My friend Paula Lerner, a fine photojournalist and multimedia producer, has regularly worked in Afghanistanover the last few years. One piece of reportage contributed rather substantially to an award winning multimedia production published by the fine Toronto Globe & Mail (long may it prosper.) Gongs all ’round and kudos to all concerned. One problem. The PR piece published by the TGM didn’t even mention Paula’s name. That, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked, so I thought I’d do something about it and penned the following note to Managing Editor for Photography, Moe Doiron.
Congratulations on TGM winning the EPPY, though I can’t help but wonder why you would not afford the photographer the common courtesy of mentioning her name in the announcement. If it wasn’t for Paula’s enterprise and grit, where would that particular piece of reportage be?
Perhaps your organisation has a “company policy” of not mentioning freelancers. No doubt it’s founded in some solid thinking about not diluting the message or confusing the readers. To me, alas, it’s either a neglectful oversight or, worse, willful disregard indicative of the level of respect the editors actually have for the freelancers who serve them. Either way it smacks of corporatism and does little to improve relations with the external professionals without whom your fine publication would be somewhat diminished.
I’m just wondering who will get the credit for anything once every news organisation has sacked its staffers due to economic pressures and has to rely exclusively on freelancers for content. Will editors continue to pretend that they do not exist?
Good publicity is good for everyone and a rising tide floats all boats, or is that too naiive and should one employ a far harsher degree of cynicism these days?
So how about giving credit where credit’s due?
Well, wouldn’t you know it. It worked. Here’s the revised PR note, and here’s a direct link to the excellent piece of multimedia reporting : “Going behind the veil.” Kudos to Moe Doiron and The Globe & Mail for taking this seriously.
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Update: in an email from today, 23 June, Moe pointed out he’d already asked for the announcement to be corrected prior to getting my message. Seems photography editors do take the photographer’s side whenever possible. Good to hear it!
With the presidential elections just around the corner, Poland’s landscape is plastered, dotted and punctured with election posters, billboards, stickers and other kinds of printed flotsam destined for the trash heap the day after the elections. Politicians with expressions ranging from a vacant stare to supercilious smirk greet us from every street corner.
Without getting into a partisan discussion about the relative merits of any candidate, I am moved to comment on the impressive posters for Mr Kaczynski or, more specifically, on the slogan they bear :”Poland is most important”. A spot of deconstruction is in order.
All political slogans are public-facing distortions of an underlying myth and belong to the category of meaningless constructs. Convenient as a weapon and a rallying cry, such a vague mythological contraption once deconstructed can, however, offer an encapsulation of the politician’s beliefs. In the case of Mr Kaczynski it is actually an example of where political discourse in this country may be heading: further myopic partisanship leading to more polarisation, leading to more populist grandstanding…
While it is logical that a conservative politician would follow the advice of his strategists and ad men and go to the heart of the part of the electorate usually described as “patriotic” – since placing “Poland” front and centre of his election campaign immediately threatens to brand anyone who would dare disagree with that statement as anti-Polish – it smacks of “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”. It is evidently “their” idea of Poland that is most important, not anyone else’s. This, of course, is simplistic conservative populism at its pernicious worst, echoing ghosts of presidents past, in other lands. It is divisive, blinkered, backward-looking, and does not bode well for Mr Kaczynski’s prospects in terms of broadening his, and ultimately his party’s, appeal. Then again Mr Kaczynski appears to be losing no sleep since he is not fighting for the centre. ( Sliding into irrelevance by failure to broaden one’s electoral base would chase sleep from the eyelids of any centrist politician.) He is deeply entrenched within the conservative camp and happy to stay there. As election slogans go, I find this one deeply offensive since, by Mr Kaczynski’s definition, the rest of us are anti-Polish.
Self-righteous escapism into a more noble patriotic past does little to suggest a readiness to confront the challenges of the 21st century but then it is effective in mobilising the conservative nationalist camp to vote. In a country where voter turnout is low it is probably the best means of ensuring a win. Plus, as a prelude to the parliamentary elections due in about two years’ time, this is certainly an interesting opening salvo in the coming battle. It seems that Mr Kaczynski and his advisors are placing their faith exclusively in their own electoral base – and probably rightly so since that is surely their best bet. This can only mean one thing – since PiS is not likely to win an absolute majority in two years’ time, should they win enough to be able to form a government they will need to enter into a coalition. Strange bedfellows are not strangers to the Polish political scene but a PiS “almost win” in two years’ time will almost certainly mean coalition with elements from the loony right. We may yet end up with a government where a minority coalition partner imposes adherence to “traditional values” as more important than wise governance. Is that the kind of Poland that is “most important”, I wonder.
