Star Gazing Conference 2006

How should an institution seek to address deployment strategies for Web 2.0? One approach would be to hold a high-profile event, with talks from some of the early adopters of Web 2.0 technologies and senior managers in the institution, external speakers to provide insights from outsiders (who will have a disinterested view of local power struggles and political intrigue!) and, if you are feeling brave, perhaps including views from the student contingent. And as well as talking about Web 2.0 technologies, you might even seek to embed the technologies in the event, with remote participants, chat facilities and perhaps even a Podcast.

Sounds good, but difficult to achieve in practice? This is what the University of Edinburgh did recently, with myself as one of the external speakers. Read on for my thoughts on an excellent event, which I would encourage other institutions to emulate.

Word of Blog - 3 weeks later

In a previous posting I described how I had launched this Blog on 1 November 2006 (ten years since I had started work at UKOLN). As an experiment in seeing how Blogs become noticed and attract traffic I deliberately avoided announcing the Blog on mailing lists and, instead, just claimed my Blog on Technorati. Details of the findings to date are given below.