Categories
Digital

Camilla Kerslake: Social Media Savvy!

Earlier this year I trained a life coach with Serenergise, run by Deborah Kerslake and her team (I’ve seriously been encouraging Debs on Twitter!), so I have had the privilege of meeting Camilla (one of the nicest people ever), and have watched with baited breath as this all came together, and am now fascinated to see how Camilla is using social media to build her brand/profile before her album launch: she seems to have had some good advice. The following video for ‘Rule the World’ (originally by Take That, and Camilla has been taken on by Gary Barlow’s record label) was posted onto YouTube on 24th September, and on 30th September was the most watched music video on YouTube (not surprising, I’ve listened to it multiple times, and today it has had nearly 57,000 views!)

  • Camilla Kerslake: Website (beautifully fresh and simple, looking forward to the rest of the content appearing)
  • Camilla Kerslake: Facebook (great use of the fan site, and simple leads into other areas of social media)
  • Camilla Kerslake on Twitter (if you retweet “@camillakerslake I WANT to meet Camilla & Gary Barlow on Monday! Please RT x“, you may get to meet both on Monday evening – just got to get yourself to London. I love the fact that it is clearly Camilla sending the tweets – her personality is shining through)
  • Camilla Kerslake on YouTube (SUCH a beautiful taste of what she’s singing, and a beautifully personally channel!)

I watched carefully to spot Debs at 3.37

Camilla & Debs Kerslake

The video below is taken from Terry Wogan’s Radio 2 show: this I think is from the 19th September, although he’d already played the song once, and had so many requests for it, it was added to the playlist again.

Categories
Digital

Google Wave

On Tuesday evening I finally watched the whole of the Google Wave developer forum, explaining the concept that brothers Lars & Jens came up with, challenging the idea that most software and online tools are built to emulate tools of the 1960s, and don’t make full use of what is now possible:

  • Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
  • Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
  • What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

On September 1st, Google Apps announced that Wave was nearly ready… but only to be rolled out to selected schools/businesses, with full rollout at some point in 2010. There’s a lot of excitement generated about the concept, so I though I ought to watch the video properly, and was interested to see what some of the new features were (some appeared straightforward and I’m sure I just don’t have a full appreciation of the technology underlying them – I’m more interested in the possible uses and applications!
Google Wave Image

Discuss and Edit in the same document, no need to send backwards and forwards. Changes are highlighted, and the entire history of the document will be available. You can add “bloggy” as a Wave user, and the wave will be automatically published to your blog. If you makes changes in either the blog or the wave, the changes are reflected in the other source in real time (the demonstration shows an image gallery).

Google Wave Presentation 1

Multiple users can edit a document at the same time, and in multiple langugages (it can cope with right-to-left and left-to-right)

Google Wave Image 2

The document uses contextual spelling, and if it’s not sure, uses the traditional red underlining

Google Wave Image 3

The wave can translate around 40 languages, as the document is being typed (word by word). Here’s an example in French.

Other features that caught my attention

  • Use with Twitter to create a “Tweave”: what’s written in Wave can appear in Twitter, and Wave can function as a Twitter search (or is that too simplistic a description?)
  • Online polls are possible, showing in real time the response so far.
  • Invites can be sent out with “Yes” “No” “Maybe”, and these are all clearly visually presented.

There was a lot of information in the presentation, and the product was still very much at a beta stage, but as it greets its first “live” users, expect to see more feedback generated.

Categories
Academic Digital

Fully Convergent?

Interesting experiment, and inspiration for ideas for a fully convergent social/educational life. Everything throught the iPhone… wonder if that would work elsewhere?

Categories
Academic Digital

Social Media: Informal Learning?

Jake Ross answers questions on informal learning. Is it real? Does it benefit small companies? How does it relate to the web? An interesting video which gives an idea as to why didactic learning no longer works.

Categories
History

Keep Calm and Carry On: Beat the Credit Crunch

Can you make do with less? Anything you can do for your clients/customers?