Its just over a month away and some great speakers have been lined up for the event including:

Fantomaster
Joost De Valk
Jon Myers
Tom Critchlow
Bas Van Den Beld

There are too many to mention but it really is an impressive set of people.

Event details:

Date: 28th of April 2010

Venue: The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

Early Bird Tickets: £225 + VAT
Early Bird SEMPO / Manchester Digital Member Tickets: £195 + VAT

So if you have not got your ticket check out the official SAScon ticket page:
http://www.sascon.co.uk/conference/registration/

Twitter was undoubtedly one of last years biggest talking points and is used by millions of people around the world. The explosion in popularity of Twitter has lead to some weird and wonderful apps being developed and i thought i would share a few with you.

Foamee
This one is pure genius. It lets you track who owes you a drink. When you owe someone a beer, send a message to Foamee in the format “@ioubeer @twitterscreenname “reason beer is owed”. Your IOU will then show up on the Foamee homepage for all to see. Novel idea but im personally not particularly fussed about asking for drinks back.

Overheard.it
A very simple app/site that pulls in any tweets that mention the word ‘overhead’. Pretty pointless in all but brings back some really funny tweets.

TwitterLoo
Probably the weirdest app you will come across and lets you share your achievements in the bathroom with the whole world. You simply select the clip art image that best describes your beauty and then the place in which you delivered it. This information is then submitted to your twitter page. Pretty childish i know, but its quite fun.

Kvetch!
Pulls in tweets about people bitching about everything and anything. Users can then rate these tweets.

Cursebird
Site that streams tweets containing swear words. Completely pointless but there is definitely something about it. Been around for a while and if you have a few mins to kill its worth a read.

If you know of anymore add them to the comments section.

So this is not exactly revolutionary and won’t give you much of an insight in to how word are used over time but its pretty good fun. Tweet cloud basically generate a keyword cloud based on your tweets over a certain time period. I have seen many people tweeting about it in the last week or so and thought i would give it a try.

Mine seems pretty accurate as i do love videos, especially those from Vimeo and talking about websites. Another thing they could consider doing is creating a top level view and being able to make comparisons. If you have five minutes to spare then check it out at http://tweetcloud.icodeforlove.com/

As always we would love to know your thoughts and appreciate some social media voting love.

The beta version does currently suffer from some bugs however as its still in beta mode i would expect them to be ironed out. I think i was most suprised by the functionality of the app. It pretty much lets you do everything that you can do in the browser version of wordpress. Wordpress for Blackberry is a must have app for any blogger.

http://blackberry.wordpress.org/2009/07/07/wordpress-for-blackberry-beta/

I also wanted to take this opportunity to apologise for the lack of posts recently. I have had other commitments but i have been testing Squidoo and hub pages. I’m hoping it will bring up some interesting results and of course i will share them on here.

It will be nice to see what effect it will have on my submissions and as a big fan of Stumble its an extremely welcomed addition.

image: clubfemina

Despite the crazyness i have been tasked with an exciting new project which involves launching a brand new video. The video, put together by a company called K3 looks at one office managers resistance to implementing a new ERP system.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hope you like it as much as we do and feel free to leave feedback on YouTube.

Although i love this new tool (well piece of code really) it could do with some revisions if they decide to develop it further. Having it purely as a code fragment at the moment means it is difficult for bloggers who are not technically minded to use. I think turning it into an actual plugin would help significantly. Also the code does not associate the link with an image, so you simply get a text link. I think a button like the one’s offered by Digg or Sphinn would significantly help. Just my thoughts anyway.

The Code & Solution

This one is nice and easy to install. All you have to do is post the following code into single.php in Wordpress within the loop.

Share on Twitter

* You may have to click view source code as the code function on this theme is not working correctly.

Thanks to Smashing Magazine and Wp Recipes for pointing this one out. It seems to have caused quite a stir in the community already.

[poll id="2"]

source: Miguel Netto

The Photography Community

One of Flickr’s core user groups is professional photographers as it is undoubtedly a great place for them to expose their work and get noticed and it generally seems to be their view that Flickr should only be for photographs. Including video in search results is a cause of annoyance to many as they have to filter them out when searching and often find the videos lacking in quality. One photographer said to me that why did Flickr need to introduce video when services like YouTube and Vimeo were doing a perfectly good job. He went on to say that Flickr does not in fact add anything new to the market space. Seems like a perfectly valid point!

General Users

Like many other social media sites the majority of Flickr’s users are general users. These are users that come on to the site and upload photos of family and friends etc and perform occassional searches but are not overly engaged with the service. These types of users seem to be perfectly happy with the introduction and even though some chose not to use the videos they say it does not effect the experience or community in anyway.

My Thoughts

For me the introduction of video seemed like a natural progression for Flickr but its clear they didn’t engage with their community first. In the planning phase they should have held more open discussions with its different user groups and take into consideration what benefits they would bring. For me i would never use Flickr for video as services like Vimeo and YouTube provide much better functionality and viewing numbers. Flickr still remains the best photo sharing service and i don’t feel that the video’s hinder my experience in anyway. I can find the photo’s i need quickly and easily and uploading images is a doddle.