If you thought portable devices meant that you had to carry a few of them around, think again. As far as I’m concerned, Chris has a completely different take on this. His philosophy seems to be;  the smaller they are, the more you can fit into your bag. – And I like it :-)

I don’t know if he even got all of his devices out during his stay, but here’s what he dug out of his secret chamber while I was watching.

• Apple Macbook
• 3G dongle
  Gives him a Wi-fi enabled network wherever here is.
• Kodak Zi6
  A nice little HD video recorder.
• Nokia N95
  The device he uses to post Qik videos in conjunction with his iPhone i believe.
• Iphone (with a windscreen stolen from his Zoom recorder)
  The windscreen helps him look more ‘reporter like’, and the audioboo app let’s him record and upload podcast on the go.
• Panasonic Lumix LX3
  Lovely little camera with a bright and wide lens.
• Eye-fi card
  A 2GB SD card you pop into your digital camera and it has a built in wi-fi and GPS chip. It will geo tag your photos and upload them directly to flickr via the built in wi-fi antenna.
• Nikon D3
  SLR for low light, loong zoom and more commercial high res. photography.
• A zoom lens (probably Nikon but didn’t check)

All this, and probably more, stuffed neatly into his North Face backpack – well done for keeping track of it all.

48 Hours in Denmark

I didn’t know about this, but Chris told me about a project called 48 hours in Denmark. Which basically give away a free trip to Denmark for people to come over and shoot some video. Chris and Philip made quite a nice video entry, so please give Philip Campbell and Christan Payne your vote.

Chris was visiting to pour out of his wisdom of multi media journalism in a web 2.0 world, but he couldn’t resist the opportunity to do a quick interview with Paul Bradshaw at the end of the lesson.

Social capital and whuffie is basically the same thing, – it’s a reputation currency. Tara got the word from Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom where it’s described as a futuristic replacement for money.

“A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions.”

A person’s whuffie can literally be used to pay for stuff and the more whuffie you got, the less $$ you need. But in reality, this is simply a set of guidelines on how to create relationships online. Measuring whuffie is just a way to convince companies that they can’t just ignore it, and have to embrace social media, rather than shy away from it.

Personally I’m a big fan of this approach to measuring social media capital. Social media investments can be extremely hard to measure. Traditional marketing results are much easier to transfer to a graph and show of to companies.

5 things that will increase your whuffie

1. Turn that bullhorn around
   Stop blasting your message out and start creating relationships. Listen to your customers and react to feedback as fast as possible
2. Become part of the community you serve
   Figure out who you are serving and become part of their lives. Engage, but DON’T sell. Break it down and identify who, why and what makes people interested in you and be interested in them!
3. Create amazing customer experiences
   Make people LOVE your service or product, really love. Appeal to emotion, inject fun into you or your product, give people control, simplify, make happiness your business model.
4. Embrace the chaos
   Don’t try to control the message. Basically this is about facing the chaos (problem) and actively showing that you are addressing it. See it as a chance to improve
5. Find your higher purpose
   Find a way to give back to the community by thinking ‘customer centric’. Send them to other websites, don’t cut down on customer service.

This really doesn’t do the talk justice so have a look through the 317 slides and watch the hour long video.