State of Search blog: Facebook

Quick note to say I blogged for State of Search last week on the AllFacebook Marketing conference.

The article can be seen here – it’s an extract of the two themes I felt most of interest to a search audience: AllFacebook Marketing Conference: ROI Values highlighted; Issues confirmed.

It’s just as valid for a PR audience – particularly the ROI justifications for using Facebook.

Enjoy!

Ada Lovelace Day: Wendy Hall

It’s Ada Lovelace Day – the day to bring to the fore the successful female role models in the traditionally male dominated fields of technology and science.

I’ve chosen to blog about Wendy Hall – now Dame Wendy Hall DBE, FREng, FBCS, FIET, FCGI, FRS.  Today she’s  Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and Dean of the Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences.

She probably wouldn’t know me from Adam, but my first job after graduating was working for the language lab at the University whilst I started my (as yet unfinished) PhD, scanning language texts and linking them using this new ‘thing’ – hypertext – on a project called Microcosm, which was absolutely her baby. She was one of the first people to seriously research the possibilities of multimedia and hypermedia.

For the first time, it was easy to make associations between subjects in unrelated documents. It seems almost impossible now, but we were at the bleeding edge at the University, with students using word processors!

I’ve rarely seen Wendy’s name on the conference circuit. and she’s not prolific on Twitter (@DameWendyOBE). But she became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year’s Honours list, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in June 2009.

Why? Her work has has had huge significance for digital libraries, the semantic web, and more.

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Social Media Week kicks off

It seems like forever ago that that Sam Michel lead an unconferenced discussion about  it at Tweetcamp, but Social Media Week has kicked off. And what a challenge they set themselves. Social media is almost as ubiquitous as the telephone, so finding enough that’s new and challenging for an experienced user/practitioner is getting tougher. The organisers have – helpfully – given a level indicator on the booking site, but even so – getting away from the ‘same old’ and ‘echo chamber’ is tough.

Keep that in mind as I report back from Dell B2B, organised by PR blogger extraordinaire, Neville Hobson, and ex-Dell social media expert, Kerry Bridge. Both have, over the years, done a great job of this event, which conveniently coincided with Social Media Week this time.

It’s a bear bug of mine when events don’t have a diverse presenter group  on the stage. When you have a phenomenal female audience that includes female ‘ass-kickers’ like Shirley Ayres, Sue Llewellyn and Kate Matlock, (look them up!) as organisers, you’d better make sure your content’s sh*t hot if you don’t have diverse keynoters.

The white male keynote presenters at Dell B2B (#smwb2b) did a relatively good job of stepping up to the plate. If I had a gripe it would be that there was little ‘unconferenced’ about the event, and that mostly the ‘B’ in B2B seemed to be interpreted as brand. That’s sad, Read more »

Ada Lovelace Day 2012

A quick flick flick through the programmes of most tech conferences will tell you what you already knew: there aren’t many women speaking on the tech circuit. If you can call social technologies ‘tech’, we do slightly better in that field, with advice on use coming from a few attractive, articulate women.

But when putting their programmes together, the organisers look around the circuit for people who’ve been on stage before with a degree of success, so the cycle’s been a hard one to break. Organisations such as Girl Geek Dinners  do well to address the balance, but why should the women in tech, who have to be pretty determined to break through stereotypes – only a quarter of university places on technology courses are apparently going to women, and this stat was one given out by Facebook this week, so I suspect it’s based on US figures – be confined to the niches of women’s networking and support groups.

Suw Charman-Anderson is a social technologist and writer.  Fed up with “the tech industry’s continual excuses regarding the lack of women speakers at conferences”, she founded Ada Lovelace Day – a day in which a mass of women technologists are written about, just to prove a point: women have always had place right at the forefront of technology.

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