Back in the prehistoric period that was my childhood I used to spend my summer pocket money on these "summer special" comics (images taken from this great post on the subject by Lew Stringer). And this summer feels just like one of them, so much stuff crammed in within the covers – so I just wanted to recap a little what's happening in the world of cataspanglish…

Right now we're up to our eyeballs in PodCamp Barcelona 2010 which takes place in El Masnou, September 13-18. Instead of following the format of the last two years and making it easy on ourselves, clever cataspanglish decided to change the format, adding some workshops to give back, through our knowledge, something to the good folks of El Masnou who bankroll the event. We also decided to limit the number of "presentations" and, at the suggestion of @Moof who is working on PodCamp with us this year along with @pdavenne, make the afternoon part of the "main" day of PodCamp Barcelona an after-lunch discussion forum based on the "sobremesa" – the long, leisurely after-lunch, over coffee and liqueurs chats around the table typical of Spain.

Moof and myself had discussed this kind of event idea after attending the 1pound40 conference held by Amplified in London late last year. Much of the thinking about PodCamp Barcelona 2010 has been inspired by the concepts of Sue Thomas and Toby Moores about participation, involvement & creativity which they experiment on through Amplified projects, and conversations with Steve Lawson and Lucy Windmill who came over to PodCamp Barcelona last year. I'd say that what we bring to that (and which complicates everything intensely), is our intent to create the conditions for real time, genuine but informal communication to take place but amongst people expressing themselves in different languages simultaneously. We have the speaker on the podium simultaneous translation thing down, but how can we extend the peer sharing of knowledge and ideas in a real time multilingual context? Maybe through transliteracy?  We'll keep you posted on the results of our experiment and if you've got any thoughts, please share them in the comments.

The other big issue, and one we haven't had the resources to deal with this year, is that of inclusion of disabled and deaf people. We have added a plugin on the Spanish website which reads the posts (need to find one those for Catalan and English too), but the budget didn't stretch to having sign language and attempts to get volunteers has (so-far) failed…

Whew! this getting too damn long for a single comic strip so I'm going to have to use that great expression "to be continued…"

Blam! (update)
Can't believe I forgot to include the Tweetlation real-time tweet translation that Moof set up at PodCamp Barcelona 2009 and which he and Patrick are going to be running this year. Check out Can you tweetlate?

foto de UrbanLabs'09 pool

Acabo de volver de UrbanLabs #ul09 donde he aprendido mucho, he escuchado cosas interesantes y algunas no tan interesantes, donde he conocido a gente que tiene unos proyectos muy interesantes y otros no tan interesantes, pero lo más importante es que hemos compartido ideas, conocimiento y risas entre los que estábamos ahí.

Mi cerebro no ha parado desde entonces, cuando asisto a jornadas así me cargo de energía “analógica” para transformarla en “digital” y enviarla al depósito del social media para intentar hacer “algo”, por qué de eso se trata ¿no? Está muy bien que nos reunamos y trabajemos juntos durante unos días, pero después qué ¿A dónde va todo ese conocimiento? ¿Emprendemos alguna acción?

Quizás es un poco pretencioso pero los que creemos en el social media somos revolucionarios, gente que queremos que las cosas cambien.

Jon Hickman: MA in Social Media from Kasper Sorensen on Vimeo.

When it was announced that Birmingham City University was going to be offering the first MA in Social Media anywhere, the blog & twittersphere went crazy here in Spain. One of the many reasons for this is the power of validation that events from elsewhere have here, something I will explore later in another post as part of a wider analysis of cultural differences & social media. I like this video of course leader Jon Hickman presenting the MA because it’s the antithesis of academic presentation in Spain. It’s in what I’m becoming to think of as “the Birmingham School” – in a pub and with an appearance by Andy Mabbett!

The video by Kasper Sorensen was recorded  ”At WxWM Jon Hickman from Birmingham City University gave a presentation about the Uni’s plans to launch an MA in Social Media.WxWM is the West Midlands’ answer to Texas’ SxSW if you hadn’t figured that out already ”

MA Social Media blog

twitter hashtag #masocialmedia

“Official” University page

Twitter Jon Hickman

Well that’s a good question and one that I do my best to answer here on the excellent Be Vocal blog in this chat with Nick Booth at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe. I need to post about my visit to Birmingham and all of the incredible stuff going on there – in the meantime check out this post from Be Vocal – 10 Civic Social Media things that are great about Brum

Chris Pinchen from Citilab in Barcelona from Podnosh on Vimeo.