Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
I gave a talk yesterday for the members of it@cork titled “The Web 2.0 Toolset - a business focussed overview”
There were around 70 people in attendance and feedback afterwards was very positive.
Here is a copy of the presentation I gave. I hope to have a video of the presentation live by tomorrow.
I uploaded the presentation I gave at the IWTC conference last week to SlideShare.net.
The talk is entitled “Why Blog?” - and is aimed at helping educate companies on the potential advantages of blogging to their business.
I have embedded a copy below -
I have been very quiet on this blog for the last few weeks - apologies for that but I can’t promise on the pace returning to the two or three posts a day I was averaging at times last year.
Why? I have been spending a lot of time on the micro-blogging site, Twitter.
Twitter is a site where you have a maximum of 140 characters per post but instead of a traditional blog site, these posts are typically conversational. Because of the immediacy of writing 140 characters, reading and responding to ‘Tweets’ is relatively trivial and so conversations are born.
Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a great article last year explaining how Twitter is now paying his rent.
And because of the still early nature of the application, it is possible to very quickly build up a powerful network of highly influential users who are only too happy to converse with you. I have met several people recently who, up until now I only knew through Twitter.
Another way I use Twitter is I often pose questions to Twitter and get great replies back from highly qualified people in minutes.
Twitter has an open API so it is possible to use third party applications to post to and read from Twitter. Currently I am using twhirl on my laptops (twhirl is a cross-platform desktop client for twitter, based on Adobe AIR) and twibble on my phone. Snitter is another cross-platform Twitter desktop client which gets a lot of good reviews.
Dave Weinberger called it “continuous partial friendship” but I think it goes beyond that. The term Ambient Intimacy has been coined to cover one of the aspects of Twitter - it brings you a lot closer to people you might ordinarily never get to know (if you decide you don’t want to know them, you simply stop following them!).
Whatever it is, it is growing in popularity steadily and it was how I and many others chose to remain connected over the holiday period.
If you want to follow me, here is my Twitter profile.
Plaxo started life as a place to hold your contact information online.
That was quite handy and they allowed synchronising from your Mac or PC so your contact data were always held safe in the cloud.
More recently Plaxo added a feature called Pulse. Pulse allows you to tell it where you publish photos, blog posts, bookmarks etc. and it creates a lifestream, a la Facebook which it publishes to your Pulse network.
All sounds nice, right?
Sure, however, for some reason, and I don’t know why, of all the social networks I have joined (and I have joined a few!) Pulse seems to generate the most emails. The emails typically have the subject line “[someone I have never heard of] has added you as a business connection”
On Facebook and Xing, the other two social networks I frequent most, I occasionally get connection requests from people I don’t know. But not very often, and usually a bit of digging will show how they are connected to me.
However, on Plaxo I get waaay too many of these business connections and I have no idea where they are coming from.
Is this just me or are others finding Plaxo also generates too many connection requests from strangers?
Via Martha Rotter’s blog (Martha is Rob Burke’s replacement in Microsoft Ireland and I bet she hates being introduced that way!), I see that Microsoft Ireland have started a Microsoft Licensing blog.
This is a great idea because licensing Microsoft’s software correctly in any kinds of numbers is unbelievably complex. I often wonder if it is made this way purposefully so that Microsoft can maximise on profit while at the same time Microsoft can say to customers “but if you only took the licensing scheme hidden under all this complexity you could save all this money”! That’s my cynical side coming out again 
Of course, using software licensed under a GPL is far simpler and there are no license fees to worry about!
Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!
Recent Comments