Next up, Damien Austin-Walker with the his nascent thoughts on how to use what is essentially a global technology in a local way – in this case, Apple Scrumping, although as a metaphor for community involvement in any project. Mere minutes in to the presentation the questions, ideas and suggestions come flooding – this sounding board seemed to strike a chord with most.

The primary questions were what to faciliate, how to facilitate it and also, importantly, why. On the one hand, people could be incentivised to do community work of all kinds by turning it in to some kind of actual-reality game with rewards; but as it was pointed out, people already want to do things and facilitating that would bring immediate benefits.

Discussed topics skimmed upon everything from social reputation systems to QR codes, RFID and GPS. In many ways discussion overlapped the previous presentation I was in.

Clearly this is an area full of questions without any tried and tested answers. Many good ideas flowed around the room but nobody is really doing any of this stuff yet – at least not to a degree that could be considered household – and nobody can really say what works and what won’t, although everyone is very interested. The major hurdles seem to be the dual barriers of technology uptake and public understanding and acceptance; right now it seems like this sort of facilitated community work would require a lot of geeks in a small space – a bit like this conference. But I have faith in time.

Conclusion: much to explore, many ways to do it, and a lot of enthusiasm from the very people who will make it work.

The topic title had me curious, so let’s see what happens! Fresh from the talk on how to write good headlines (according to The Times Online), perhaps this would better have been entitled ‘Native to a Web of Britney Spears on Viagra’ – who can say.

David Thompson hails from Cambridge. A self professed geek, he draws on material from talks by Tom Coates, Ben Ward and Tantek Celik to give a presentation on microformats. The first half of his presentation seems to cover familiar ground, although I’m grateful for the list of names and terms to take notes from.

Immediately interesting to me was the informtion about Yahoo Fireeagle, which I had not previously heard of – think geo-location mashup, and if you can’t, ask… Another point of note was that microformats don’t take off until they are adopted (Kelkoo, Flickr).

‘Ambient Intimacy’ seemed to be the hot topic, prompting immediate discussion and questions from the group. DO we really care if a friend wants to tell us they are eating a burger right now somewhere in the world? I didn’t find an answer to that – indeed, there are many interesting deeper unresolved issues in this area, too many for this blog post.

XFN gives us one means to avoid David’s pet hate – that when you join a new social network (assuming you haven’t succumbed to Social Network Fatigue already), to find your friends, they often ask you for your email or messenger password so they can log in and find them… a cardinal sin and a huge security risk. Other means are available too – Facebook and Twitter’s publicly exposed friends or follower lists. Directly using these would be ‘creepy’ – what’s the One True road?

In reality, XFN – or the idea of XFN – gives us a means to follow everything we are interested in, as long as it has an RSS feed, or perhaps a VCard or HCard. David mentioned FriendFeed and a tool written by my colleague David Singleton as an implementation in the right direction – I resisted the urge to jump up with pride.

What I really took home from this presentation was that information does not always speak for itself. David Thompson’s bold uneasiness at public speaking was endearing, although I think he could have kept the attention of the non-techy person who left the room (‘I’m sorry, it’s not you, it’s IT!’) had he re-ordered some of his points for catchiness instead of putting them in dependency order like every good programmer is used to.

Overall: thought provoking and informative.