We’re chuffed to bits to have won the pitch for The Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SECC).

It was a four way pitch, primarily for the redesign of the secc.co.uk business to business site. We’ll now be working closely with the SECC’s marketing, commercial and technical teams to review the site’s information architecture and navigation, to reinterpret the SECC brand and to introduce a range of new event planning features.

We’ve been doing a fair bit of interesting work in B2B sectors recently, and this is no exception – a range of internal stakeholders and a series of target audience segments all of whose goals and objectives need to be reconciled via a single site.

Sean Murray and the team at SECC have an ambitious vision for the venue and the brand, and there are some exciting projects in the pipeline.

Its helps a lot to be working on behalf of a “product” that is world class. For the 2nd year in a row, the SECC has just won BEST UK CONFERENCE VENUE 2009 at the industry leading M&IT Awards in London (23 Feb 2009).

As well as the main B2B site, the SECC also operates the ticket sales websites secctickets.com and secxtra.com.

Watch this space for details of the new site when it launches.

It’s been a while. The You Are What You Shirt category has gathered dust and cobwebs. But this morning’s fire drill presented this opportunity, courtesy of Roy.

The devil is in the detail. Read the small print.

In my search for social entrepreneurs, I discovered the Urban Survival Project on Facebook:

Which led to a discussion with Riz who created the Urban Survival Project blog.

Several posts and hyperlinks later, found this slideshare presentation Shift Happens and I liked it.

And so it began one cold January morning during a hunt (a friendly chase really) for social entrepreneurs. But as the weird and wonderful ways of the Web work -  several hyperlinks later and I’ve found myself somewhere else entirely.

http://sociability.org.uk/ (Andy Gibson’s thoughts on Mind Apples and how to preserve our mental health … it’s good stuff.)

http://www.unltd.org.uk/index.php (a charity which supports social entrepreneurs – incredibly comprehensive and clearly very dedicated to the cause.)

And http://multichannelthinking.blogspot.com/ (Some interesting thoughts on the retail market … how sad to think that in a recession we’re doing ourselves more damage by not co-operating, thinking collectively and actively collaborating).

Come on people, lets get it together.

Sincerely,

Doogie Howser.

And so it began one cold January morning during a hunt (a friendly chase really) for social entrepreneurs. But as the weird and wonderful ways of the Web work -  several hyperlinks later and I’ve found myself somewhere else entirely.

http://sociability.org.uk/ (Andy Gibson’s thoughts on Mind Apples and how to preserve our mental health … it’s good stuff.)

http://www.unltd.org.uk/index.php (a charity which supports social entrepreneurs – incredibly comprehensive and clearly very dedicated to the cause.)

And http://multichannelthinking.blogspot.com/ (Some interesting thoughts on the retail market … how sad to think that in a recession we’re doing ourselves more damage by not co-operating, thinking collectively and actively collaborating).

Come on people, lets get it together.

Sincerely,

Doogie Howser.

A week ago we set out our stall to provide live tracking of EdTwestival socialising as it happened.

The idea was to do this using a newly created Twitter account @wemet. By sending a direct message to WeMet with the Twitter @names of the people you met, you would help to create a real time database of all the social interactions as they happened.

That was the theory…

In practice in turned out pretty well. The EdTwestival event itself was an unqualified success – well organised, well supported and much appreciated by all who attended. By comparison the live tracking element was more of a mixed bag.

What worked

• Roy, Andy and Fraser did a grand job in a short space of time to grapple with the Twitter API, develop the application and sort out the front end interface.
• Excellent support for the idea ahead of the event from the EdTwestival team and the “community”.
• At the event itself there was a generous spirit and plenty of good intentions to participate in the idea.
• In the end, from a universe of 189, a total of 58 people sent direct messages detailing conversations with 118 others. These “meetings” involved 124 unique names or 66% of the universe. The resulting social graph of the event is shown in the image above and the movie below. You can also view a replay, condensed into 5 minutes, here.

What could have been better

• Despite the best efforts of the EdTwestival guys the venue wifi couldn’t cope with demand for bandwith resulting from the furious content creation of 200 avid twitter-bloggers. We ended up running the application through a 3G dongle that could only manage a 2G connection.
• A design that looked great on screen could have been better optimised for large scale projection.
• Despite the predictably high penetration of iPhones within this geeky group, many people simply weren’t packing the right kind of mobile devices to make participation easy.
• Even with an iPhone, sending a direct message at the start of every new conversation is actually an anti-social act. In the end, an idea that was enabled by technology was also limited by technology. More accurately, and reassuringly, the idea was limited by people’s desire to be socialising rather than technologising.

Nonetheless a big thank you to all who did “technologise”.

To retweet this post, copy and paste the text below into Twitter, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Twhirl, or twhatever.

Results of Wemet live tracking at #EdTwestival – http://bit.ly/yblG3

(Thanks to freezelight for the photo)

I’ve had a rewardingly unrewarding time skim-reading (skim re-reading) Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. I was looking for a quote to illustrate a point I’m making in a presentation. Alas to no avail.

However, I did stumble across the gems below in the process.

(The context for this is that the book is about a group of friends who are also geeky (and lowly) Microsoft employees. It was written in 1995 and the prescience of the author should be appreciated from that perspective).

The industry is made up of either gifted techies or smart generalists – the people who were bored with high school – the sort of people the teacher was always telling, “Now, Abe, you could get As if you really wanted to.  Why don’t you just apply yourself?” Look for these people – the talented generalists. They’re good as project and product managers. They’re the same people who would have gone into advertising in 1973.

One psycho for every nine stable people in the company is a good ratio. Too many maniacally-driven people can backfire on you. Balanced people are better for the long term stability of the company.

