Plans for “Metrics and Social Web Services” Workshop on Monday

Supporting a Remote Audience

On Monday 11^th July I am facilitating a one-day workshop on “Metrics and Social Web Services: Quantitative Evidence for their Use & Impact” which will be held at the Open University.  There has been a lot of interest in this workshop which I think is indicative in the perceived importance of the need to gather evidence to be able to demonstrate the use, impact and value of online services, with, in this case, a particular focus on Social Web services.

Since there is such interest in the workshop we have decided to attempt to video stream the talks. However we are not in a position to guarantee that we will be able to provide a high quality video streaming service since we will be setting up the infrastructure on the morning of the workshop and will be keeping our fingers crossed that the bandwidth is up to it and there are no firewall problems.

We do intend to record the talks given at the workshop and make these available shortly afterwards.  In addition in order to help to provide a context to the workshop I have pre-recorded an audio presentation of the Welcome slides for the workshop which is available as a slidecast of the talk is available and embedded below.

The talk is also available on YouTube and embedded below (although note that the Moyea PPT to Video conversion tool used to create the video included a watermark which is embedded in the video).

If you feel this workshop is of interest to you please sign up on the Eventbrite booking system as a remote participant so that we can email you details of the video stream.

Evaluating Shhmooze for the Local Audience

I should also add that for those who will be physically present we will be evaluating the Shhmooze app. The Shhmooze marketing material states that:

Research by Shhmooze shows that 75% of conference delegates find networking to be hard work or ‘a nightmare’!

That’s because it’s really hard to find the right person to talk to within a crowd of dozens, hundreds or thousands of people. And, for many people, it’s even harder to strike a conversation out of nowhere with a complete stranger.

Shhmooze takes the pain out of networking by making it easy to find the 3 people at the event you really need to talk to! 

and goes on to suggest that event organisers can tailor the following:

But networking’s not always easy. That’s why we’ve teamed up with Shhmooze to bring you a free smartphone app you can use to

• find useful, interesting people
• broadcast your professional profile to other event attendees
• privately contact the people you want to talk with face-to-face

Whilst the marketing rhetoric grates somewhat (how will it ensure that I find useful, interesting people and not useless dull ones?!) I do feel it would be useful to explore the potential of geo-located social apps in the context of events. Perhaps a one-day workshop with 50 participants isn’t the ideal event  but we’d like to evaluate its potential prior to using it at a large event, such as the forthcoming IWMW 2011 event which will have about 150 participants (and note that bookings are due to close on Friday).

If you are attending the workshop please consider installing the app (iPhone/iPod Touch/ iPad only at present) and try and track me down on Monday. I’m sure you are an interesting person and I’ll try and be useful :-)