As a lawyer friend remarked in a conversation the other day, “What is patriotism in peace time?” I’m sure it amounts to more than simply posturing, listing all the things one is “against” and, crucially, bringing up The Past. Any party which trots out the patriotic theme is, I’m afraid, committing a gross affront and doing major disservice to the very people in whose patriotic memory it professes to be acting. The fallen thousands would be offended by their memory being used as a trite political appearance booster.
Just in case you’re wondering, I assure you I have no interest in proselytising. The other candidates’ records range from questionable to non-existent and their slogans are just as vacuous. Mr Komorowski’s impressive moustache does a good job of hiding a mouth which is yet to utter something substantive. I for one have no idea what he stands for and whether or not he’d be anything other than a mouthpiece for Mr Tusk, if elected. Mr Napieralski’s campaign spot utilising the attributes of two attractive blondes would be better suited as promotion for a late night motoring show. The others? Not exactly inspiring and some more ridiculous than others.
Not much of a choice out there, but that is no reason not to participate. If we do nothing, things are not likely to improve next time around. Quite the contrary, as politicians emboldened by great apathy in the centre will forever ratchet up their rhetoric to ensure participation by their own narrow base, further driving apart the already polarised nation.
If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain afterwards.
Jose Azel, as much a thoughtful intellectual as accomplished photojournalist and founder of the international photo agency Aurora Photos shares with us some hard-won insights as well as his business philosophy which combines an altruistic approach with a keen attention to the bottom line.
Listen as Jose recounts his early experiences and then seamlessly moves on to the inception of Aurora and its subsequent evolution through the turbulent period of rapid growth coupled with incessant technological and business change and the need to rapidly adjust both processes and goals.
The theme tune is “Lucid” by Nigel Gavin off his Thrum album for which I took the liner photos. The album is available on iTunes and you can find out more about Nigel here.
Starting in a few days I will begin to post audio interviews with some of the World’s thought leaders in the field of photography – the people behind the images – under the common name of Talbot’s Fox.
First up we talk to award winning photojournalist and founder of the elite photo agency Aurora Photos, Jose Azel. Jose shares with us his thoughts about the future of the profession of photography in a changing business and technology landscape.
This is a long post. I thought I could break it up but then thought the better of it. If you are organising a TEDx event – or any other small conference with people speaking and presenting – this is for you, and I’m hoping it contains enough information to carry you to the end of the piece, so read on.
More important than anything else is to pick a good team. It is entirely possible to arrange everything yourself but it will take a lot longer and the results will not be as good as they could be otherwise, so don’t try it. To a degree the team may self-select, with passionates getting in touch with you as soon as you receive your license confirmation. Let it happen, even if – or actually especially if – they seem too young, too inexperienced, too whatever. Trust me on this. Far better to have someone passionate and enthusiastic driving forward than to try and convince a reluctant “experienced pro” to put their weight behind the project. Of course, the ideal would be to have both and at TEDxWarsaw we are fortunate to have a great mix of skills and levels of experience. Passion to get it done to the highest possible standard needs to be the underlying force and it goes without saying that excellence is a starting point and not a goal to be reached. Team leaders listen up: if you want several months of intensive leadership training then putting together a TEDx event is one of the best ways to get this :)
The three critical areas in terms of putting together a successful event are choice of speakers, choice of venue and choice of participants. Get these three mostly right and any whizz-bang technology or award-winning stage design (as nice as they are) will only add to an already outstanding event. Get one of them wrong and there is little that technology or design will be able to do to compensate. How to go about choosing the participants is covered elsewhere on the Net so here I’ll concentrate on the other two points.
The quality of speakers is the single most important aspect of the day, and the single easiest to get wrong. Selection of speakers needs to begin months before the day. Make lists, put out a call for suggestions and pick someone appropriate and, preferably, experienced in dealing with a large number of fragile egos, and have them manage the speaker selection. That does not mean one person can, or should, do all of the work. It means speakers, and team, need clarity in terms of who is responsible for what – which of course goes for all the other roles to which people will need to be assigned. (I threatened the team that if it were left up to me then the entire schedule would be filled with feminists and jazz musicians and I was only half-kidding. It’s important to have several voices making decisions on whom to include and whom to leave out, for all the best reasons of variety, scheduling and ‘flow’ as well as on the simple basis of their presentation and speaking skills.) Make up a list of likely speakers, follow up, cull, discuss within your core team, make a decision, then repeat the process.
Speakers will likely fall into one of three categories:
1 – happy to contribute, “where do I sign up?”
2 – socially-minded and happy to contribute with a little explanation
3 – primadonnas.
Needless to say, the last category is best left to itself since pushing a reluctant primadonna up a hill with a pointy stick is not something we usually have a lot of time for. Leave them to their primadonnaness. Their loss, not yours.