“@” could become the “Mc” or “Mac” of the next millenium.

It’s like male geeks don’t know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it’s a user interface problem. Not their fault. They’ll just wait for the next version to come out – something more “user friendly.”

There’s an endemic inability in the software industry to estimate the amount of time required for a software project.

Networked games, like where you have one person playing against another, are hot because you don’t have to waste development dollars creating artificial intelligence. Players provide free AI.

This post is primarily aimed at the 200 or so folk who have bought tickets for the EdTwestival on February 12th.

If you don’t know what this is about there’s a quick summary here (main Twestival site). An even quicker summary is “Tweet. Meet. Give.”

Blonde is the badge sponsor for the EdTwestival event, and we thought that we should do something interesting and Twittery as part of our involvement.

So, what follows is a brief summary of our idea, a plea to everyone who’s going to help make it work, and a mini instruction manual.

The idea

We aim to use Twitter to track in real time the socialising and networking that happens on the night.

No doubt lots of people are planning to live Tweet from the event anyway. We just want to give that live Tweeting an extra dimension.

To do this we’ve set up a Twitter account called WeMet – http://twitter.com/wemet.

Fairly shortly after the writing of this post @wemet will become a follower of everyone who’s attending the EdTwestival event. That will allow each of you (them) to send direct messages to WeMet. Please don’t block this new follower.

On the night everyone will be issued with a badge that carries their Twitter name – e.g. @Phil_Adams.

As you work the rooms we’d like you to send a direct message to WeMet each time you talk to somebody. An example message would be like this…

D wemet @tom @dick @harry

This will tell us that you talked to Tom, Dick and Harry and when you did so.

And we can then visualise this data in interesting ways. For instance everyone who takes part in the experiment will be sent their own personal social graph of the evening after the event. We’re also looking at some live visualisation options but we’re not at the making promises stage at the time of writing.

If you have the time and inclination you can add more context to the direct message (within the constraint of a 140 character limit). For instance…

D wemet @Tom @Dick @Harry – talking drunken shite about memes.

This will give us extra options when we play with the data, but it’s optional. The engine for this idea is the raw data about who you met.

The plea

Please bring your mobile Tweeting device with you and please take the time to send a short direct message to WeMet at the beginning of each conversation. Given that we’re tracking this in real time it would be good if you could send a message every time you talk to someone, even if you have already spoken to them earlier in the evening.

Hopefully this makes sense and is clear. There are a million and one things we could do with the data, but we hope that keeping it as simple as possible will maximise the participation levels.

If you need clarification or have any suggestions, please leave a comment.

If you’re following this blog via RSS the idea is that the EdTwestival folk will be sending an alert to attendees directing them to this post. Please feel free to distribute the link, but please give the Twestival guys first crack at the whip. Thank you.

If you want to retweet this post just copy and paste the text below into your Twitter client of choice.

Live Twitter-tracking of EdTwestival – http://bit.ly/131aU

In Lesson 1 we learned that most of Blonde hadn’t heard of Star wars kid and thus failed the internets.

Consequently Lesson 2 was the fact that the Internet is something that is either won or failed.

Lesson 3 is nsfw = ‘not safe for work’ as it may become relevant in the very near future if you start looking round xchan boards.

So commences Lesson 4.

What is the most important story on the tubes
(the tubes you say? don’t tell me … Lesson 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes )
today? Civilian casualties in Gaza, the election of the first black American president? No its whether you are pro or anti Boxxy.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jan/20/internet

Why is any of this important? (I’m assuming you read the link). Not exactly sure but it does cover aspects such as privacy, truly viral memes, the kind of culture that actually exists on the internet (as opposed to one that passively accepts advertising or the initiatives of companies and organisations), and that if you piss off the right demographic they will DDOS (god! you people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack ) a site they consider to be their home on the web and hunt you down for your personal details to threaten and black mail you. I’m sure there are lessons in there that affect our business if we have the wit to spot them.

Next week Lesson 6: TLDR.

Further reading

http://boxxystory.blogspot.com/

and the offending videos

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VcydqSpYN00

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=80hx2FfWjow

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Yavx9yxTrsw

The Future is Ship-Shape campaign launched (excuse the pun!) earlier in the week to support the recruitment campaign for a thousand new jobs to engineer and build new ships in Scotland, specifically the production of two of the biggest aircraft carriers ever built in Britain.

The site is aimed at school leavers, adult apprentices, graduates, skilled workers and parents with specific areas for all audiences. The site includes career path advice, case studies and excellent industry contact details – this is a valuable resource for all those considering shipbuilding as a career.

You may have seen the Scotsman article and so you’ll understand what a challenge this will be!

What they’ll build a battling behemoth

DISPLACEMENT: 65,000 tonnes. Length: 280m (similar in size to QE2). Six metres taller than Nelson’s Column.

SPEED: 25-plus knots.

CREW: 1,500 officers and men and women.

AIRCRAFT: 40, such as F-35B fighters. Or 25 Chinook helicopters.

PROVISIONS: 1,000 tonnes of food – enough to feed crew for six weeks.

FLIGHT DECK: nearly 13,000sq m – equivalent of 49 tennis courts or three football pitches.

HANGARS: 29,000sq m – equivalent to 12 Olympic swimming pools.

SCHEDULE: HMS Queen Elizabeth expected to enter service around 2016. HMS Prince of Wales two years later.

CONSTRUCTION: Four main companies involved – Babcock Marine, BVT Surface Fleet, BAE Systems Submarine Solutions and Thales Group.

SCOTLAND: Work in Govan, Glasgow, will be worth more than £650 million, and work in Rosyth, Fife, more than £675 million.

www.futureshipshape.com