Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

I know July 5th falls on a Sunday but if you can, you must make your way to JuJu, 316 - 318 King’s Road, Chelsea, London, SW3 5UH to meet some of the best known social media experts from the US (and the UK). I highly recommend this event and have been asked to help promote it. You have just under 2 days to get a ticket for just £10 20 - which will get you food and drinks!

Who’s coming to town

• Robert Scoble
• Craig Newmark
• Sarah Lacy
• Howard Rheingold
• Meghan Asha
• JD Lasica
• Tom Foremski
• Sarah Austin
• Susan Bratton
• Jeff Saperstein
• Renee Blodgett
• Jim Schuyler

To find out more and to register for the event, visit http://www.eventbrite.com/event/366118069

I announced the registration page for OpenSoho June this morning and as a result of all the retweets from Computer Weekly, The Telegraph and others, my announcement had a potential reach of approximately 15,000 people. This can only help to demonstrate the power of twitter for marketing events, products and services. With this in mind, I decided to tweet this fun statistic in the hope someone would also retweet that, and they did, Milo from the Telegraph retweeted it. Oh the joy of it all.

In April 2008 I wrote some twitter tips to help new users better understand how to use the social network - my post includes how to make your messages more prone to being retweeted by others as I did above. Why not check them out.

When Google first announced that it had acquired Jaiku, my first question was, ‘why?’. Why buy the second best in the market?! I’m a firm believer in going after the best and only the best. Some would argue that Jaiku is more feature-rich and easier to use than Twitter. However, I was never attracted to it because none of my followers/friends were on there. ‘Better’ doesn’t necessarily equal ‘better features’. In Twitter’s case, it’s main benefit was ‘people’ (i.e. users).

When Google launched Latitude I thanked my contacts at the company for educating the marketing as clearly, their product doesn’t actual solve a problem. I’ll write more about that later. By launching latitude without any Jaiku integration, it proves they were unable to make use of the software. Perhaps they knew they were flogging a dead horse. Anyway, it’s a little late to go after Twitter - they should have put in an offer when (all) of my friends were mocking me for using the service - when it was still very early and mainly used as a one-way broadcast medium.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter turned down Googles offer and according to TechCrunch, it looks like Apple is now making a move.

So, who’s going to buy Twitter? Apple, Google, Microsoft or one of the main operators (carriers)?

I’m hoping Twitter remains independent but there’s only so long they can hold back from a gazillon dollars.

Follow me on Twitter.

Twitter has been responsible for my lack of blogging of late, so rather than try to write about all the stuff I’ve been up to over the past couple of weeks, I’ve posted some pictures and a video to help capture the essence of my recent shenanigans.

Pictures taken include the breakfast that Jeff Pulver and I hosted at Kettners with over 90 companies present - it was a great morning but as you can see from the video below, I was a little worse for wear and should never appear in front of a camera that early in the morning. Other pictures were taken at various dinners and of course, the pool shot was in South of France.

Jeff Pulver, Loren Feldman, Pat Phelan Andrew Keen and JP Rangaswami.

Watch this video on 1938media.com. If you want to leave a comment re the video please do so on Loren’s blog as I’ve just ripped it from his site.

Taken from the Metro:

Using Facebook or Twitter may make you a bad person because it ruins your moral compass, it has been claimed.

Fast-paced modern media, such as Facebook updates and news feeds on Twitter, do not give us time to reflect and could make us indifferent to human suffering, according to a group of researchers.

Children could be particularly vulnerable because their brains are still developing, it was claimed.

‘If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,’ said researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, from the University of Southern California.

Yet another dumb ass quote from another dumb ass lecturer. Why do respectable publications such as the Metro (well, I enjoy reading it anyway) continue to quote people who’s job it is to come up with new opposing opinions to that of the general public?

Dear Metro, please try to interview people who know what they’re talking about. Stop interviewing people who sit on the fence commentating on the theory of everything, without actually delving into the real world of practise.