Have a couple more speakers lined up than you think your schedule can accommodate, and don’t “lock in” the speakers’ roster publicly till a few days out since someone will probably remember a wedding they’d committed to attending or get confirmation for that long-awaited lecture tour abroad. Conversely, keep the schedule as fluid as possible for as long as possible since excellent speakers will appear at the last moment and one of your afternoon speakers will desperately need to moved to the first morning session.
Communicate with your audience as frequently as you can. Whenever you have something to say, good, bad, or indifferent, post it, blog it and tweet about it. Train your audience to head for your website once or twice a week to get the latest lowdown. Following the same logic, announce speakers in batches instead of waiting for the last moment to announce everyone. Each speaker will have their own band of friends or followers who will do much of the publicity for you. Work with your speakers, prompt them to tweet or blog as soon as the are confirmed. Make the announcements using every channel available – do not assume that everyone reads your Twitter stream or your Facebook updates. Use every means you have to get the information out there, and make sure all team members are doing the same to get the news out to your entire social graph and to build buzz. Before, during, and after the day keep pushing speakers (and other, of course) to blog, tweet and generally talk about it. After a while, the conversation will build up momentum and volume. Check out some of our tweets – it’s all about keeping up a steady level of energy… .
Assuming that your event is a general interest conference rather than one concentrating on a specific range of subjects, then hugely important to its success will be a good balance and mix of disciplines, approaches and levels of expertise of the speakers. At TEDxWarsaw we had several PhDs as well as some very young speakers, just starting out in their careers or fields of study. This allowed us to cater to our broad audience in terms of both a range of subjects as well as emotional identification with the speakers. It worked well.
In order to build your programme you need to make up a day schedule as early as possible (as a spreadsheet or database), complete with the number of minutes everyone gets. Allow for two minutes between speakers and follow the TED guidelines as to the length of sessions and breaks between them. We had a very full, and exhausting, schedule of over twenty speakers and a dozen TED talks or so. By the end of the day everyone was spent but elated.
How to help your speakers reach their best is covered elsewhere, not least in TED’s own materials as well as the TEDx wiki which is available for licensees, so I will skip those subjects. A word on presentations, however: give yourself twice as much time to correct all of the speakers’ presentations as you think you will need, then keep hounding them relentlessly. Once the speaker has agreed to participate, they are subject to the same rules as everyone else. This includes handing over much of their creative and technical control over the presentation to the team. For most speakers this will be a relief! Even experienced professionals are often at a loss as to present their ideas succinctly. If at all possible you should have a highly trained graphic designer on hand to fix up most of the presentations. In some case this will mean starting from scratch… Such is life.
All presentations need to have a uniform title slide with the speaker’s name in the selected house style. In our case we decided to draw direct on the design vocabulary of TED, with Helvetica in two weights, no spacing between words, and so on. Study this aspect of the project. A little extra effort pays off on the screen. Not enough effort takes down an otherwise excellent day by a peg or two. That’s the unfortunate reality.
As early as possible create a written document with as much information and ‘pointing the way’ for your speakers as you have to hand. Update it regularly and send it to each speaker as they are confirmed. Here’s ours: TEDxWarsaw Speakers Note [pdf download] Other documents that you will find useful will be a questionnaire which you send to speakers following the initial approach, and a call sheet / schedule of the day, to make sure everyone knows precisely when they’re on. Some speakers may ask you to put them in before or after others in order to get extra synergies from the talks playing off each-other. Go with it if the schedule allows it. Cool things will happen.
A few more bullet points:
Find musicians who will amaze the audience. Our accordion and cello duet was truly astonishing, and I’ve heard a lot of music in my day.
Challenge the audience at every step – with the choice of speakers and their ideas. Showing up at a TEDx event should not leave the participants luke-warm. If they’re merely politely grateful, you have not done your job. They should either love it, or strongly disagree.
Mix disciplines. We had a monk, a nationally known actress and a horse whisperer among our speakers, and they were fantastic.
Open and finish with the strongest speakers.
Allow plenty of time for screening of TED talks and discussion between the live sessions. The whole point of doing this is to get people talking.
If you are not able to pin down someone you particularly want, keep in touch with them and make sure they know about the next event. Timing may be on your side then.
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The venue needs to follow the Goldilocks principle and be “just right” for the event. That means the first thing you have to do is to figure out what kind of even you want to stage. In our case, being the first in the country plus staging it in the capital city we figured it was only fitting to do something fairly large and well produced. That, naturally, meant a venue with appropriate capacity and facilities. At TEDxWarsaw we are fortunate to have the unstinting support of the University of Warsaw who has provided a large and comfortable auditorium, with adjacent spaces, and an industrial strength internet connection. At the other end of the scale, if you are producing a TEDx for your local community an auditorium such as ours would be entirely inappropriate – a school hall, community centre, art gallery etc. would work far better. Pick a venue that is easy to get to on public transport, has decent parking nearby for those arriving by car, is easy to find (a major thing to get right since the majority of people will not have been to it before) and is close to a restaurant or lunch bar, if you are doing an all-day event but are not providing sustenance. People will need to eat, drink and then, naturally, find somewhere to take care of the other end of that process ;)
You will probably screw something up. We did. Not a major thing but we’d thought we sent out about a dozen invitations too many and were worried people might not find a seat if they did show up, so we recalled the invitations and offered a full apology. As it happened, we learned that you need to overbook by 10% anyway since even those who have confirmed will show up late or not at all. So this would not have been an issue, had they shown up.
