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Thinking Digital 2011

Benjamin Ellis — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:27:04 +0000

Benjamin Ellis and Sam Michel - Photo (cc) Janet Davis

Two CEOs, three days, 8 hours of train journey and one Thinking Digital 2010. Talking technology, ideas and the future in Newcastle. I’ve been wanting to go to Thinking Digital for a number of years, and this year I finally made it, joining long-time Thinking Digital attendee Sam Michel (CEO of Chinwag, who were also one of the conference Media Partners).

It’s rare to find a conference these days that really pushes at the envelope of what’s happening, pulling together the leading thinkers in a stimulating environment and given fresh food for though. In the age of blog posts, on-line videos and Twitter, new ideas spread rapidly, and all too often one ends up hearing what one has already heard before, but #TDC10 did manage to produce some genuinely unique thoughts and experiences.

Not only was it a chance to catch up with folks like Documentally and the familiar faces of the Newcastle digital collective, but also an opportunity to meet and talk with people like Brian Solis (who took a very nice portrait shot) and many others that I have only previously encountered on-line. There are too many people to name in one go, but let me point you to at least two speakers, by way of their previous talks at TED :- Surrey local Julian Treasure (of the Sound Agency), and Andy Hobsbawn (and the inspirational dothegreenthing)

I caught organiser Herb Kim, to have him explain what Thinking Digital is about, via Qik, at the bustling after party (excuse the wind noise and music!)

“…What we try to do is bring in a lots of extra stuff… …from the arts and sciences and make it different… …it produces an experience where it opens people’s minds not just to new ideas, but to new people…” Herb Kim.

The next event is the 24th-26th May 2011, and booking is already open (this year sold out well beforehand). The venue, the Sage Centre, provided an excellent photographic backdrop, and people have had fun tagging and adding notes to the pictures – if you were there you might be in this one.

Thinking Digital was a great example of the journey that conferences are now on, moving from didactic broadcast, to digitally-enabled, network-building events. While you can watch a live stream, you miss much of the benefit of the event unless you are physically there. It might be about the on-line world, but the valuable action happens off-line, in the corridors, the dinners and the lunches. We’re face-to-face people, on-line tools simply provide a way to enable, bridge and extend our real-world experiences.

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Put it in the Diary

Benjamin Ellis — Wed, 12 May 2010 10:30:57 +0000

Things have been frenetically busy with projects and event-related travel, with longer form writing taking a bit of a back seat, given the amount of coding and blog set up going on around the office as well. That hasn’t stopped the tweeting of course! WordPress training activity has also stepped up a notch, with more demand for advanced level courses, which we are currently running as an on-site option for small groups.

The bonus from all this activity has been lots of face to face interaction and debate, from the Information World keynote with Elizabeth and Mia of the Continued Communications research team, through speaking at UKTI’s TechnologyWorld, to the amazing LikeMinds event in Exeter, Web 2.0 Expo and the recent Digital Surrey event. The next few weeks feature a huge number of events, as we escape election (and post-election) fever. The schedule for just the rest of the week is:

13th May - Being-Social – , 2-6pm, London. Where I will be chairing the ‘How Social Media is changing how we communicate’ session, joined by Andrew Davis Antony Mayfield Chris Thorpe David Cushman Jamie Riddell.
May 14th – Higher Ground:The future of social and digital media in HE - London, for CASE. Opening, and joined by Abigail of The Blue Door.

With much more coming up, but more on that later. There is still time to book for Being-Social tomorrow, with just a few spaces left. The full speaker list and programme are here:

And I am looking forward to getting back to my roots in the Education community on Friday. All of this has required some careful diary management! It is amazing how much backwards and forwards email and phone calls a simple shared diary system can save, likewise, sending event participants a diary invite with the event logistics in may seem a bit cheeky, but at least you know they have the details somewhere that they can find them on the night before. Standards like iCalendar have made diary sharing and synchronisation relatively easy, even in mix Mac/PC/Linux environments.

Here’s to a busy (social) life!

Social Media Week London

Benjamin Ellis — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:15:07 +0000

Roll up roll up, it is Social Media Week. Obviously every week is social media week these days, but this is an extra special series of events all around the world. First of all, by way of full disclosure, I am on the advisory board for the London Events, which might make me even more enthusiastic than normal.

With that out of the way, let me share a little about what is happening. The first Social Media Week took place in New York last year and was a great success. This year Social Media Week is happening in six cities around the world. The schedule of events can be found on the London site, with more events being added all the time.

