Sabrina kicked day two off with her talk on a managible approach to social media using WordPress as a platform. As she later admitted herself, being the first speaker up after three hours sleep in the previous 72 was probably not the best idea in the world, but nevertheless she delivered a very nice presentation.
Sabrina’s talk concentrated on the big three social media sites: LinkedIn, Twitter and facebook, and how you can use your WordPress blog as the hub between all three.
Linkedin more focused than other social media sites. Unless you have your own domain, it’s likely that your LinkedIn page will be the first result in google results. For that reason, be sure that your LinkedIn profile is as you want it.
You can pull feeds from WordPress blog to your LinkedIn profile. Everybody should do this. This is one of the best ways to let your LinkedIn connections know that you have a blog. Can get traffic from LinkedIn page to blog.
LinkedIn groups? Useful for some applications, but often not for many others. Very few groups done well. If you’re going to use groups, make sure that you’re the group owner, rather than just a member. Build your own community rather than join somebody else’s.
Here are my notes from the various sessions that I attended on day one at the recent (excellent) WordCamp Ireland event, which was held at Langtons in Kilkenny.
Leo and Loughlin had the unenvious job of being first up on Saturday morning. I had high hopes for this talk. I was hoping to come away with a bunch of specific actions that I could take to help to build and grow an online community using WordPress and other online tools. Unfortunately, I found the presentation was a little unfocused and lacked a clear message. The first half (or more) of the talk was given over to a protracted history of online communities, back to email and Usenet in the late ’60s and early ’70s – unnecessary and irrelevant.
The meat of the presentation revolved around using facebook, Twitter, YouTube, commenting on forums and your blog to develop reputation and a community. The presentation could have greatly benefited from real, practical examples of what steps to take, and what a developer/site owner can expect to achieve.
One interesting takeaway from this presentation was the observation that comments on blogs peaked around 2007, and that since then the conversation has moved elsewhere. That is, rather than leave a comment on your blog your visitors are more likely to post a link and a comment on Twitter or facebook. Because the conversation has moved elsewhere, you have to too.
WordCamp Ireland finished up yesterday afternoon at about 3pm. I took copious notes over the weekend, which I hope to edit down into something vaguely intelligible over the next few days.
In the meantime, huge congratulations are due to Sabrina Dent (@sabrinadent), Katherine Nolan (@doChara) and their team, who put together a packed programme, and a fabulous event with a great vibe.
The first of a series of webinars that the FP7 national support network are planning is a 1 hour Webinar on March 2: 2.15 p.m. – 3.15 p.m. The aim of this one hour webinar is to provide researchers, research managers and administrators with an overview of the key pointers on how to write professional and competitive proposals for Framework Programme 7. The webinar provides guidelines on the evaluation criteria that need to be adhered to in successful proposals and outlines the common problems in proposal writing. The webinar provides tips on useful sources of information, how to select strategic partners and finally a proven approach for proposal writing, using clear concise content. There will be a specific ICT focus to this webinar.
Having flirted with Typo and Mephisto in the past for this blog, I eventually switched all of my blogs/websites (bar one) over to Wordpress. In my view, there is simply no more powerful, or easier to use blogging platform than Wordpress.
Next weekend, March 6 & 7, Kilkenny plays host to Wordcamp Ireland – a Wordpress conference/camp/general love-in. I booked my ticket months ago, but the missus, hot on the heels of a Social Media course that she’s doing hosted by Krishna De (nothing but excellent feedback, by the way), has decided that she’s going to tag along as well.
To their immense credit, the organisers of Wordcamp have gone out of their way to make the event family friendly, with supervised play areas, free meals for the kids, and so on. So, we’ve decided to go along en famille. Should be an opportunity to indoctrinate them at early age. (As an aside my 4.5 year old mentioned the other day that she has to “get the internet” on her toy laptop – don’t need to worry about her).
The only problem will be deciding which talks to attend. The camp has been organised as three parallel tracks, with a few plenaries. Great content, great speakers, and to top it all off, a fantastic price: €50 for a day and a half, including lunch on both days – outstanding in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.
Earlier this year I blogged about installing Rails 2.2 on Leopard. I recently upgraded my MacBook to Snow Leopard, so it was time to do the MySQL dance all over again.
Rather than reiterating what I did, here are the three resources that I found most useful in getting things sorted:
As with my previous experience, the most difficult & frustrating part of the exercise turned out to be getting the MySQL gem working properly. I found the commentary in the last post to be particularly helpful in getting the MySQL resolved.
Recently, I was invited by Dr. Michael Gannon of the DCU Business School to present a lecture to one of his M.Sc. classes as part of the grandly titled “Innovation, Marketing and New Technology Foresight” lecture series.
Apparently, somebody somewhere thought that I knew something about those topics.
I must admit that I know very little about the process of printing books, but I came across an absolutely fascinating video on how John Carrera reprinted Pictorial Webster’s.
Luke O’Neill, Professor of Biochemistry at TCD, has been awarded Ireland’s premier science award, the RDS Irish Times Boyle Medal for Scientific Excellence, for his pioneering work on the molecular understanding of innate immunity and inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.
Following the conferral of the Medal, Professor O’Neill will give a public lecture on his groundbreaking discoveries and his passion for science. He will describe what drew him to science as a career – from the desire to satisfy curiosity about the big questions of who we are, where we came from and where we’re going – to how science is a superb pursuit and why scientists are the best of people.
He will describe his own discoveries in the field of immunology and explain why Charles Darwin, Ilya Mechnikov and Gary Larson are his heroes. The practical benefits of science and his own research, how essential it is for governments to support fundamental scientific research, and how science can save the world will be discussed also.
Well worth checking out if you can. You need to register to attend, and I suspect that it will be well attended.