Technical advice on projectors, cameras, audio gear and all those other bits of technology we come to reply on can easily be found elsewhere so I won’t double up on that subject here. Here, however, are some of the software tools we have used:
File sharing: DropBox – a file sharing utility well integrated into your desktop; a fundamental necessity for sharing files with the team without emailing them
Information management: Spreadsheets – you can use Google Docs of course, very simple to set up and run. We happened to save in Excel format though I open spreadsheets in Numbers and a lot of team members use Open Office.
Presentations: all of the presentations received in PowerPoint or other formats were corrected in Keynote, then exported as pdf to preserve typeface integrity
Communications: Skype for VOIP, Gabble for instant messaging
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These are of course starting points – putting together a full-day conference of consistently high quality is a major undertaking. As more thoughts come to mind I’ll be posting them here. In the meantime feel free to leave questions as comments, or @ me on Twitter.
If you are interested in getting involved in TEDxWarsaw, sign up here and we will be in touch.
The holiday season is nearly upon us, not a day too soon I say, and for those of you who take more than a passing interest in immortalising those holiday memories it’s time to think about packing the photo gear and stocking up on memory cards, or Tri X if that indeed is your preference. Alas Kodachrome is no longer with us, we may whistle that Paul Simon tune as an elegy… But I digress. I thought I’d shoot off a quick note about the one, two, three steps to better holiday photos, with hope of some of the ideas taking your photos to a new level.
Let’s start with packing. The temptation to bring Everything is of course always there but resist it like the hungry demon that it is. Bringing Everything will mean one certain thing and that is exhaustion by the end of each day. The idea is to shoot photos not to schlep a mountain of gear. I’ve never been a gear freak (even when I owned a total of fourteen cameras…) and have enjoyed the discipline of improvising and getting the desired result with a minimum of fuss and, certainly, as little gear as possible. Naturally, there are shoots where a truckload of gear is the required minimum. This post is not about those jobs. It’s more about the kind of photography you see at the top of each page here – this ongoing series of panoramas has been shot using one camera and one lens. It can be done. What you need to bring is a function of what you want to shoot, not the other way around. If you think you will photograph cathedral interiors, mating bugs, dragon boat races and everything in between then indeed your bag will be heavier than if you were concentrating on one type of photography but that is largely in the lens department. There are any number of handbooks which talk about equipment in moderately well-informed fashion. Most of those are for gear freaks. I will be adding a book section to this blog before too long and it will not include those titles. (For a start you can’t go wrong by picking up a copy of Julian Calder and John Garret’s book. Go on, do a little search engine magic.)
Trim the gear you bring with you to a minimum. Your back will thank you.
Now, those promised three tips which are guaranteed to improve your pictures. Or your money back.
1. Look before you shoot. If you consider yourself even a half-serious photographer, you will not be doing the snap annoying snap snap thing of snap snap snap banging away at the shutter without giving your subject some consideration first. This doesn’t have to take a long time but is guaranteed to give you a better result. Look at the subject. Step to the left. Think about the angle, the light, the context of what you’re looking at. If it’s a scene, do you really need that huge wide angle? If it’s a person, would you not rather include some of the background in the shot? Look, think, look again, then shoot. This needs to become automatic, and it will with practice. And it only needs to take a few seconds. It’s a good investment. In this shot inside a Hong Kong temple, the best photos were to be had by looking up.
Man Mo Temple in Hong Kong
2. Pick your battles. Trying to conquer the contrast of a Mediterranean noon with dedicated fill flash is a lost battle before it’s begun, despite what those gear freak books tell you. If you take on a battle like this you’re not going to like the result. Instead, how about coming back to that magical temple at sunset and shooting it into the twilight? Or, better yet, arriving at dawn, before the insane hordes, and taking your time as the sun caresses the architecture instead of beating down on it, and you, like a hammer? The magic hours are not called that for nothing. An hour before sunrise / sunset to an hour after are definitely magical. As an alternative, get up high and shoot looking down, as in this photo of the Istrian town of Rovinj. OK, a well placed church steeple is definitely a useful accessory here but in the absence of those look for hills, top-floor restaurants or even friendly locals’ balconies.