I plan to be at the Social Graph event at the IAB on Monday, followed by the opening night reception. I will be joining a fantastic panel including David Terrar, Ala Patrick, Euan Semple, Mat Morrison, Dr Sue Black, Shefaly and co on Tuesday Evening for a session on Social Media in Enterprise. Lightning 10 minute presentations, followed by Q&A, at Cass Business school. If you are working with social media in a business setting you’ll probably want to book here now! The week for me rounds off with “Social Media Measurement” at Sun’s offices on Friday, where I will be chairing the afternoon session.

Key event details: Mon 1st Feb – Fri 5th Feb, 2010

Location: All around London.
Website: http://socialmediaweek.org/london
Twitter: http://twitter.com/smwldn (for the latest updates)

In other news, the blog got into the Technorati top 100 for Small Business Blogs, which is a gentle nudge to blog some more. We’ve been doing some very exciting things with WordPress for Redcatco’s customers, and are adding in some new server infrastructure in the next few weeks as well!

Tweetcamp London – Beyond 140 Characters

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:12:01 +0000

The recent Tweetcamp event was organised by Farhan Rehman (@farhan), Dees Chinniah (@cyberdees), and Jon Bishop (@jonin60seconds), I just ran around with a microphone on the day, and chatted with Farhan before hand! It was far from being another BarCamp. While many familiar faces from the social media space came along, it also reached people who hadn’t been to any sort of unconference before.

The idea that a community can get together and self-organise an event is still a refreshing one, but when Farhan first suggested the idea of Tweetcamp I knew it was going to be something a bit different, pushing at the boundaries between the on-line and off-line world. What was it about? I’ll let Farhan explain:

TweetCamp is about bringing communities together, in real life. It’s about accelerating the conversations that happen on Twitter, in real life. It’s about creating richer, more personal connections… …It’s all about bringing the people together who you know from and through Twitter, into a physical space, and then having some of those great conversations and interactions you would have online, but in real life.

You can get a feel for the day by watching the video I put together:

The process of on-line to off-line bridging is something I pursue in the corporate space. On-line platforms work best with people who have met off-line and interacted face-to-face. Similarly, on-line tools let people sustain relationships when time and distance – from remote working or hectic schedules – would otherwise curtail them. Tweetcamp was an opportunity to experiment with different ways of stimulating discussion and self-organising a very large group (about 150 people or so).

Amy Sample Ward has challenged the team to build on this start at bridging on-line and off-line communities in her thoughtful post. The conversations and activities were very varied. I met someone I knew by swapping a toilet seat for a wonderful water spray – you had to be there. You’ll also hear Ray mentioned in the video. He is a poet and ran a poetry workshop. Inevitably he was ‘dragged’ on to Twitter, where you can now find him as @TheEducatedfool. He was there as part of the BBC poetry initiative, which came up with an innovative live idea for the event, linking Tweetcamp to Glastonbury via Twitter. People tweeted short poems from the event, which were displayed live over there. I told you it wasn’t your usual barcamp!

As well as a wonderful lunch, and Muesli, from sponsors Mymuesli, Addlestones provided a wonderful end to the day with their cider. A big thank you to all of the sponsors. The day wasn’t about the food though, it was about the conversations, which covered topics as diverse as children’s use of the Internet to internal business communications, and a range of other topics between.

There are lots of photos from the day up on Flickr, including these by Adam Tinworth and some from Chris Heuer (who recently ebayed himself) as well as a few I took:

On a (Digital) Mission to New York

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:48:49 +0000

This post has taken nearly 4,000 miles to write. I started writing in my office, then wrote more sitting at Heathrow airport, having packed my things and said my goodbyes. Finally I finished writing at 30,000 feet above sea level, then posted this when I arrived in New York. Quite a journey for one post.

I’ll be blogging my progress at Web 2.0 Expo on the Chinwag blog as I follow the Digital M ission around New York (find the events on upcoming and photos on flickr). The digital mission has great sponsors in UK Trade and Investment, Sun Startup Essentials andWinston and Straw, enabling the Chinwag team to pull together an impressive agenda for the companies involved. There will be lots to learn.

Mission is an interesting topic, often misunderstood. Organizations have missions (see Vision, Mission and Purpose from a few months back), and people can have missions too. Mission is about achieving something, creating change (getting a message out is a means to an end).

Linking the US and the UK has been part of my mission for nearly 15 years, as I hopped backwards and forwards over the Atlantic. I love working across different countries and markets, exploring the cultures. That practice has given me the opportunity to discover many things, both about myself and the countries.

Between the mission and thinking about social media best practice recently, I have been mulling the combination of the two in my head. Someone read me a definition of ‘practice’ from a children’s dictionary, it went something like this:

“Practice is doing things, rather that thinking about them or standing around talking about them.”

