events

Delayed report on two events

January 19, 2009 By Dan Thornton

In a relunctant admission of poor timekeeping, I just wanted to share some thoughts on a couple of events I was lucky enough to attend last Thursday.

The first MeasurementCamp of 2009 kicked off at 10am, hosted by E-Consultancy. It was good to be back, having missed a couple, and it’s always great to get the chance to tackle hypothetical examples in a group and share ideas and methodologies. Plus I got to sit next to BBC Working Lunch blog/social networking star Annie Mole… The only downside was the sheer number of people present meant introductions took a hefty chunk of time and left the case study discussion in a bit of a rush.

The other event was the Every Single One of Us Powwow, held at the ICA. It’s probably the most inspirational and exciting event I’ve ever attended – partly because it can be hard to grasp every aspect of ESOOU in words, partly because of the incomparable dynamo that is Jonathan MacDonald, and also because there was a real sense of purpose in the room.

It also meant I got to see, and occasional meet, some cool virtual people in the flesh, including WhatleyDude, Alfie Dennen, and the Herdmeister himself.

In all seriousness, pretty much any one of the people that spoke on the night would have been the highlight of most other events, so having them all in one room was pretty interesting. As was a mid-presentation hug from Jonathan…

The site has more details, videos, slides, interviews and details on everything to do with esoou.

Tomorrow should be very interesting

January 14, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Whilst today has been approaching epic fail status, (including my other blog, 140char.com having some kind of outage for 50% of visitors – including me), tomorrow has suddenly shaped up to be very interesting.

I’ve suddenly ended up with a breakfast date over soup with someone I’ve been trying to catch up with for ages.

Then there’s a good chance I might actually make MeasurementCamp for once…it’s always really interesting, and it has more of a focus on actually coming up with metrics (hence the name) that work for social media and marketing!

Then catching up on some of the plans for the day job at Bauer Media.

And then off to the very interesting EverySingleOneofUs event.

Considering some of the complications and illness-inspired delays that have already hit me (and my family) in 2009, it feels like tomorrow is the day it all kicks off.

EverySingleOneOfUs in the flesh…

December 16, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Very quick note to remind myself as much as anything, but the first live event from EverySingleOneofUs has been announced for January 15, 2009.

You can find out more details on the EverySingleOneOfUs wiki.

Using Twitter in a live setting.

September 30, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Apologies for a slight lack of posting due to other commitments. But on the bright side, there’s a good post on Event Manager Blog about ‘How to embed twitter in your event’

Admittedly it’s written by someone who was going to be my original collaborator here, but didn’t have time to blog, or write about Twitter! But we’ll forgive him for making a practical guide to starting to use microblogging tools for more…

Worth repeating?

September 26, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Writing about how the election coverage on Twitter and C-Span points to the future of media coverage, I came up with a little gem that I thought might be worth repeating:

‘aggregation of sources of information provides a starting point for a media company to add its own expertise and reason to provide something of value.‘

That’s it really. A mainstream media source can’t just aggregate content. Anyone can do that and the winners are decided by those who obtain a reasonable community and audience. And there’s already plenty of people out there, from Yahoo Buzz to Digg, to Mixx, to Sphinn, to microblogging.com.

But by aggregating and adding interpretation, it not only creates dynamic changing content, but actually opens up and highlights the expertise that a good journalist can bring on top of raw information. One of the mistakes we’ve continued to make in mainstream media is to underplay how good many journalists are at going beyond raw data, and the myraid ways in which they add value to it.

I’ve long believed it, but not managed to sum it up quite so succinctly before. And it’s not a new idea for plenty of notable people, e.g. Scott Karp, Jay Rosen, Pat Thornton (still no relation!), Howard Owens, Jeff Jarvis, David Cushman. And there are many, many more people I could name, and I’m sure that’s just a small proportion of a collective wisdom which suggests numbers and expertise big enough to hopefully break out of the social media echo chamber. And we can see it with the adoption in growing ways by a small number of titles (I mentioned the LA Times and The Guardian, here). Now we’re adding C-Span to the list.