Rovinj from the steeple of the church of St Eufemia
3. Keep it steady. The number one cause of otherwise OK pictures being rendered unusable is camera shake. Modern cameras are lighter than their predecessors. This makes them harder to hold steady. When you’re shooting those magical twilight or dawn pictures, and want to keep the depth of field to something more than a sliver, especially when focusing up close, you want to help your camera along a bit, fuzzy logic notwithstanding. Rest it on a fence, press it against a lamp post or a well positioned municipal rubbish bin (they’re good – you can move them around, just don’t forget to put the damn thing back where you found it), or even just hang it off your neck on a strap, if you have a camera with a swing-out viewfinder. It will give you at least a stop, possibly two of extra exposure “elbow room.” Or put it on the floor, as in this Vilnius photo. And using a self timer set to two or three seconds alleviates the problem of you causing shake by pressing the button.
St Stanislovo & St Vladislovo Basilica in Vilnius
Have a great time. And tweet some of those photos @ me. Would love to see them.(
This is a “What Not To Do” and goes some way towards answering the question of whether Adobe, and other large companies in general, are just playing with Twitter to make themselves look good, and end up making themselves look bad in the process. Are most of the large companies, even tech-savvy ones, still at a total loss as to how to handle instant, real time, public conversations with their customers? My conclusion? Adobe has no idea what it’s doing with Twitter, at least not for the time being. And quite possibly neither do most of large companies out there. Let’s hope one day soon they will cotton on to the idea that having pointless conversations is worse than not having any conversations at all. And it all could have been handled so differently… (A brief and instantly resolved question and answer I had with @KLM comes to mind.)
Conclusions:
1. Conversations on the customer’s terms are not something that large companies are particularly good at (with some notable exceptions.) They would do well to read the Cluetrain Manifesto. It’s been out for ten years… Thesis 1 comes to mind…
2. Twitter is a wickedly attractive medium to “engage” with customers but since it flattens the access curve there needs to be a large amount of effort on the companies’ part to train and empower appropriate personnel to handle themselves properly in this wonderfully accessible medium. Proper engagement with customers requires investment in ‘front line staff’ on an unprecedented level if you’re a tech company that makes software and has been selling it through established channels for nearly decades.
The “conversation” as it unfolded:
Having finally updated my ancient Mac I naturally got Snow Leopard thrown in, in the bargain. All well and good since it’s faster and lighter than the predecessor plus some of the UX features really are rather good. There is a “however” in there and that is my InDesign, which I have been faithfully using since 2003 in version 2.0.2, and been quite happy with, suspended all willingness to co-operate. No matter. It was due for an “upgrate” (grating due to the prices which we keep paying) anyway, what with the wickedly fast new machine and all…
So it’s off to search for a good deal on an upgrade for me. In bricks and mortar as well as online stores. I don’t want the whole CS shebang at a quintillion shekels. Just plain vanilla InDesign will do. And here is the thing. Adobe, in its intimate knowledge of its customers needs, seems to have forgotten about us InDesign v. 2 users – no upgrade path apparently available for this lad.
Can’t be, right? So I did what anyone would do and that is tweet about it @adobe and even with the #adobe tag, at 16:59 (that would be a minute to 5pm) on Wednesday:
@adobe Is there an upgrade path from InDesign 2.0.2 (not CS2) to InDesign CS4? Doesn’t seem to be… (standalone version only)
Give them a little while… Wait a bit. At 18:05 follow up with this:
The cost of #Adobe CS would suggest that a spot of #CustomerService might be in order. I’m waiting to be pleasantly surprised @adobe
At 18:16 I get this:
@ralphtalmont Hi Ralph, did you have a support issue you were unable to get resolved? If so, @adobe_care can help
So far so good if not precisely the answer I was looking for. So I clarify:
@Adobe Just asking where to look for upgrade path from InDes 2.0.2 (not CS2) to InDes CS4: I can’t seem to find one. Pagemaker yes, InD 2 no
Waiting, waiting…
At 20:40 I hear from @Adobe_Care:
Hi @ralphtalmont thanks for pinging @adobe. What seems to be the issue regarding customer service? ^Bing
I state the problem again:
@Adobe_Care No issue re customer care yet :) just wondering where I find upgrade InDes 2.0.2 (not Suite) to current InDes (standalone ver.)
Now I reckon I should be close to getting the right answer. Waiting, waiting… And waiting… Evidently the question was somewhat perplexing. By the end of the evening it still wasn’t answered. By the morning there was still a gaping void where a message should have been. Obviously they’d misunderstood the question. So here we go again on Thursday morning:
@Adobe_Care So is there an upgrade path to current standalone InDesign from InDesign 2.0.2? #adobe
and almost exactly twelve hours later on Thursday evening:
@Adobe_Care Anything on the InDesign 2.0.2 upgrade path yet?
