Chris Heathcote has posted his Pirates & Scalpels slideshow, as mentioned here, so you can get even greater context.

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There's a PaperCamp heading to a city near you. If that city happens to be New York, anyway. One in San Francisco is being mooted, with maybe more to come elsewhere. You could always set one up yourself… Yes, you.

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Further to ( Read more... )

The next session's title, Why Everything On The Internet Is The Opposite Of How It Is In Print, intrigued me, and prompted some great discussion. Session leader, Mary Harrington, outlined what she thinks are the five qualities of books:

- physicality
- fixity
- boundedness
- authority
- universality

The physical shape of books is underlined by the ( Read more... )

After a lacklustre lunch at Camino in Regent Quarter (tasty food but slow and surly service), I decided I should ignore the exciting conversations happening upstairs at PaperCamp in honour of some exciting conversations happening downstairs at BookCamp.

First up was a session suggested by Kevin O'Neill (not that one) to discuss the creation of a ( Read more... )

On Wednesday evening, I went to the Prince Charles to a free screening of Us Now, courtesy of the lovely NESTA Connect people. It was pretty interesting; a snapshot of the last few years and the rise of media being used towards positive social change. There were some interesting case studies, such as Slice The Pie, a site where bands can go ( Read more... )

I've been quite the social party animal this past week. 'Tis the season and all, except that most of the events weren't actually related Christmas. It's all been a bit mad, so be prepared for a series of long posts.

On Tuesday night I went to the Webby Night at the ICA, which was quite fun. The nice Webbies people provided us with free booze, ( Read more... )

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This session was, for me, the least successful or useful. I think partly it was the timing; it was, perhaps, too serious a subject for the time of day. I’m not saying we shouldn’t discuss serious subjects in the evening, but coming after the fun of playing silly games, a quite amusing overview of the first two sessions and a period of mingling over ( Read more... )

This particular session, run by Johnnie Moore, was surprisingly the most useful one for me. I went in not knowing what to really expect from the title, except that “more play” sounded fun. Although I knew there were bound to be games at first, I still had an awful sinking feeling for a moment that they would be those cheesy roleplay-based ones ( Read more... )

I found the emphasis behind the session for Future of the Book really fascinating, especially as it’s one that’s inciting so many contentious discussions at the moment. There was a minor kerfuffle about it on Twitter a month or so ago, prompted in part by something Tom Coates said, which was really interesting but awkward to follow, and it’s a ( Read more... )

I struggled a bit to find the focus to write about last Thursday’s Amp08 event at NESTA. Ironically, that’s perhaps the most appropriate thing I could find to say about it, as the event seemed to lack a little focus itself.

A lack of focus was to be expected, though, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was being run along the unconference ( Read more... )