The Awesome Web Company » Conference

My interview at Civil Service Live

Jenny — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 12:30:16 +0000

I caught up with the Amplified team at Civil Service Live recently and got interviewed by the lovely (and uber-talented) Steve Lawson about the work I’ve been doing on Monitoring Dashboards at Ministry of Justice (amongst other things).

Listen!

All is full of love

Jenny — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:49:06 +0000

I’m full of love for the web at the moment.

Well, I’m always full of love for the web, but every now and then my tolerance for navel gazing disappears completely and this time it’s been replaced by a desire to just sit back and enjoy for a while.

Bathcamp is a matter of weeks away and I’ve been mulling over what I might contribute. Whatever it ends up being, it’ll be a celebration. Pure and simple. And preferably without any explanation or discussion.

I might host a film club – bring a clip from your favourite video sharing site. Or perhaps the same thing but bring a film, a flickr photo, a (demonstrable) meme or a website.

In case you were wondering: today my 3 favourite things on the internet are:

Urinal Bitchie – Hello (because of the entire spectrum of wrongness)

The 21 Steps google maps story (because of the potential it represents)

The sneezing lamppost (bless you)

Tell you what, while we’re on the subject, what’s your best thing on the web, reader? Post me a comment…

I also like the idea of actually making stuff during the weekend. Something creative, not just your standard documentation of conferences guff (handy though that is ). So that’s something else to ponder.

If you’re coming to Bathcamp, keep an eye on the wiki to find out what I come up with (in case you need to bring anything!).

If you weren’t planning on coming to Bathcamp, I’d strongly recommend reconsidering. And – hurrah – there are still a few tickets available!

Embedded buzzdaq

Jenny — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:00:30 +0000

Frustratingly, I can’t see a way to embed it into this post…

jenny-bee.net/2008/04/22/buzzdaq/

Hi Jenny

Thanks for looking at our Buzzdaq, it was a great idea to add an embed code. If you take a look now, you’ll notice we’ve added one one on there now!

jenny-bee.net/2008/04/22/buzzdaq/#comment-131

Nice one Refreshed Media.

Buzzdaq

Jenny — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:33:31 +0000

This is quite PR-y but a nice idea none-the-less.

Refreshed Media unveil their latest digital breakthrough called Buzzdaq, which … allows visitors to see, at a glance the most mentioned words from hundreds of specially selected blog and news articles.

All feeds are taken from the blogs or news items of sites relevant to the internet community… These are drawn from an RSS feed and displayed through the Buzzdaq application which can then be bookmarked to share with others.

From socialmediaportal.com

Frustratingly, I can’t see a way to embed it into this post, but you can sample the delights of Buzzdaq on the Internet World website.

I’m wondering whether something like this could be used to measure the buzz around specific conferences (related post: I want it ALL (in one place)!).

I want it ALL (in one place)!

Jenny — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:44:21 +0000

As anyone in the tech world who hasn’t been under a rock for the last few days will know, the SXSW tech love-in is currently taking place.

I’m not there but I’m trying to keep abreast with what’s going on. Fortunately, this is a lot easier to do than ever before. Twitter and Seesmic are updating me with observations from people who’s opinions I respect and my rss reader is busy gathering feeds. There are also a number of tools I can use to ‘manually’ find content – digg, del.icio.us, hashtags etc.

But sifting through the gossip, chatter, informed opinion, official texts, party videos etc etc to identify key themes, opinions and zeitgeist is a daunting task.

Established publishing channels such as Wired seem to be doing a good job of recording key moments and general observations. But I’m not totally certain their reporting is accurate. What if they are completely failing to notice the Twitter buzz around a new application?

What I’m faced with is my perception of trust and authority in the recording of this event. I need to employ a number of methods to build a complete picture of the conference as there isn’t one source to do that for me. I trust that I’ll be presented with well informed, intelligent, crafted commentary from the Wired blog, and I also trust my Twitter and Seesmic friends to reflect zeitgeist and offer their expert opinion.

What I need is a website where I can get a roundup of what the Twitterverse is buzzing about, what’s being discussed on Seesmic, what’s being blogged, rated, bookmarked and so on.

I’d still like to read ‘professional’ editorial and interpretation but this and the user generate content would complement each other in order to present a holistic vision of – in this case – SXSW.

I wonder if this is the approach established news publishers will need to move towards in order to survive changing perceptions of authority and the inevitable mainstream establishment of user generated content?

What do people think? Does anything like this already exist?

Unconferencing chinwag

Jenny — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:53:58 +0000

I’ve been thinking about how you might go about taking the free-form nature of barcamp and merging it with ‘static’ industry-expert panel discussions.

Very much in response to discussions after Chinwag’s measuring social media event on Monday.

So…

How about a panel event where there is a set subject and fixed set of panellists – but the areas of discussion are worked out on a wiki by the attendees in the run up to the event?

The agenda would have to be managed to the extent that there could only be, say, 4 or 5 areas of discussion in order to stick to the time frame. You could open up the wiki for general suggestions and comments and then a week or so before the event someone arranges the suggestions into logical groupings in order to form the agenda. (For the panellists’ sake you’d probably want to fix the agenda about a week before the event.)

What do people think?

PR, Social Networking & Blogging in Practice

Jenny — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 12:07:15 +0000

I was at the PRWeek PR, Social Networking & Blogging in Practice conference yesterday.

To be honest, I was sceptical beforehand and my scepticism was at first confirmed by being one of only about 5 people with a laptop, and there being no free wi-fi. Am I too ‘un-conferenced’ these days?

Anyway, in actual fact the day turned out to be extremely useful with a consistently high calibre of speaker and a few genuinely interesting case studies.

Abbreviated notes and comments:

The established media clearly don’t ‘get it’ if they think (according to Shane Richmond) that bloggers are official spokespeople for the brand. But hey, it’s something we need to be aware of
Applying a persona to your programme may help focus and inform the nature of engagement
Apparently the mobile internet isn’t worth talking about
Some established media giants might actually think people will always read print newspapers
I like what Kodak are doing with 1000 words & 1000 nerds. After all, experience IS the product
Oh how I love stats
Penguin are doing some really exciting things with social media – engaging interest groups and facilitating user-generated content, merging on- and off-line
(Wondering how they’ll respond when faced with the same challenges the music industry are currently facing. Hoping book publishers will learn from music publishers mistakes)
Will McInnes twitters, and said some interesting things like:
- Negative reviews generate conversions AND reduce product returns (because expectations are lower)
- You demonstrate confidence by linking to competitors
- Fake people are so much better than real people
And he also wrote up his thoughts from the day here.
12-14 year olds trust unknown peers more than experts and they are source agnostic. And deys de future, man
Authority is now with the ‘louder voice’ rather than seniority

Why I love Twitter (barcamp presentation)

Jenny — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 07:50:08 +0000

Presentation for the UKGovWeb barcamp – 26/01/08 – London.

The basics

Twitter is a website that enables you to set up a profile and then add text updates (known as ‘tweets’) using 140 characters or less. Other people with twitter profiles can choose to ‘follow’ your updates, and vice versa.

You can update your twitter feed through your profile page on the twitter website, via SMS on your mobile phone, through an IM client, and via a number of dedicated desktop and on-the-move applications. You can also receive updates from people you are following via these methods.