| View | Upload your own

These slides from the training session for the Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce last week. Let me know if you want us to come to your event or run a bespoke event or Masterclass.

More details on our Social Media for Good course soon (looks like next date will be Oct 3 in Brighton).

Covers a bit of an introduction to social media and blogging, plus some questions to get you thinking about your own context, opportunities and challenges.

Some good thinking in the room and animated conversations. Quite a few organisations ready to get blogging and exploring integrated social media in more depth.

A few of you made pledges are you walked out the door about your goals and intentions, so let me know how you get on!
Thanks to all for your warm feedback and to those who helped make it a positive event, especially Lorraine Bell (BCP), Tania “Radiance” Fullerton (Brighton Steiner School) and Fay McDonald.

New dates coming soon…

Your chance to get > share > use radical knowledge for positive impact. More information…

If anyone is trying to get their heads around Web 2.0, social media, new paradigm thinking and all that claptrap – get a look at this. Lovely simple animation. I’m going to use it at the beginning of all my courses. Free event coming up soon to give people a taste of it all. Watch this space.

Guardian review here (including Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky) which also looks reeal good.

Shame The Big Issue review isn’t available online. A different and very valid take on things.

No wonder most journalist’s I meet are annoyed with blogging and What’s Going On with we-think.

No wonder I am compelled to work in and support this space.

So glad Rosie Sherry is in it with me (thanks for the video).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiP79vYsfbo&hl=en]

It was good, really good. I got to spend a day with the concepts and details of widgets. I had the sortof skeleton of an idea of what the whole widget thing was about, and then spent the day really adding flesh and ideas to that ever so slippery widget concept.

And some neat and interesting ideas have come out of it all too. Here’s a few of my highlights and thoughts:

Physical Widgets

Russell Davies helped fill in my Amazon wish list with a couple of real-world widgets. Real physical things that talk to the internet and physically exist in the real world.

Firstly, the Wattson which is a sexy-looking real-world implementation of the Viridian Energy Meter proposed by Bruce Sterling in a design competition in, gee, about 2000. This idea here is that if you can see your energy consumption via something sitting on the kitchen table, you might just go and turn off some more lights and appliances on standby. I want one of these.

And I’m still deeply intrigued by the Nabaztag WiFi bunny.

Platforms

There was a lot of talk about widget building, distribution and management platforms. All good stuff. I think some of the vendors did a bit much spruiking their own stuff rather than addressing the big questions, but you get that. It was good the the full lifecycle was represented, and I was delighted to see a lot of talk about metrics around widget usage rather than simply downloads, placements and impressions. This is getting towards the behaviour-based or participation-based metrics we are starting to get out of our scouta media recommendation platform.

Distributed Rights

Great to get into a discussion about content ownership among microsites and widgets. Who owns the data you put in a comment field? I hope we can get something together to come up with a simple way to represent terms and rights next to every input box. A litle rainbow of colours or something. Thanks to Kris from js-kit for originating that discussion.

Freshness and humility

These days, I value more and more the people that are brave and real enough to accept and talk about their mistakes and what they don’t know:

• Google can’t be as cool as their speakers always say they are. Sorry, but I just don’t buy the perfection. It just seems arrogant and unreal.
• If you are a widget platform vendor, I’m happy enough for you to tell me once that you have the best platform. But please don’t do that for half an hour. Move on. Tell me what you are worried about, or confused about. I want to find the human becoming in what you are doing.
• Will McInnes filled the room with fresh Oxygen with his presentation about Nixon-McInnes evolution into a social media agency. I like the humility, I like the experiment. And thanks for the name-check Will!

Just being there

Gee conferences are marvelous things (though the afterparty++ hangover wasn’t). Just getting out there and sharing. Wow. In the day I threw a couple of new ideas out there, worked a couple more through with people during drinks, and chatted probably complete nonsense well into Friday morning.