Finally it’s starting to dawn on me that Adobe has a couple of interns fire up their iPads (no they probably wouldn’t, make that their nondescript PCs) and fire off occasional Twitter messages just for effect so fools like me can get caught thinking they’re actually into, like, you know, talking to people. So at 11:30 pm on Thursday I send:
@adobe @Adobe_Care So am I going to get an answer to my question or is #Adobe just having a play with this Twitter thing?
and get back this little beauty in the morning on the Friday:
@ralphtalmont Hi Ralph, sorry you were not helped. Please send me a DM with more info?
I’m really at a loss as to what more info they might possibly be looking for, plus DMing is not my usual practice, especially when the conversation (more like me talking to myself) was begun in public so I continue with the patience of, of, well, the patience of a patient thing whose patience is being tried:
@Adobe I’m asking whether there is an upgrade path from InDesign 2.0.2 to current standalone version. Quark is looking really good now.
and follow up with this little piece of brilliance (well, brilliant for early morning):
Starting to have doubts whether #Adobe is actually serious about having conversations on #Twitter. Seems I’m talking to a wall :) @adobe
Adobe. Wall. Geddit?
More waiting ensues. While no work gets done on account I still don’t have an upgrade for the software and I’ll be dashed, as they say in classic period cinema, if I stump up for a brand new CS5 box.
Finally I heard back a little after 6pm on Friday and things progressed somewhat faster from there on, albeit down the path to Nowhere:
From @Adobe_Care :
Hi @ralphtalmont only InDesign CS2, CS3, CS4 are entitle for an upgrade to inDesign CS5. ^Bianca
and two hours later from @Adobe:
@ralphtalmont Hi Ralph, @adobe_care responded, “only InDesign CS2, CS3, CS4 are entitle for an upgrade to inDesign CS5″ Thx for yr patience!
Then from me:
@Adobe_Care @Adobe Hi. Yes. Right. I knew that. So why is #Pagemaker elligible ? Seems it’s a case of corporate oversight. Can we fix it?
and
@Adobe_Care @Adobe So how do I upgrade from #InDesign 2.0.2 to CS2? I’m looking for solutions here, people. The facts I’m familiar with :(
Watch for this pearl of wisdom:
@ralphtalmont If you have a CS2 upgrade you should be able to install it over 2.0.2. ^Bruce
Nooooo? Really? Wow. But let’s keep our patience a little longer:
@Adobe_Care Cool. That figures. Now how do I get one in 2010? Seriously, I’m looking for a solution here. Work is not getting done :(
@ralphtalmont we do have a free tryout of CS5 for 30 days, you can evaluate if you wish to purchase. ^Bruce
Well, Bruce needs a medal. He’s trying to sell me a brand new package while all I’m trying to do is to upgrade the software I already have. Great corporate thinking. This lad will go far. Lehman Brothers maybe?
Still, I have questions which need answering, so one more try here, just to make it obvious:
@Adobe_Care Tnx. Is that ultimately going to be cheaper than going down upgrade path???
to which I get back this marvel:
@ralphtalmont Not necessarily cheaper but it will tell you if CS5 meets your needs. You have missed a lot of upgrades. ^Bruce
Yes, thanks for pointing that out. Very helpful.
So, let’s recap. After repeating my question several times I’ve been told what I already knew, offered a deal on software I don’t want and told I’d missed lots of upgrades. Not very helpful. Evidently whoever runs their Twitter stream for Adobe needs to learn to listen, at least.
@Adobe_Care You’re in the business of selling software. I understand that. Too bad you don’t understand what I’m looking for. #Adobe #fail
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Update:
Over the following few days not much happened beyond me trying to find alternative solutions and finally finding them. In the meantime:
From @Adobe_Care @ralphtalmont were you looking for something besides InDesign? ^Bruce
I guess Bruce is looking to provide some customer service which is great but kind of on the useless side since it ain’t what I’m looking for.
@Adobe_Care Other than world peace and free energy? Not really. Just a clear upgrade path from InDes 2.0.2 without paying through the nose
to which they replied:
@ralphtalmont the upgrades you missed would have cost $995 total so you’re actually ahead at this point. ^Bruce
Well…. What can I say? I guess I’m grateful.
InDesign as a piece of software is terrific.
Adobe the company needs to learn a thing or two about this “social media thing”.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting this idea at The Next Web conference, to a roomful of internet professionals, ie. the people who are building this “networked economy.” This is an “idea-in-progress” so more presentations and more ongoing discussions are in the works.
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My professional life has been spent, some would say mis-spent, in photography, publishing, collaboration with artists and musicians, multimedia and now this internet startup with I’m not allowed to talk about here so instead I thought I’d talk about the next available topic, namely economics.
Bear with me. This is not as stupid as it sounds. People in this room are building this new capitalism right now so let’s consider for six minutes – not too long – where this is going and try and put a label on it, which is what I have been struggling with for some time.
