Ignite captures the best of geek culture in a series of five-minute speed presentations on topics ranging from The Best Way to Buy a Car to Hacking Chocolate. Imagine that you're on stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, doing a five-minute presentation using a slide deck that auto-forwards every 15 seconds, whether you're ready or not. What would you do? What would you say? Could you stand the pressure? Every week, find out how some of the smartest minds on the planet dealt with this situation as your host, Brady Forrest, highlights a different talk from Ignites around the world.
Cheese was a happy accident. It was discovered when animal milk was exposed to bacteria. It has since been elevated to a tasty artform. Dale Dougherty, the founder of Make Magazine, has reclaimed this art from corporations and makes his own cheese.
This was filmed at Ignite Sebastopol. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
O'Reilly Media's Founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly has used language to shape the software industry's thinking several times. In the 1990's he helped create and define the term Open Source (o help de-stigmatize "free software"). In this century he defined the term Web 2.0. By finding and evangelizing a meaningful name, Tim boosted the development and adoption of these world-changing technologies.
Tim had been exposed to the idea of using language as a map in the 1970's through a man named George Simon. As Tim wrote in his 2002 essay Science and Consensus:
At about the same time, I studied with a man named George Simon, who was trying to build what he called "languages for consciousness," believing, like Benjamin Whorf (author of Language, Thought and Reality), that our language limits our ability to perceive, and that until we have languages for certain states of consciousness and perception, we won't be able to use them. He saw his work as an extension of general semantics, a system developed in the 30's by Alfred Korzybski, author of Science and Sanity. Korzybski's famous statement, "the map is not the territory" is more than an observation; it's a tool for living more perceptively. A lot of my friend George's work was in training people to open up the ladder of perception, to recognize the difference between what you are experiencing directly vs. through various levels of abstraction, to let go preconceived notions and let the world come in fresh.
George also argued that as human consciousness evolves, certain things that were once on the frontiers of awareness, and that were experienced with near-mystical force, become commonplaces as they are routinely abstracted into language.
In my classics honors thesis at Harvard, I used this premise to assess certain of Plato's dialogues, arguing that the mystical overtones with which Socrates describes concepts like justice and truth were the result of the newness of his ideas. As we "rehearse" these now familiar ideas thousands of years later, we don't get that same rush. Most of us receive them at a level of abstraction, fitting them into our accepted system of facts, rather than taking them in through the entire ABCD perceptual cycle.
Tim expands on these beginnings in his Wired Profile, The Trend Spotter. This talk was filmed at Ignite Sebastopol. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
The U.S. Senate's legislation is the result of ever-shifting alliances. Using data from Govtrack you can get every Senator since John Adams. You also get their roll call votes. By summing the amount of times Senators voted together and dividing it by the number of sessions in a given year, Andrew Odewahn was able to calculate Senatorial affinities. He then plugged the affinities into GraphViz to visualize each year's social network.
These graphs reveal a lot about the state of bipartisanship at the time. For example in 1991 there was some cross-party voting. However, by the time 1994 rolled around with the "Republican Revolution" there was almost no cross-party voting. During the Clinton impeachment, the Democrats show a distinct rift, while the Republicans are solid (with the notable exceptions of future party-switchers Jeffords and Specter). This excellent talk reveals some of the secrets hidden in public data.
Andrew Odewahn works for O'Reilly in Cambridge. You can read more about his Senate graph research on our Broadcast blog. This talk was filmed at Ignite Boston. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Andrew Hyde runs Ignite Boulder. In this week's episode he shares his thoughts at Ignite ATL about the rapid economic shifts that can be caused by user-generated content. Andrew calls this The Posting Economy.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
If you want to be successful with your customers, you need to make them feel succesful. It's all about them achieving awesome. This week, Kathy Sierra explains some of the secrets for creating passionate customers. This is an area that Kathy knows well. She has classes on the topic around the world and her writings have been read by many.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. It was filmed at Google I/O 2009 at the Moscone Center.
Ignite is often used for geek ideas and how-to's but it can also be used for stories. Writer-director Scotto Moore shares his digital fairy tale from Ignite Seattle. Not wanting to reveal too much about his sci-fi story, Scotto describes CPU as "a cautionary tale about the dangers of modern neural malware."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
It's one of those things you usually don't think about: what will happen to my body when I die? Stacy Holmstedt has always been interested in the subject and in this talk she presents us with a very matter-of-fact answer to that question. She dives into the governmental and procedural consequences, while also explaining what's happening in the body at the same time.
Where does her knowledge come from? It comes from her childhood:
A few people asked me how I got interested in the topic of the body after death. My mom worked in the mortuary industry and we had a lot of dinner conversations about it. Usually while eating chicken. It was perfectly normal to talk about just how gory you had to be to warrant a closed-casket funeral (answer: extremely).
At any given time, our house contained hundreds of dollars worth of funeral flowers. Someone had to take them or they were going to the landfill.
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