The value and power of getting together face to face to share and work on stuff is remarkable. Nice one, Ivan.

Anyone participating in the WGUK07 Social Network will now have a chance to give their blog a boost.

Authentic Blogging has sponsored the event with a coaching session for two bloggers captured in the feed into the network on the day.

For those that aren’t up with this stuff yet, it’s really quite neat. Backnetwork provides a platform for social networks to build in the lead up to a conference or event, on the day and for some months afterwards. Delegates join with speakers, sponsors, media and organisers to answer each other’s questions and help set the focus for the event. During and after, they chat, think and debrief to make even more sense of what’s going on and move things forward in their worlds.

We’ve been facilitating this space since its inception.

So Graeme and I thought it would be nice to give something to the community of Widgety folk by sponsoring the prize for “Most Indepth Blog Post on the Day”.

Delegates will have their laptops there and, believe it or not, be tapping away to share what’s happening for them. To document and reflect. To download, store and retain it all in their “external memory drives” ie. their blogs.

…and propping up the bar at the After Party later on.. and chewing each other’s ear’s off no doubt.

It’s going to be a great day.

Good on you Ivan, Emm, Zoe, Kris, all the sponsors and speakers and punters for bringing it together. Can’t wait to share more about the wonders of widgets.

Widgets matter. As Tom Coates was saying at d.construct this year, your product must be more than your website. Widgets are one of the big ways to spread fingers of your product into many corners of the online and mobile world.

Lib is working on the Widgety Goodness backnetwork, helping to bring people together online before the conference itself and using the back network to richen delegates’s experience on the day. Altogether shaping up to be something quite interesting.

More info about the conference and registration over on the Widgety Goodness website and blog.

Wow, it’s been over a week since I posted. Loads going on with running the three initial courses (2 x mainstream, 1 x academics), developing our delicious new blogging course for business (social enterprises and others), invitations coming in from all over the place… and now, Widgety Goodness.

What is that you might ask? Well, if you have ever been on Facebook (ah, yes I guess the answer would be for most), you might have noticed all the applications you get sucked into using and sharing. Well, these are widgets. See previous post about what a widget is here.

Suffice to say, widgets are scorching right now. Particularly for marketing bods.

The Widgety Goodness 07 one-day event in Brighton 6 December is the first ever widget conference in the UK, and tickets are flying out the door. All going well, we’ll be doing it in New York next year.

I’m working as the backnetwork facilitator among other things, with the ever-happening Ivan Pope and co. I marked him as my “muse” in the relationships profile for backnetwork, which is largely why I took the gig. Ivan sometimes describes himself as an artist, entrepreneur, anarchist. How could I resist!

Thanks to Ivan Pope (again) for leading me down the rabbit hole via his highly absorbing widget haven, the one and only Snipperoo. I’m now getting all widgety!

Widgets are nifty little things you can add to your blog or other website to personalise it. Wordpress’s official blogger Lorelle calls it “accessorizing” (that’s one for the girls).

Facebook applications are widgets, eg. that lovely Bob Dylan one, tag clouds are widgets. The search box on the top right of this blog is a widget.

“Widgets” is just a silly buzzword we’ve chosen for this sidebar-chopping plug-in we have developed. They could have been called Gadgets or Gizmos or Wizbangs or Whatevers. On the surface, they’re just things you can use to personalize your WordPress site without knowing HTML. Way down deep, they may be something entirely more significant. Anyway, here’s a peek…” more at automatic.

Note for Authentic Blogging students: we are all using Wordpress 2.2 or later so it already supports widgets under Dashboard > Presentation > Widgets.

To find out more go to Snipperoo and Wikipedia. These sites go a lot deeper in terms of the commercial and social implications of widgets. Snipperoo is where you go to get loads of cool widgets.

To find out how to use widgets on your Wordpress blog.

If you want more flexibility in how you “pimp your blog”, then you might need to upgrade to Wordpress.org.