Capitalism, of course, has been in constant development since Marinus van Raysmerwaele painted this Renaissance banker and his wife actually not far from here. In fact it’s kind of fitting we should be discussing this in what is arguably the birthplace of capitalism.
Over the years people have tried to define it, to change it, some perfected its execution and women from our own world have proven that girls can play, too. It’s been a tortuous but largely linear development, albeit with the occasional dead end.
What’s clear is that we’ve come to a fork in the road. Which way we end up going is important for the future of the species. One thing is for sue – we’re living in an evolutionary moment.
Ten years ago the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto put down some prophetic words, none of which hit me more than this. Human beings make up markets. They didn’t necessarily mean this kind of market, though this is a possibility if things go wrong, but rather these markets.
We’ve seen this before, of course. Any which way you slide it E-Bay is a bigger economy than most of the world’s countries. There is some disagreement over whether this entitles E-Bay to apply for UN membership but that’s not really the point.
The point is that the economy of networked individuals is rapidly becoming the biggest game not just in town. In all towns. And while the established economies will grow and shrink as they do, this one has only one way to go and it’s only just getting started.
It can’t of course operate in a vacuum. Things happen spontaneously in cyberspace but they still need somewhere to happen and someone to make it happen. What’s required are environments where this economy can grow.
We have these environments now of course and as envisioned by Yochai in this book, wherever people gather they are likely to do one of a number of things. They can waste time, hang out with chums, or do what humans have always done, that is engage in trade. At least that is what the enterprising ones will do, and of course are indeed doing. We have examples of this all throughout the networks. Trade, not mindless drudgery in a gulag, which is why when Marx wrote these words thinking about a flat society he was so horribly wrong. But he was right in one way and that is in having an early definition of a networked economy. Albeit a hundred and forty years too early and not quite as he intended.
And here we are starting to tread on familiar ground since Mr Pareto is not going to change his ideas about how we as humans operate any time soon. Names are starting to be applied to this new capitalism. May I propose this one:
Participatory Free Market. Very much like participatory democracy and probably one of its building blocks in the long run. The term occurred to me as I was trying to define the larger operating context for the startup I’m not allowed to talk about here. I googled the term and to my amazement got a google whack which actually had nothing to do with what I was looking for. The second search is from a week later when I’d tweeted asking people what they thought it might mean, the third one is from last Saturday. This is six months.
Now what’s exciting is that it’s the people in this room who are building the platforms, the environments, the tools that enable this participatory free market to emerge, so how about it? Let’s start a discussion and see if the label makes sense. Here are some of the elements of what might constitute a definition and individual responsibility should actually be at the top of the list.
Now I tend to take the middle road between the high priests and the prophets of doom. We have a chance to steer things in a positive direction but we can expect problems, of all kinds. Mostly to do with human nature.
One thing is certain. We can build environments where positive developments can take place or, just as easily, wander down paths where we end up in places we never intended to be. The fork in the road is right here.
I’d really like to hear what you think, not just about the label of course but mostly about the ideas in which we are immersed while trying to build this next stage of the development of capitalism. Thank you.
It’s hard to not write something when the questions surrounding a major event are not getting answered and are possibly going to remain unanswered, at least for some time.
The plane crash death of the Polish president, the country’s entire top military brass, civic leaders, senior religious figures and so many travellers who accompanied them is doubly more horrible since its magnitude could have been so much less impactful. It is just inconceivably puzzling that all those people should have been travelling together. Never mind that the plane carrying them was a relic of the soviet past (yes, we’ve heard how it was all up to scratch and recently serviced), never mind that the crew were probably acting under severe pressure to land from those on board and made a tragic miscalculation. Never mind all that. Why, how, is it possible that all those people were on the same plane when even in an ordinary corporation procedures prevent executives from travelling on the same flights. And here we have the chiefs of the airforce, navy, army, special forces, the Warsaw regiment and, for goodness’ sake, the head of the armed forces all sitting on the same plane as the country’s president and the head of the central bank, plus all the other hugely important travellers. If it seems like astoundingly idiotic to ordinary people, why did it not seem important enough for those whose job it is to manage these things?
In the city centre tonight the sight was truly extraordinary. Actually, not so much the sight as the sound. There was hardly any. Tens of thousands of people quietly walking towards the Presidential Palace, filing past the stone lions, obeying instructions from the boy scouts (boy scouts!) and behaving in what can only be described as a quietly respectful manner. Krakowskie Przedmieście has never been this quiet.
The questions remain while the people search for some way to comprehend what has happened.
