW!

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Wondering what in the world?  check out:
Web Content Marketing: How to Successfully Publish and Promote A Website With Outdated and Irrelevant Content

If you already have Leopard and are happy with it, I would probably suggest staying with it, unless you feel you need the upgrade.  Why shouldn’t you upgrade?  Well, the big issue is that some of your apps could cease functioning.  Some of the big under the hood changes, could seriously affect how your apps work.  Now many of the app developers are coming up with fixes for these issues, so before you upgrade, make sure that your apps will work, or have a workable fix.  These are some of the issues I’ve seen…

My current version of aMSN (an MSN messenger app) crashes before it even opens…

One of the biggest changes is Microsoft Exchange connectivity using Mail, iCal, and Contacts.  Now, this is probably the biggest reason I got the upgrade.  Belmont uses Exchange Online hosted by Microsoft.  I figured I would be adding everything manually.  What surprised me was how amazingly simple  it was to set up.  I simply put in my email address and password, and Mail found it almost immediately…  until it downloaded my messages, and stopped at August 24th.   For the life of me, I can’t get it to pull any more from the mail server…  talk about strange…

Especially after I used the Connection Doctor to diagnose the problem.  According to it, everything is hunky dory.  In looking at the settings, everything looks right, maybe I’ll figure it out soon. Until then, stuck with Entourage.

Also, iCal refuses to sync from the server.  Which is randomly annoying.  Looks like a spinning wheel of death to me (not to be confused with the spinning beach ball of death).

Maybe this is just snippy…  but there were changes to the wallpapers.  I had a favorite rocks Nature wallpaper. It was nice and dark, and surprisingly soothing.

They were nice enough to replace it with another (which loaded when the OS came up the first time). The weird thing is, they kept all the other wallpapers from the previous version of the OS.  I guess the picture wasn’t zen enough for Steve Jobs.

So instead I picked this one… its not too bad.

All in all, I think that this version of OSX isn’t something to write home about, or even make a big deal about.  I don’t really think it was meant to be a big deal.  That’s somewhat disappointing, especially since Windows 7 is just so freaking awesome.  Maybe they have put all their effort into the tablet that has yet to appear.  For now, I think I might load some Windows 7 boot camp, and enjoy something fun to work with…  wow.  I never expected to say that any time soon…