Month: February 2010

1000heads: The Social Media Week Digest

This week, believe it or not, is Social Media Week.

As the website says:

“Social Media Week conferences take place simultaneously in multiple cities around the world. The aim of each event is to advance the use and understanding of social media in the corporate, public and non-profit sectors.”

From New York to Berlin, San Francisco to São Paulo and Toronto to London, across the globe people are coming together to ‘explore the profound impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large’.

Here in London, the home of 1000heads, there are events happening all week and – hashtag tracking aside – some might find it quite difficult to try and get to everything on the rather packed out event schedule. To aid those in their quest to consume as much knowledge as possible, 1000heads is hosting the official ‘Social Media Week Digest’, this Friday, from 10am at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts.

There are a couple of other events going on Friday morning, including Reputation Online’s ‘Crisis Management‘ session as well as a special Social Media Week Tuttle Club. However, having seen how quickly the tickets for these events have been snapped up, we think there might be scope for one more thing..

So if you’re free and fancy joining us – you’ll be made to feel very welcome indeed.

As our sign up page says:

The Social Media Week Digest does exactly what it says on the tin; by Friday morning at least some of you would have all had the chance to catch one of the aforementioned fantastic events and this end-of-the-week gathering is your opportunity to come together and share stories, anecdotes and generally catch up on some of the interesting things you’ve seen and done.

Come drink some coffee (on us) and have a chat about where we’re all headed next.

Tickets aren’t mandatory (get yours here), they just help us keep an eye on numbers etc…

See you Friday! 🙂

Thanks to ICA London for the super last minute providing of the venue, I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of the place very soon.

This is my iPad post

Last week I was approached to write a piece about the iPad. But if you read here regularly, you’ll understand that it’s not something I’d typically do. However, I’m not proclaiming to have uncovered something new or shocking about the product, I just fancied putting a few thoughts down about how I feel about it because someone asked me to.

The original piece I wrote is now up where it should be available here (after said someone changed their mind at the last minute), and is a reasonable assessment of my thoughts on the subject. However, the very idea of writing a piece about Apple (a company about which I have never had any interest in writing about), forced me to look at the brand in a whole new light.

I am, as you may guess, no Apple fan. I have never owned an iPod and I will never own an iPhone. Though the keys I’m currently tapping away at belong to a MacBook Pro, a lot of the posts here were first written in my moleskine (my true creative pallette) then transferred to this page at a later date.

A zealot I am not.

iPods enforce iTunes. iPhones enforce iPods. I don’t like the iProducts, because I like to do things my way. Mine. Not Apple’s.

I digress.

When I was eight years old, my father bought my sister and I the complete Encyclopedia Britannica; appendices, indexes – the lot. This was before the Internet, before the Web, before Wikipedia.

The Encyclopedia Britannica got me through school. I used to sit and read through the pages, sometimes just for fun. ‘Let’s see what I can learn today’ was my daily motto. It was a thing of wonder.

When I look at the iPad, that is what I see.

Not a great big iPhone, nor a simplified MacBook Pro. Just a small boy, spread out on the lounge floor. With his school books on one side and the iPad on the other, he’s laying there, doing his homework.

For that reason and for that reason alone, I think I might get one.