Jun 11, 2007
Women, Business and Blogging. And cake.
I spent last Friday at the Women, Business and Blogging conference at DMU in Leicester, at which I was giving a talk about new ways of thinking about content and publishing in the era of the social web.
My presentation essentially covered the different sorts of content activities and their established and emergent forms online.
This then provided a context for talking about…well, context, actually, as well as publishing models and control and the lack thereof.
I wound up by talking about community, and more specifically, user engagement and community management, including the ways that communities can be nurtured and supported for growth.
I found the event to be really interesting - and very stimulating to be involved with, which is always a bonus - with a rich mix of people from varying backgrounds attending, plus good opportunities for networking talking over refreshments, of which were were many. Opportunities, that is, not refreshments, though now you come to mention it…
It was quite a privelege to appear on the programme alongside (and in heated panel discussion with) fellow speakers Eileen Brown from Microsoft (who was much quicker off the mark in getting her blog entry about the event up - but then, it’s her job…) and Jory des Jardins from BlogHer. I found both of their talks to be full of insight and thought-provoking material, and all this while both apparently suffering from jetlag. I had no such excuse, alas - unless you consider an early train from St Pancras to Leicester to be disruptive to the body clock…
I also really enjoyed meeting such an interesting and intelligent array of people, including Louise Brown, Marknominious, Anna Farmery, as well as reconnecting with some of the people I met at the Transliteracy Colloquium at the IOCT last month - Toby Moores who is doing some fascinating stuff with Machinima, and Ruth Page who somehow managed to blog an uncannily verbatim version of my talk on her site in real time.
So a big thank you to Kate Pullinger for introducing me so nicely and Sue Thomas and Jess Laccetti for organising the event and asking me to get involved in the first place.
And, if any other conference organisers are reading, I’ve got one word for you which will stimulate conversation as well as people hanging around to drink wine and keep the conversation going after the day has ended : Cake.
You took photos of the cakes! You genius :D Now they will be with us forever! Also loving the photo at the top. How did you do it? Stick loads together? After the frankly hidious outcome of my own photography attempts, I’ve resolved to learn to use my camera properly. Perhaps by next year I’ll be able to take something as nice as your one :)
I’m glad to see some of your slides up. I took as many notes as I could during your talk but it is good to see them again. All three keynotes really were brilliant.
I found your perspective really interesting especially the bit about “what’s your blog about”? It seems like you’ve been blogging before blogs were invented! Can’t you claim some sort of prior art on the idea? I’m only sorry that I didn’t get a chance to chat with you. I did have one question? Do you think you could stop blogging or is it something that is just a part of you now?
Mmm…consumption.
Hi Meg,
I really enjoyed your talk on Friday. After seeing the pics I’m wishing I’d taken full advantage of the cakes, but alas I was feeling weighed down by an onion bhaji overload from lunch. Mental note: next time take tupperware!!
My blog - Tea Blog - is not that conventional and after the list of blog definitions you gave, I’m not quite sure how it fits in, it’s an art project really. It would be great if you could take a look.
Best wishes, Ellie
Hey love it - considered intelligent!! Only downside to this post - is I now need food and lots of it…
Great meeting you and will watch out for your next presentation on “Let them eat cake!”
Are those chocolate-covered mini-swiss-rolls in the middle? Apparently, sales of swiss rolls are in free-fall because they’ve got out of fashion. This is, in my opinion, a crying shame. We should campaign to raise awareness of this issue and encourage more people to purchase swiss rolls.
I’m curious about curation. What is curation
@Gifted Typist: Curation activities are ways in which people order, sift and sort content.
This may be active - e.g. for editorial reasons: the best links about X or ten places I’ve eaten in Y - or passive, completed via activity, such as topics sorted by how many people have clicked on them.
Or imagine Amazon book search results presented in order of how many people actually bought the books rather than just looked at the page (or publishing date).
Thanks Meg for joining us and sharing with us an excellent presentation. It was such a pleasure to be in the audience - and I’m especially taken with your slide style (I love the *holy trinity* model)!!
I’ll look forward to reading updates about your other presentations.
Thanks again for being part of our conference!
Meg,
Sorry to take an age to get round to asking…
You also had another couple of slides that I found interesting - those showing the early relationship the web had with users, and another with a more complicated diagram showing users feeding back to publishers.
Any chance you could also bung them on your site? (couldn’t draw them fast enough). I’d like to compare them with some other comms models I’ve seen. Thanks.
ps Graybo - they weren’t chocolate covered swiss rolls in the true sense of the word (I believe). They were chocolate covered chocolate logs, not victoria sponge and jam. Perhaps an expert on the definition of ’swiss’ could help here…
Meg,
Thanks again for a great talk. Maybe I should have a new career as a transcriber (or ‘get everything she says down as fast as possible’). I had friends who wanted to attend the event from further afield who wanted me to blog the main talks - hence my attempt to get as much detail in my blog of the event as possible. The whole event has given me plenty of food (cake?) for thought, though, especially for my own research on blogs.