Martin Wright.tv

Web 2.0 Surgery is going from strength to strength with the fifth event.  There is another great line up of experts ready to answer questions on everything Web 2.0 and internet related.

As part of figuring out the Nottingham Tech Scene there is now a wiki page to track the tech companies, web companies, web design companies, games companies and tech events based in Nottingham.

Please feel free to add your company to the Nottingham Tech Scene wiki.

It seems appropriate to find out about a virtual festival through a friend on Facebook who I’ve never met. This lead to a shared experience with hundreds of other festival-goers who never get to meet each other.

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!

Another great NottTuesday event. This time it was very ably hosted by Garry Shutler and took a different Q&A format to normal. A whole raft of questions were suggested including reliance on the cloud, Twitter as a marketing tool, AB testing and refactoring code. The single topic that then dominated the night was web site calls to action and conversions.

Take a look at nottingham+video+production and see which site would get your call.

Alan talked about his experiences of conversion success on SimpleLifeForms.

Adam described monitoring Twitter searches using Tweetdeck as ‘dynamic SEO’. You can also get an RSS feed of Twitter Search terms so that you never miss a tweet. Here’s the RSS feed for NottTuesday tweets.

Looking forward to the next event already!

If you were also unlucky enough to be able to make it down to Cornwall for Bamboo Juice, it will be clear from this that we missed a treat.

• Winning business in tough times by Paul Boag
• An awesome presentation http://prezi.com/35967/view/ by Jeremy Keith, but you’ll need this commentary to make sense of it!
• Keeping Up with the Zeldmans by Gareth Rushgrove
• Wheel of Tea presentation

Photos of the weekend:

• http://www.blurredfocus.co.uk/?p=270
• http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=bamboojuice&s=int

Post event commentary:

• http://www.cvwdesign.com/txp/article/346/bamboo-juice-at-the-eden-project
• http://shortboredsurfer.com/2009/04/geeks-in-the-garden-of-eden-a-review-of-bamboo-juice/
• http://prettierpixels.com/blog/events/bamboo-juice-2009/

Oh well, there’s always next time or BarcampCornwall.

This post was written by Twitseeking bamboojuice.

Short URL: http://martinwright.tv/?p=258

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!