I attended the first day of the Internetworld event at Earls Court yesterday, but wasn’t able to blog last night as I was watching Chelsea football club crash out of the Champions League semi-final!
It did make me realise the time is right to move to a newer mobile phone, with web access, and the ability to blog without a PC, bearing in mind I decided to travel light for once. One of the presentations was by Russ Shaw from O2, covering convergence, and although I don’t really care too much about the fact they’ve bought the Millenium Dome, I was quite interested in things like the pay-per-clip LootAtMe, the online SIM back-up and the ability to share any pics and videos at My Bluebook. Although everything is currently sent via MMS, the facility is coming this year to instantly share via a simple option, which should increase the 25,000 user group (I think I’ve got the figure right).
There were plenty of seminars by the likes of Yahoo etc, and most were OK., if not revolutionary. Lots of talk about social networking and convergence. Examples like Myspace, Flickr and Youtube. Not exactly startling, but the occasional interesting point emerged in each 30 minute presentation.
Probably my favourite even of the day was “Five things web copy commissioners should know about social media” by Catherine Toole from Sticky Content. Appropriately for someone creating engaging online editorial, Catherine was fairly engaging herself, and for once, acknowledged some of the problems facing companies who are starting to embrace web 2.0 (People actually still use that term?) and social networking.
Catherine was followed by Liz O’Donnell from LinkedIn, explaining how to use social networking for selfish reasons…i.e. to help you as an individual find jobs/employees/companies etc. Again it was nice not to just here someone explaining that social networking is a growth area, and then pimping their product in isolation.
Sadly work means I couldn’t go today or tomorrow, but I think it was definitely worth visiting, just to meet some fellow geeks, watch Catherine and Liz’s presentations, and have the chance to be inspired in real life. I know some of the presentations are being taped to be put on the internetworld site, so I’ll post when they appear.