Facebook and Twitter brings out the best in us in my opinion. People have an instinct to help others by sharing opinions, contacts, advice, gossip and the like. What are your thoughts?

The tools that Twitter endorse are few and far between. So, when it’s revealed that it plans to “officially endorse” ExecTweets, and to encourage more brands to create customised Twitter homepages, it deserves to get my full attention.

I haven’t got time to write about this right now, so why not read what Milo has to say at The Telegraph - where I picked up the story.

Follow me on Twitter
Follow Milo on Twitter

The award serves to celebrate the wealth of female speakers and practitioners of social media living in UK. In doing so its objective is to challenge the current under-representation of females on event panels by offering a high profile platform for women.

Victoria Chowney (AKA @VikkiChowney) get’s my vote without hesitation. I think she’s one of the very few people who can put all this social media-smedia into practice. She’s quietly confident but modest too. That’s why she won the BIMA PR pitch on behalf of Six Degrees and that’s why I recommended her to Quick.TV. What I love about Victoria most is that she loves to help others.

If you agree, then why not take 30 seconds out of your day to vote for her too. Cast your vote now.

If I could cast a second vote I’d go for Judith Clegg, Helen Keegan, Judith Lewis, Katie Lee, Amanda Rose and Katy Howell - in no particular order.

Cast your vote now.

We need more awards and competitions to help celebrate the great women in tech/media.

Leave a comment if you would like to acknowledge other women who don’t appear on the list but who deserve to be promoted for their contribution.

Here’s a fun Web site that displays a person’s reach on Twitter. I scored 1,117,492. I’m not entirely sure what that means but I’m guessing from the wording on the site that it’s two layers down from me; my followers and their followers.

Either leave a comment or @ me on Twitter with your reach

My last post focused on the negative side of a good tool called Qwitter. My motivation was driven by the urge to provide a little insight to how it ‘could’ be used in the wrong way. It wasn’t my intention to slate the product. So, there are good reasons to use Qwitter, but at least digest my post and remember not to make too many assumptions when people unfollow you.

Now onto a more positive post to balance it out. TweetDeck is my desktop client of choice for Twitter. As you can see from the screen shot above, you can separate your main friends’ feed, replies, groups and direct messages (DMs). I haven’t shown my main feed because I didn’t want to show who wasn’t amongst my ‘Toilet Cleaners group.

The ability to group people is what I love most about this application. Some people create groups for family, friends and colleagues etc. I only have the need for one group, which contains about 25 people; people who I consider as either friends or very interesting people.

Qwitter, a tool which informs you when someone unfollows you on Twitter, is likely to break relationships, sometimes before they’ve had an opportunity to prosper. This is the complete opposite to the ethos of the Twitter community.

I first learned of Qwitter (it didn’t have a name at the time) in January, when the developer asked for feedback on the functionality. I thought then, that it was a very smart widgetery piece of functionality. I still like it from a technical perspective. However, I don’t like the idea of a tool that is likely to give some of its users the wrong impression.

How can it give the wrong impression?

1. Some followers subscribe to my RSS feed instead of following on Twitter. I know this because a few of them took to the time to write and say that I shouldn’t be offended if I didn’t see them following me. Some chose RSS so they didn’t miss any of my tweets, whilst others thought I had too much to say and they didn’t want their stream taken up by so many of my tweets.
2. Some people follow/unfollow/follow… depending on the noise level they receive from individuals like me.
3. Some thought they were following me, but weren’t, as the system unsubscribed them for some reason.
4. Some thought I wasn’t following them as they were unable to send me direct messages. I checked and confirmed I was actually following them.

You could argue that Qwitter is a nice way to enable users to nudge friends who they think should be following them, but aren’t. Whilst this might be true for some, it won’t be for most. I’ve been using Twitter for longer than most - before it became a conversational tool. So, I’ve had time to learn all of the above. However, some less experienced, or people with less insight, will undoubtidly get the wrong impression and assume that people have unfollowed them for the wrong reason and without asking why, may reciprocate.