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:

• http://www.being-social.com/programme/
• http://www.being-social.com/speakers/

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!

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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!

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I’m always on the lookout for new technologies that will make businesses, and people, more effective and productive. My latest port of call was the February London BarCamp minibar meet up.

TechCrunch UK‘s Mike Butcher was there to shepherd the evening’s five minute speaker slots along, and ask the questions that make a web business shuffle on the spot, including the especially awkward: “How are you going to make money?”

Margaret Gold presented Vodaphone‘s Betavine developer community. The mobile phone (cell phone, or my favourite: the handy) has taken great leaps forward in functionality since the days of the two and a half tonne grey Motorola brick.

However, it hasn’t contributed much to an increase in productivity since those early days. We are more in touch, through SMS and mobile data connectivity, but widespread productivity applications are few and far between.

I hope we’ll see some new applications through the likes of Betavine, and initiatives like Google’s Android, that ease the burden of developing mobile applications. The mobile phone stands in the special ground between the personal and the business worlds. To date consumer applications have dominated. Enterprises should be developing business applications too, but are hampered by the range of handsets and network functionality.

Vigster.com presented their social network for video games. Despite my games console collection, not an area of interest for me. However it did make me realise how dominant Facebook has become in the social networking space. I found myself wondering how Vigster might compete against a Facebook app, and what the equivalent business social network applications might be.

Xavier Damman gave a demonstration of the upcoming WordPress plugin Commentag. Essentially this enables the tagging, by authors, of comments. It looked very pretty, although I’m not sure if users will go to the extent of tagging their comments, even though it increases discoverability.

Tagging is a powerful information management technique, and the main reason I use TiddlyWiki as a productivity tool. However, the future of tagging is for tags to be computer generated. We aren’t there yet. Folksonomies, that is group-based collaborative tagging, holds out some hope in the mean-time.

The presentation of graffywall piqued my curiosity. Essentially it is a shared infinite canvas. Antonio Lopes took it through its paces. It needed some ambient music to really set it off, and make the whole thing even more surreal. Imagine an infinite space where the whole world can simultaneously draw. Very experimental.

Shared white board applications have been very underused. A big screen and a pen tablet really brings this technology to life, and it a great way to interact with remote workers. I have been inspired to dig out the pen tablet for my Mac.

Nick Haltsted was there, talking about the development of tweetmeme, which will interest Twitter fans. Nick is better known for aggregator fav.or.it (explained on the about fav.or.it page). More on them, and the world of crowd sourcing later. They are hiring, apparently:

An interesting event, supported by BBC Innovation and O’Reilly, with some food for thought and opportunity to meet and greet for the London crowd.

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