Photo Credit Phil Campbell

This is Penny Jackson’s vox pop from Amp 09 at TigerTiger. For those of you listening on your MP3 players the podcast has been arranged in to chapters so you can dip in and out of what interests you. The chapter order follows the subjects people discussed and are; Books, Film, Soap Box, Digital Britain and User Generated content. Penny didn’t manage to get round to all 44 topics so apologies for those missed out but it does give a taster for the quality and energy of the conversations.

The general question Penny asked was what would you like amplified from what you have been discussing and/or what one tweet would you make.

Other than that the rest of you are all there!

In the busy and sometimes very loud circulation area at Amplified ‘08 I asked participants these three same questions to get a flavour for people’s response to the event.

These questions were

1: What’s good about the event today?

2: What’s bad or the downside about this event?

3: What would you like to see happening in the future?

Here is the collected vox pop I hope you find it interesting.

Just before I went off to San Francisco I remarked that “this blog will go very quiet for two weeks unless some of you reading this take me up on the offer of doing a little amplified blogging“. It’s so satisfying to get back and find that the blog has been anything but quiet. Thanks everyone! And I’m still catching up with the work that’s been going on behind the scenes. I’ll try and bend some arms into talking about that process when everyone has a little less on their plate. But it’s quite remarkable how all this was pulled together so quickly and with only the lightest touch on the rudder. We seem to be already building a best practice guide for Amplified09 without even trying…

Lots to catch up on and some new bits and pieces to get up, but let’s kick off with some attention from the BBC. Pods and Blogs caught up with Toby last week and wanted the low down on Amp08. Tune in below – Toby pops up around the seven minute mark:

Thanks to Jamillah for pointing the mic our way!

Sizemore tells Penny about the use of Seesmic to get great interviews with such Hollywood luminaries as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Cate Blanchett. It is fascinating hearing how “a small bunch of geeks with too many laptops” managed to get access to such celebs and in a way that disarmed them and got around the usual media dance of such events.

After covering the niceties of engaging the existing Seesmic community in the process and coping with some of the challenges of the scalability of celebrity, Mike tells a great story of allowing a family in Crystal Palace, sitting in their pajamas to have a conversation with one of the most famous actresses in the world.

Penny talks to Steve Lawson, a new media enthusiast & solo bass player, and the result is one of my favourite podcasts ever. Just jump straight in:

Steve talks about the moving from performing other peoples music to writing and how he was lucky that he always had geek friends to draw on.

“Curiosity turned me into an early adopter without even knowing what an early adopter was…”

The audience took him along from step to step, from having a site, to playing solo gigs to releasing albums. I particular enjoy the way he pulls away the curtain from the wizard controlling the conventional way of approaching a career in music.

“The music was part of a narrative that i was in charge of… I’m looking at the world and I’m playing what I see… what social media allows me to do is to tell my story and invite other people to contribute to that”

This is brilliant stuff and not only great advise to any budding musicians, but to anyone wanting to strike out in their own field. And he even has a delivery room story

To paraphrase: the return is larger when you get the opportunity to tell your story. The conversation is where the longevity is…

Photo credit: Steve Lawson by Documentally (used with permission)

Podcast notes: Janet first became aware of the need to bring the audience in five years ago. Simply rebuilding a website resulted in double the page views ie. double the customers. Moving from a non tech position to a position of understanding not only the technology, but how it can be used.

Simply asking her audience for help, lead to a podcast which eventually lead to a podcasting magazine! The importance of global voices: by tapping into her love of language and people from around the world her work now had an international reach. This lead to a whole new arm of business.

That all this started because her original site resembled a Christmas tree is priceless

When I was listening to these interviews a few nights ago I forgot my iTunes was still on random until the theme tune to Sesame Street kicked in as Penny signs off:

Come and play, everything’s A-OK / Friendly neighbors there, that’s where we meet…

How wonderfully apt. So here’s the first (of three I’m posting today) in which Penny talks to Euan Semple and Toby Moores:

Podcast notes: The conversation takes in the tribal system through to the industrial revolution and now we’ve arrived at social media how there are fresh opportunities to find other like minded people. The way we are all traditionally educated (wrong = bad) and why it’s now easier to throw ideas around and let others test them. In short, we trust our network.

It’s pointed out that businesses are conversations already, but now we have to allow different voices in. The time for interruption is over – it’s time to listen. This leads to Penny asking a question that I hope we can come back to on the NON blog: Are we in the midst of a Social revolution?

There’s a great analogy of regular business practices (right up to Microsoft) being run along a trench warfare system and some great observations on why ‘experts’ are sometimes wary of jumping into the fray of a free flowing conversation. It also echos some of Bob Geldof’s Innovation Edge talk and why someone in a third world village with access to a mobile phone and a social network can be more powerful than someone behind a wall in the City.

I’d be amiss not to add a link to Sue Thomas as she’s mentioned in the conversation and has some wonderful things to say about all of this and much more on her own blog.

Thanks again to Penny (and Euan!) for putting up with my emails as I stumbled through this whole podcasting malarkey.