Sue Beckingham’s talk on Using Social Media to create a Personal Learning Network provided some great insight on the tools available and how to use them to best effect. I’m definitely going to be looking at the use of Posterous and WordPress to create private blogs for personal use.

Sue mentioned The Conversation Prism which is not only a beautiful data visualisation but a great way to find new tools and services.

Sue also included The Geosocial Universe showing the amount of mobile devices and the number of users on popular services.

Sylwiva Presley joined the event via Skype from Oxford to discuss the issues around children having access to Facebook. With some very interesting statistics she raised concerns over our attitudes to how children behave online:

In the US:

• Of the 20 million minors actively on Facebook last year, 7.5 million (one third) were younger than 13 and not supposed to be using the site.
• More than 5 million were under 10 using their accounts unsupervised
• One million children were harassed, threatened or otherwise bullied on the site

Sylwia also recommend a TED talk by Adora Svitak on how adults can learn from children.

Lunch break was good fun with everyone getting to grips with the tamales from Rico Mexican Kitchen. The sun shone and we all got some fresh air.

Mark Spofforth from Lovefre.sh gave a very personal account of the story behind Lovefresh. A demo of the apps gave everyone a taste for finding more local produce. Discussion around the use of the word checkin was interesting as they are using it in a different way. Also interesting to hear their struggle with web standards on mobiles for using features like the camera and microphone.

Very interesting talk on Digital Inclusion by Matthew, discussed the DAIN project and their new venture Das4Life. Some great work going on to help those without skills, knowledge or access to technology. Interesting to hear stories of 70 year olds getting to grips with digital cameras. Concerning that some choose to exclude themselves and almost end up opting out, but why should they have to adapt?

The day was rounded off with a stunning performance from Linda Harrison. She’s pretty much everywhere on the internet so find her on Youtube, iTunes and Bambuser.

See all Instagram photo’s from the event thanks to Instagreat.

And damnit, still didn’t go to see the Fibrecamp studio.

Updated (22 May 2011) :

Photos on Flickr from Paul Mellors

Unexhaustive list of MCN4 attendees on Twitter

I’ll be there all day. Come say hello. I’m @mawawa (don’t ask me why, I don’t have a good answer!)

If you can’t make it to the event, follow me @mawawa and #mcn4 on Twitter. And there will probably be a followup blog here afterwards.

(And I’m not just doing this for a #freelunch)

Twitseek.com has been blessed with a glut of traffic in the last few months. After being up for over a year, something has kicked in to drive traffic to the site.

Increased Page Views

A combination of Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google Adsense stats have been used to try to understand the recent surge in traffic. It appears that unfortunately, this may need to be called the Justin Bieber effect. No, I didn’t know either.

Page Impressions

These are the page impressions for 2010 so far:

Jan – monthly 115 – daily avg 4
Feb – 99 – 4
Mar – 118 – 4
Apr – 255 – 9
May – 1,212 – 40
Jun – 3,891 – 129
Jul – 3,845 – 124
Aug – 5,036 – 162
Sep – 6,110 – 203

That’s  a total of 20,681 hits this year so far, with over half of those occurring in the last two months.

Monthly increase stats are:

Feb -14%
Mar +19%
Apr +116%
May +375%
Jun +221%
Jul -1%
Aug +30%
Sep +20%

The June, July, August figures are where the traffic really increased to significant volumes, levelling out in July but steadily increasing again in August and September. In order for the site to become a real asset, growth figures need to return to being in the triple digits.

Ad Revenue

Ad revenue as also increased throughout the year.

Jan – no revenue
Feb – no revenue
Mar – no revenue
Apr – no revenue
May – pence
Jun – £’s
Jul – £’s
Aug – £’s
Sep – £’s

This corresponds to a small amount of ad revenue, half of which occurred in the last month. A doubling of revenue in August is due to change in ad layout with inclusion of extra ad panel, as well as increased traffic to the site.

Changes

New features are always rolled out at http://beta.twitseek.com and this receives a significant amount of traffic too. Changes trialled here in August were the extra Adsense panel which has already been rolled out. Also, a Popular strip has been added to the top of the site to link to some of the apps and sites which are used to frequently post to Twitter. The Retweet button is a possible for future rollout too. It seems to fit into the interface without breaking the layout. It would be great to get some A/B testing set up for the site to try new layouts before rolling out.

Update: Added September stats.

So, how do we fix this? I would suggest that we start doing it more until it becomes commonplace, second nature, part of the culture. Part of how we use the web. All we need is a mechanism

Twitpay is a such a mechanism. All you need is an Twitter account and a PayPal account. There is then a simple format for making payment on Twitter:

@mawawa twitpay $2 for proposing feasible micropayment structure for indie content producers

And that’s it! At the top of your blog post, ask for payment. At the start of your podcast, ask for payment. At the start of your video, ask for payment. If you don’t ask you won’t receive. If you do ask you will receive.

On this blog, if I publish content that I think is worth charging a fee for I will ask for that fee.

This is all inspired by Mediacamp Nottingham and the problem of monetising content. Does this help? See you in the comments.

List of the active Twitterer’s although pretty much everyone at the event had a Twitter account. This would not have been the case at last year event. Also read the timeline for #mcn2.