Very poignant. There is an amazing propulsion that comes from combining a solid mission, with diligent practice. Mission focusses effort. Practice helps use get better. Either one, without the other, leads to a dissipation. There is little point having a vision and mission if you don’t get out and do something about it. On the other hand, heading out and doing random things doesn’t give a narrow enough focus to get better at doing a few key things, by repeating them. As exciting as doing something new everyday is, it does give much scope for excellence.

I’m off to practice…

Living in the Cloud – Computing

Benjamin Ellis — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:53:36 +0000

This is a long overdue post, following on from CloudCamp London, which was the second ever CloudCamp, and the first in the UK. It’s been a couple of weeks of firsts, what with WordCamp too. And yes, before you ask, I have been a busy camper – so much so that I am taking time out to go camping tomorrow, but that is another post.

Like many technology trends, cloud computing is a series of waves and threads, not a single happening. Software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS – a la SalesForce.com), generally lots of things as a service – XaaS.

There were some cracking presentations, especially Simon Wardley‘s “Gang up now before the *aaS Cloud gets you” which was delivered in a Lessig presentation style than was more Lessig than even Lessig himself.

Hosted services aren’t new, in Internet terms. However, what is new is the brewing perfect storm:

Affordable, ubiquitous Internet access (Mobile for flexibility, Ethernet services for high bandwidth).
Scalable, but low entry computing services (Thanks to Google and Amazon’s cloud services).
A bevy of Internet start ups producing applications and users that are keen to consume them.

My favourite technology of the evening was really James Governor’s Segway (founder of RedMonk – his write up of the event here: CloudCamp London: the inauguration). However, I didn’t manage to persuade James to part with it, although he did get me thinking more generally about Cloud Computing and the surrounding issues.

Cloud-based services are going to be a increasing part of business life, and understanding them will be essential. There are a number of benefits and a number of challenges, which I’ll touch on in the next few posts…

A More Open Cloud

WordCampUK 2008

Benjamin Ellis — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:58:07 +0000

I use both commercial and open source software. Choosing the best tool for the job is the priority. However, one thing that I do really appreciate with open source is the communities that operate around each platform.

For the first time in the UK, the WordPress community is gathering. WordCamp UK will be held from Saturday July 19 to Sunday July 20, 2008 in Birmingham (Birmingham, UK that is). Tickets are on sale here.

There will be presentations, workshops and the opportunity to socialize with other WordPress enthusiasts and developers. A great opportunity to learn and share knowledge and skills.

I’ll be there with my camera, capturing the moment (here are the pictures from MediaCamp and TechCrunch Pitch! in case you missed them). I’ll also be on the Q&A panel, as well as speaking from my experiences of the past few years.

Redcatco are supporting the event with sponsorship – it is great to be able to give something back to the community. You can find out much more on the WordCamp UK blog. Oh, and the event even has its own WordPress plugin: Linklove.

If you are a WordPress user in the UK (or know one, or can travel to the UK), come along and spread the word. I use WordPress everyday, and really appreciate its ease of use, flexibility and developer community.

Communicating Feelings on the Future of the Web

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:03:56 +0000

Two things in one here: A heads up on an event tomorrow (don’t worry, you can still catch it), and an interesting way to look at things.

Tomorrow sees a talk from Sir Tim Berners-Lee (recently voted the most important technology innovator of the last century), focussing in on web science. It is an area I am fascinated by, so I’m chuffed to be going along. Web science looks at the impact of the web on our society and economy and combines a number of disciplines dear to my heart.

He will be joined by Andy Duncan (Chief Executive of Channel 4) and Charlie Leadbeater (author of “We-think“: The Power of Mass Creativity’) for discussion on the role of governments, business and academia in safeguarding the future of the web as an open platform. The session is fully booked, but panic not, there will be a live webcast, tomorrow from around 4pm GMT (or a bit earlier to be sure!). Here is the URL:

http://www.nesta.org.uk/the-future-of-the-web-with-sir-tim-berners-lee-8-july

The NESTA Innovation Edge team polled a number of people about their hopes and fears for the future of the web, and used these to produce a Wordle cloud. I’ve seen a few Wordle clouds recently, and they can be quite thought provoking. It is essentially a word cloud (just like a tag cloud, if you are familiar with those), but more graphically rich.

Take a look and you’ll get the idea. Here are people’s hopes for the future of the web:

And here are people’s fears about the future of the web:

Word clouds are a useful stimulus for conversations. The words, freed from their semantic context, stimulate all sorts of thinking. How about building your own word clouds about your hopes and fears and then see what they tell you? Just go to Wordle – Create and paste in your text.

Here’s the wordle for this blog:

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Thinking Digital 2011

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