TED requires that TEDx hosts file a fairly detailed report following the close of each event – and a good thing, too, since TEDx is a work in progress and everyone is learning from everyone else. Seeing as we have been asked by a lot of people for bits of practical advice here are some thoughts taken out of the longer report. Please bear with me re. the brevity of this – speed seems to be very much of the essence today…
Before I quote from the report, I must congratulate the team and crew on a job superbly done. The last six months, and especially the last few weeks, have been a period of growing intensity as the level of activity built up. We invented and designed everything from scratch since ours was the inaugural event in Poland and, of course, we wanted to learn the mechanics of running a successful TEDx “from the inside.”
The event would not have happened without the dedication of Adam Liwiński who carried the administrative load for months and performed under pressure better than most seasoned executives I have met. His friends (and now mine) Łukasz Alwast and Maciej Michalski both contributed very substantial time and energy. Julian Kozankiewicz found and sealed the deal with our major sponsor, Play Dla Firm. Julian’s team at EMLab, with Chris Szymczak and Zuza Rzeszutek at the head, worked tirelessly on the endless list of details a conference like this requires, Małgosia Minta wrangled the press almost single-handedly and our friends at Prezentio Peter Zvirinsky and Iza Wojtaszek helped out with speaker coaching. The full list of team and crew is here and includes some of the behind-the-scenes people who have also helped out. Well done, troops; thank you sponsors and supporters!
A big thank you to my good friend Janusz Kobylinski for shooting our official photographs – which are available for use under a Creative Commons license on Flickr.
Finally, thank you to my friend Colin Lewis for securing the license for the team, getting us started on this path, and then having the confidence to have the license transferred to yours truly. Colin is now off doing his own hugely exciting project – you can follow him @ColinLewis and learn more about what he’s doing here.
Here are a few photos shot by Janusz Kobyliński on the day. You can find more on Fickr and in other places byt doing a quick search for “tedxwarsaw”
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We had a professionally set-up stage, large comfortable auditorium, speakers’ mikes were attached backstage, two hand-held radio mikes (one for me as the MC, one spare), two follow spots either side of the stage, one projector, live vision mixing for projection, separate registration area out in the foyer.
To search for pictures on Flicker go here:
Recorded talks were effective but most people responded to the live speakers since a lot of them are well known in various circles in this country.
We had two video cameras and one official stills photographer.
We ran it mostly in English. Two people questioned the wisdom of this. A quick explanation of how we are part of a global community settled that.
Technology worked as expected. All the systems we devised performed well. The team worked like a well oiled machine. Speakers went on cue and performed excellently well (we had coached about half of them prior to the event). All but two stuck to their assigned time. The music was incredible.
What worked not as well as I had hoped was the virtual jam – our connection to Chicago and Auckland started out well but then deteriorated to the point of me having to fade out the US and NZ musicians. But our man in Warsaw, the bass player, Krzysztof Scieranski, took over effortlessly with a solo and brought it all to a lovely close. Full report here.
We played a lot of TED talks, starting at the end of each live session and through the breaks – in the auditorium and on plasma screens in the foyer. Next time I think we will purposely OPEN each session with a TED talk as well as closing the sessions with them, that way we can potentially set the scene for each session.
What worked incredibly well was giving each session a ‘subtitle’. We had :
Change the flight path
All is not as it seems
Surprises are good for the soul , and
One small step
This helped the audience get purchase on the disparate talks and find a ‘way in’
The live stream was rather popular. We had 712,000+ server hits from 57 countries, including Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Maldives and China. The team from StreamOnLine, who handled the transmission, assure us that the only higher scoring Polish stream has been the Prime Minister with a million hits or so. Not bad, I say :) We streamed on the web and on iPhones, which proved to be a popular mode of access.
Web and iPhone streams of TEDxWarsaw compared side by side
Vegetarians appreciated having a separate table catering to their need at lunchtime
The event itself went as well as we expected but the response, feedback and “after-shocks” have been actually an order of magnitude greater than we expected. People have been blown away by the quality of the event, the venue, the speakers and what they had to say. The quality of our performers was not an inch short of awesome.
You can find our talks in the official TEDx YouTube channel, by doing a search on YouTube here or embedded into individual speakers’ pages on our site here.
What worked particularly well was having our very own “Speaker Angel” – complete with wings, yeah! You can find her in TEDxWarsaw photos if you do a search :) – assigned to looking after our speakers, herding them backstage when required and then keeping an eye on the clock. We had given her a dedicated cellphone, with the number available to the speakers and no-one else.
I honestly can say that due to the incredibly hard work by the team and crew the event has been a runaway success and we have accomplished what we set out to do, ie. establish an embryonic community of TEDsters in Poland. We are already thinking about the next one in Warsaw and there are events starting to happen in other cities.
The team are all hugely excited and new people are coming up every day to ask how they can get involved.
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Please add your URL to the GoogleDoc-based community photo and video bank here : and send around the URL http://bit.ly/tedxwarsawvisuals . Thank you!
(I’ll be adding photos etc. to this post as they become available.)
