I was presenting at a teleconference earlier this week for OneWorld. It’s a great organisation, and all my fellow teleconferencers were from non-profits, so I felt like there was a sympathetic audience on the other end of the line for my presentation of highlights from NTEN’s Non-Profit Technology Conference.

But really, I had no clue whether they were sympathetic or not.

As I was presenting, everyone else’s line was muted, so my words went completely, disturbingly uninterrupted. Not even a hushed cough or a shifting of buttocks on a chair to be heard. And, of course, there was no visual feedback. Were these quiet folk nodding? Sneering? Snoring? Cheering me on? Or wishing I’d finish? Were they, indeed, quiet at all? There was no way to tell.

Teleconferencing is a silent, squirming ordeal for presenters.  It’s not quite so bad when everyone’s an active participant, or there’s an accompanying web-based component, or some other way to provide interaction. But for a straightforward talk, it’s downright nasty.

The best part of making any presentation is feeling the mood of the audience and responding to that mood. You can start off flat and still win them over if you use the visual cues, eye contact, subtle shifting of attention to help you remould your talk to fit the room. Fat chance of that when you’re speaking in the teleconferencing cone of silence.

Web 3.0: Goodbye teleconferences? 

After my bit was over in the teleconference, the host invited questions. I’d been talking about web 2.0 sites and services and someone asked: “What do you think Web 3.0 will bring us?”

There are lots of different ideas about this. Tim Berners-Lee thinks web 3.0 will bring us the semantic web, an Internet in which computers understand the information stored on them and act as truly intelligent agents. Self-aware sites, if you will. Others talk about an intersection of small applications all working together, regardless of whether they’re on your computer, a phone or another device. Something far more sophisticated and seamless than the digital handshaking that goes on now with web 2.0 apps and services. Others think the driving technology behind web 3.0 will be improved hardware and greater bandwidth, and applications which benefit from these hardware advances.

Perhaps it was in response to the eerie quiet in which I had just presented, but I picked on the latter; the hardware-driven advances. I said web 3.0 would be the death of the teleconference. After all, there’s no reason why, with the faster connections and more powerful graphics processing coming down the pipeline, videoconferencing shouldn’t replace teleconferencing almost entirely - at least in countries with big, fat Internet pipes and generous data plans, like the US. If I can conference on Skype with my far-flung family now, then surely web 3.0 will deliver ubitquitous video interactions.

Of course, web 3.0 should herald much more than merely the death of teleconferencing. Seth Godin has an interesting take on web 4.0 and it sounds good to me. But only if I no longer have to teleconference. Without that advance, web 3 or web 4 will both be failures.

Quite a day today: Mixed it with 650 other women online at the Women Who Tech (WWT) telesummit and my new Apple MacBook Pro arrived.

The telesummit was excellent. Sessions were held using ReadyTalk, with slideshows online and a free phone-in number. There were some glitches with the web side, mostly due to misunderstandings and broken links. I found the ReadyTalk support people very helpful in response, and the WWT women were equally helpful and flexible. There’s room for improvement in helping newcomers understand how a combined phone-in/webinar works, but hundreds of women managed to participate very happily.

I noticed some overlap in sessions from last week’s NTEN Non-Profit Technology Conference. That overlap wasn’t necessarily a disadvantage: I found it useful to have some concepts and material repeated with the slightly different slant required by a webinar. The 75-minute sessions zipped past at an amazing rate and were stuffed with good information and useful resources. I attended sessions on Get Your Local Campaigns On; Build an Online Campaign; Women and Social Capital; Firing up your Online List; Everything you Wanted to Know about Tech But Were Afraid to Ask; and Web 2.0 sessions. I used Twitter to tweet all the sessions I attended, while following those I couldn’t attend via others’ tweets. Very effective but definitely a multitasking stretch, what with several other background tasks requiring my attention.

A few highlights: Beth Kanter’s Cute Dog Theory of Web 2.0; listening to the panel field all sorts of questions in the Everything You Wanted to Know session; hearing some of the personal tales behind the highly successful ventures of some very high profile women.

Women Who Tech will be publishing the sessions online for those who couldn’t attend, so keep an eye on their site. And keep an ear out for the next time around: it’s a high-value, high-intensity day.

Crossing over 

In fact, so high-intensity was it that I didn’t get a chance to open the box containing my brand new Mac. It’s sitting here, beckoning. I plan to leave it under wraps until tomorrow, when I can do it justice. As this will be the first Mac I’ve spent time with for well over 15 years, I plan to blog the experience.

The abundance of very happy Mac users at the NTEN conference and the ability to run Windows on the new Macs has lured me into this new realm. While I’m not planning to plunge into the ranks of the blinded-by-the-Mac fanatics, I think Microsoft is becoming more of a lumbering behemoth with each passing year and it’s time to look at alternatives. I intend to load up the release version of Ubuntu 8.04 when it’s launched in 24 days, so it should be an interesting time.

I’ve been playing around with about 40 different beta services over the past month.

One that’s insanely easy to use and lots of fun is Mixwit, a service which lets you create mix tapes, share them and embed them in sites. Mixwit is free (unlike the commercial Mixaloo) and draws its content from Seeqpod. The quality of content is decidedly rocky (make sure you check out the tracks you add - some of them end prematurely or won’t play at all), but the mix-creation experience is fast and pleasurable.

All you do is sign up (very fast), click the My Stuff link, and work through three steps:

1. Add music (there’s a search box built in).
2. Choose a skin for your tape - or upload your own - and tinker with the font and style.
3. Publish.

Once your mix is published, you can add it to your social networking sites or your blog, link to it or simply copy and paste a piece of code - as I did in this post - and voila!