ba.rna.by

A site I designed for Picador went live last week.

Read the press release: http://www.chameleonnet.co.uk/news_item.aspx?id=91

Rosanna and I just got back from a holiday in Australia. Check out the flickr set here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/beedee/sets/72157623601516271/

Last Friday’s Culture Show had a bit on judging the Brit Insurance Design of the Year.

http://bbc.co.uk/i/r8fkz/?t=19m50s

I just received 50 new business cards from moo.com

I walked to the Tate Britain this morning to see the new Henry Moore exhibition.

I remembered seeing a sculpture of his when I visited San Francisco a few years ago, so I was interested to learn moore (ha!) about him.

One piece I really liked was the “Reclining Figure” because he had made the shape of the head, breasts and shoulders by following the grain of the wood, as if that shape was already inside the piece of wood he chose. As the Financial Times said it embodies ”Moore’s belief in the oneness of man and nature.”

Overall I really enjoyed the exhibition. I would recommend getting the audio guide (£3.50) if you aren’t familiar with him and his work already since there isn’t much info about that on the walls and it drowns out the background noise (it was very busy today). The other thing worth doing is combining your ticket with one for the Chris Ofili exhibition (£16 for both)

Today we went to see the Designs of the year exhibition at the Design Museum. We also had a look
round the Dieter Rams exhibition on the floor above.

Last night I re-checked the #140conf website before I left work and found they had freed up some more general admission tickets (albeit £5 more than the first round), so I quickly snapped one up, booked the day off work and found myself at 7.45am this morning on a Jubilee Line train heading towards the 02 with laptop (Macbook), notebook (Pantone) and camera (Canon g9) hastily stuffed in a rucksack.

I arrived at about 8.15am and joined the other bleary eyed social media/web types outside the Starbucks wondering why the hell it wasn’t open already. The fun didn’t end there however: we quickly found out there wasn’t any free conference WiFi. After paying The Cloud £9.99 for 24hours usage and feeling suitably fucked over, I made my way to the Indig02 and took my seat.

What follows are some highlights, thoughts and quotes from the day.

Jeff Pulver (@jeffpulver)

• “Listen, Connect, Share, Engage”
• Jeff Pulver liked the idea of a GT to signify a “Guest Tweet”.
• Jeff Pulver compared his first experience of Twitter to his first experience of Ham Radio as a child.

Babs Rangaiah (@babs26) & Laura Klauberg (@lklauberg) on The benefits of Twitter

• “Twitter without links is like cornflakes without milk”
• “Twitter is the most measurable channel out there”
• “No one has nailed social media yet”
• “Real time internet is here to stay”
• “Live the space”

Stephen Fry (@stephenfry)

Watch Stephen’s keynote here:

• “Twitter is human shaped, not business shaped”
• “It is called ‘Twitter’ not ‘SeriousDebate’ or ‘MarketingTool’
• “Participation is understanding”

Andrew Keen (@ajkeen)

• “We are discovering how to resell ourselves”
• “Authenticity is power”
• “Authenticity is currency”

(More here: http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2009/11/twitter_140_2_-.html)

Jeffrey Hayzlett (@jeffreyhayzlett)

• The 4 Es…Engage, Educate, Excite and Evangalise.
• “Twankers” (explained here)
• 1/3 of people get twitter straight away, 1/3 get it eventually and 1/3 will never get it.

Venture Outlook

• “Real-time web is greater than Twitter”

Kevin Holley – Co-inventor of SMS (@gadget37)

• SMS was meant for business but only really took off when consumers started using it

Small Business

• “1/5 of small businesses are on Twitter
• “Twitter has to get very big before it can get very small”

BuyACredit.com (@buyacredit)

(More here: http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2009/11/twitter_140_con_2.html)

Twitter and Brands

• Twitter is not a numbers game. Think less about numbers and more about depth of engagement
• “It’s about the conversation”
• Twitter followers can act as one giant focus group

Universal McCann

• “1/5 of all active internet use is mobile”

Kevin Slavin (@slavin) on Objects that tweet

• By the end of 2012 physical sensors will create 20% of non video web traffic

JP Rangaswami (@jobsworth)

• “We are moving closer to the internet of things”

(More here: http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2009/11/twitter_140conf_2.html)

Police who tweet (@wmpolice)

• 15 (out of 43) police agencies in the UK are on Twitter
• “Twitter is like a freight train – you either get on it or get hit by it”
• Twitter is part of core business for West Midlands police now
• A protest in Birmingham wouldn’t have been policed correctly without Twitter
• They are rolling out Twitter accounts to officers – “Give them guns, give them tasers, give them Twitter”

Education

• “Teens don’t tweet” is a myth
• Many schools and colleges ban Twitter/Facebook
• Teaches children to write for a purpose

Future of communication

• “If Twitter is the new telegraph what is the new telephone?”
• Google Wave allows people to interrupt thoughts before they are finished

e-democracy

• Last year: Facebook app, This year: Twitter strategy
• “Light/rapid interaction”
• Twitter is good for short term campaigns but how can it be used for long term campaigns?

Media

• Financial Times use it to gage popularity of stories and follow up on them when they are written
• 30 – 40% of Radio 1’s weekend music requests come from Twitter
• They use a “Would you say it on air” approach to presenters personal streams
• The #iranelection was a tipping point

So that is a very quick round up of some of the main things I took away from the event. There was so much content and discussion that it would be impossible to capture everything (I made about 34 pages of notes).  The lack of WiFi and the temperature of the Indig02 (like a freezer) were two small negatives amongst a whole day of positives. Most presenters could have done with more time and a few didn’t seem relevant (to me anyway), but it is always good to have some variation.

Thanks to @jeffpulver and all the speakers for a really interesting and informative day!

(Here is my flickr set -> http://www.flickr.com/photos/beedee/sets/72157622829007148/)