Interesting discussion on last 10 years and next 10 years in media by Glenn Le Santo. News is the least unique of all media. The Times is about to put its content behind a paywall. Reinventing social active. All content is now about interaction. There was a large focus on monetization which I tend to make me switch off. There is rarely talk of how to increase quality of content, targetting content, syndication, editing or a hundred other topics around why content is king. It always comes back to monetization, which I agree is important for content producers but we’re always talking around the subject and not doing anything about it. When was the last time you visited a blog/site/platform that was experimenting with paid content?

Time lapse photography of Nick Walker’s journey to Nottingham. http://post.ly/Vpeb (via @walkerama)

Talk about building community by the Creative Nottingham team was really interesting. Lack of funding for creative industries in the area has meant that people just get on with it. Its a great site that is expanding rapidly and importantly has lots of support from its community. Interesting comment that “Website is least important part of what we do”  as they also use Posterous, Facebook, RSS and Twitter. You need to use their resources more!

@iainsimons gave a very passionate talk about Gamecity. I’ve never made it to any of their events and his talk made me realise what I’ve missed out on. This year I will attend! He also introduced their idea of a Festival API. Great idea. Slightly off the wall but it makes so much sense. I think its that API is such a common term now that it makes sense in uses outside of technology. Can an API refer to a paper process, why not? The examples given where to inform the jacket potato vendor of the process he needs to follow to run his stand. I assume this would include application, payment, compliance with regulations, timetable for the event etc. This same API could then be used be used by any other festival who is also planning to sell jacket potatoes. A bizarre but excellent way to reduce bureaucracy. Is the videogames industry really going to change the way we handle paperwork?

Missed @philcampbell‘s talk about Posterous and didn’t even get chance to see the new streaming studio.

Lovely sandwiches and cake from @hungrypumpkin in the Lace Market

Very intersting talk about social media and the Olympics by Jennifer Jones. The Olympics is finally opening up to social media. Has authorised press and unathourised press centers. The Olympics is the biggest media event in the world bar none. Impact on host cities is massive. London in year 5 of 14 years of Olympic pain. How are the communities affected.

Purposely controversial session “The web site is dead” chaired by Glenn proved that it is and it isn’t. Static web pages are dead by their very nature. Social interaction on pages makes them very much alive. Someone commented that everything in their house is what other people have liked in reviews. Nothing is bought without recommendation. Is this is last gasp of consumerism. Need to communicate with others has returned? We don’t need brands. Better to have all that invested in communications. The logo does not help customer service.

Alexia gave a great intro on personal branding. What are your strengths? Decide what you don’t want and then start going in the opposite direction. People do business with people – do this apply to a website? Attract the things that align to you. Lots to think about.

The event rounded off with a great session from Ben Walker. A very intimate session with a true internet superstar. Listen in then buy online.

Posts from people who wrote stuff quicker than I did:

• Design & I

Nottingham Twestival

Twestival 2010 is on the horizon and once again I will be heading up the organisation of the Nottingham event. The last two events have been great with over £500 raised for worthwhile causes. At this event we’ll be concentrating on requesting corporate sponsorship.

I’ll be looking for a team of keen volunteers to help choose a venue, select entertainment for the night and spread the word!
Follow @nottstwestival on Twitter and join the Facebook group.

Volunteer meetups are currently taking place with much more help than last time, thanks all! With the venue agreed it is now the interesting part of finding sponsorship, getting raffle prizes and choosing bands.

To find out more about Nottingham Twestival , check the blog and follow @nottstwestival.

The Invisible Festival is taking place over the weekend of 8/9 August 2009. The venue for the festival is wherever you want it to be. The soundtrack is the same but the venues are different. The very simple idea being that you invite all your friends to your place and you listen to a set playlist. This happens at many different venues but the experiene is shared on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Its all provided free but donations are requested for Cancer Research UK.

The music is provided by The Invisible Festival as playlists on Spotify. The event wouldn’t be happening without Spotify which as a service has to be seen to be believed. See Lifehacker Spotify article for glowing review. Spotify has 3.8 million tracks available for streaming, for free. Its like iTunes without the shopping cart.

Similarly, without the Invisible Festival I wouldn’t be a Spotify user. Its ridiculous but I just didn’t realise how great it was going to be even though people have been raving about it. And its a nice smug feeling that the UK is one of the first countries to get access to the service.

Spotify and Invisible Festival made the best festival of 2009!

With the continuing speculation (Silicon Alley Insider, BuzzMachine, WebProNews) surrounding the possible purchase of Twitter by Google why not get a sneak preview of the end result by using Twitseek.

It’s like Google, only for Twitter. It’s an attempt to present the results from a Twitter search in a different format. It’s information from Twitter that looks like information from Google. It should have been called Twiggle or Twoogle but it just didn’t sound right!

Twitseeking BRIT Awards
• U2 at the Brit Awards
• Liveblogging from BritMusicScene

Twitseeking Girls Aloud
• Photos from Philip Schofield @schofe
• Popjustice is twitpiccing too @popjustice

Twitseeking Duffy
• Pride of Wales
• Duffy backs illegal downloading

Twitseeking Coldplay
• Coldplay post their own pics
• Coldplay to give away album

Other terms from throughout the night:Bono, Kylie, James Corden.

Short URL: http://www.martinwright.tv/u/13