IWMW blogs

We used a blog for the first time to support the IWMW 2009 event and felt that it would be worth continuing to provide a blog at this year’s event.  We also decided to use an in-house blog which enabled us to make use of various WordPress features which are not available on WordPress.com, in particular the BuddyPress social networking environment.

We used the blog to:

• Provide information about the event and the various sessions in advance.
• Provide summaries of the plenary talks which were published shortly after the talks had been given.
• Host interviews (in text and video formats) with workshop participants.
• Provide an online social networking environment which enabled participants to create groups and discuss topics of interest.
• Provide an easy means of publishing last minute information.
• Provide easy access to information for those who make use of RSS readers.

We now wish to evaluate the effectiveness of the blog in order to identify whether it is worth investing effort in providing a blog environment for future events.  We also welcome comments on ways in which the blog can be improved if it is felt worth providing in the future.

Please give your comments below.

As might be expected many participants at IWMW events are following the IWMW Twitter account. We use this account to keep participants informed of news and developments. We have also set up auto-follow so that the iwmw account will automatically follow new followers (although we will unfollow those who aren’t directly involved in the IWMW event).  This will allow us to send direct messages (DMs) if there is need to do this (such usage is only envisaged in case of emergencies).

The links between the IWMW Twitter account and the followers will also enable us to evaluate and exploit the potential of new Twitter developments.

In our initial experiment we have used the paper.li service to create a daily newsletter based on links shared by IWMW and IWMW followers.   So if you visit the paper.li iwmw page you will see a page which has been generated based on the links which have been posted on the IWMW Twitter feed (typically, so far, links to blog posts and pages on the IWMW 2010 Web site).

But in addition it will also display content from links shared by our followers – and, as can be seen from the image, this provides a much more diverse range of content. As there is so much content which the paper.li service can analyse I was interested to note that it has started to auto-classify the contents of the posts, with headings such as Education, Technology and #mobile being featured (and shown in the top right hand content of the screen shot). I’ve also noticed that the advertisement on the page can be related to these headings.

We have also created  a paper.li page for the #iwmw10 event hashtag which displays the content of links which have been posted using this hashtag. Currently the page contains summaries of posts to the IWMW 2010 blog, but in the days prior to the event and during the event itself we might expect to see a greater range of content, including content from IWMW 2010 participants who are posting links related to the event.

Over the years in which we have been organising the IWMW series of events we have been pro-active in helping to support the Web management community – which has developed, I feel,  into an effective community of practice. I wonder whether seeing the resources which are being posted on Twitter will provide another way in which mutual areas of interest can be identified and, perhaps, contacts established?

I’ll be very interested to see how the contents of the auto-generated daily newsletters evolve over time – and especially over the period 12-14 July, during the three days of the IWMW 2010 event.

If you are attending IWMW 2010 would you be interested in sharing your interest in the event on your personal networks or on a number of popular social recommender services?  Or perhaps you would like to recommend particular talks or sessions at the event.

We are currently evaluating the OpenLike protocol which is described as “an open protocol to allow sharing the things people like in a simple and standard method between web applications“.

We have implemented the OpenLike widget on the IWMW 2010 home page which provides the illustrated icons on the home page. So if you want to recommend the event on the Hunch, Digg, Reddit or Stumbleon services this is now a simple way of doing this.

We have also embedded this interface on the individual pages for the plenary talks and intend to do the same for the workshop sessions.  So if you want to share  your thoughts on, say Paul Boag’s plenary talk, you can now do so.

In addition to OpenLike we are also evaluating the Facebook’s Like mechanism which allows Facebook users to share their recommendations with their Facebook followers.  This is  available on the IWMW 2010 home page It has also been implemented on the page for the workshop session on  ”Engagement, Impact, Value: Measuring and Maximising Impact Using the Social Web“. As you can see, if a Facebook user clicks on the Recommend icon which has been used in preference to the default Like option) this will be displayed in their Facebook news feed.

Note, though, that as the pages providing information on the plenary talks and workshop sessions contain RDFa data, it does not seem possible to include the Facebook Like code into these pages without making the pages invalid (the Facebook Like code contains an <IFRAME> element which cannot be used in an RDFa+HTML page.  We will investigate whether it is possible to embed the code in a valid way.

Are these approaches which others think are useful?

Contributing to the IWMW 2010 Blog

The initial posts published on this blog have provided introductions to the IWMW 2010 organisers together with a summary of many of the areas which will be addressed at this year’s event.

In addition to posts from the organisers we would also welcome contributions from the wider community. This opportunity might be particularly relevant for speakers and workshop facilitators who wish to provide background information to their session in advance of the workshop, for example. However if you’re not running a session but feel that you have something relevant to say feel free to get it touch.  The contact for anyone wishing to write a guest blog post is Marieke Guy.

Contributing to the IWMW 2010 Social Network

In addition to blog posts as described in a post on Networking with BuddyPress the BuddyPress social network is also available. BuddyPress is available for use by participants and topics can cover a broad range of areas – the group on Sunday 11 July: Social Arrangements – (World Cup Final) provides a good example which is likely to be of interest to many who may be arriving at Sheffield that day before the start of IWMW 2010 (especially is England do manage to progress to the final!).

So feel free to initiate discussions on topics you feel will be of interest to fellow participants.

Use of Blogs and Social Networks at Previous Events

For the IWMW 2008 event we made use of a Ning social network to provide a forum for discussions and also an opportunity to evaluate the potential of social networking software to support an event.  The service was easy to set up and (at the time) there was no costs for use of the service.  However we found that the discussion forums were little used and, with the exception of the group on “Web CMS and University Web Teams Part II – the Never Ending Story?“, there was also littler takeup of the Ning groups.

Last year we decided that IWMW 2009 would be supported by an event blog. This proved successful, enabling the event organisers to keep participants informed of developments in the run-up to the event and, during the event itself, to publish summaries of the various talks and also include video clips and interviews with a number of the participants.

However use of the WordPress blog meant that the content we published was under the control of the organisers; we had lost the ability for participants themselves to initiate discussions.

Developments for IWMW 2010

This year we are again using a WordPress blog.  However we have installed the BuddyPress WordPress plugin as part of the blog environment.

BuddyPress is an open source social networking software package and the plugin transforms the blog into a social network platform.

Using BuddyPress will provide an opportunity for delegates (and remote participants) to network before, during and after the event. BuddyPress allows you to become a member of the site, add a user profile, create groups and group discussion forums, become ‘friends’ with other members and message them.

We will be interested to see if greater usage is made of the social networking environment at this year’s event. Is there, I wonder, a real demand for social networking software to support an event?