Cheltenham’s social media conference, the #AddMe conference, will play host to some of the country’s most prominent social media speakers.

The conference has been set up by me as part of my role as CIPR Student Representative for the University of Gloucestershire. Open to students and businesses alike the #AddMe Conference aims to tackle the key questions of how to create, manage and utilise relationships online. To highlight the significance of creating relationships online keeps the #AddMe Conference open to a wide range of topics.

The conference will highlight the significance of creating relationships online and will explain the continually adapting communication landscape for industries. The evening will begin with a talk from David Phillips who is an active PR practitioner, has been involved in the communications landscape for 20 years and is the author of three books about online public relations. He will be followed by Alex Sass, named “Best of British: Entrepreneur” by Attitude Magazine and currently heading up the digital team at Renegade Media. He will cover methods of digital PR, social media marketing and a warning to the industry.

The keynote speaker of the evening will be Aren Grimshaw. His roles include lead organiser of the Cornwall Twestival events, founder of Cornwall Social Media Cafe, marketing director of Tonick Media, publisher of Business Cornwall and consultant to a range of clients. He is a regular speaker on the subject of social media and its role within business.

The event will take place at the University of Gloucestershire, Park Campus on Wednesday 10^th March at 7.00pm until 10:30pm. Normal tickets cost £5 and student tickets cost £3 (using promo code STUDENTDISC). Refreshments will be available on the evening.

Further information and ticket sales can be found at: http://www.addme.mikewhite.co.uk/

You can also follow the event on Twitter: http://www.Twitter.com/Addmeconf

Originally published in issue 3, vol 10 of Space Newspaper. The University of Gloucestershire’s student newspaper.

It is understandable that when AC/DC stand on stage crowds will emphatically cheer enthusiastically. Not surprising at all. However, I do cringe with an expression that only a cat’s arse can imitate when Google announce a new product to a crowd of developers who respond with more vigour than the standard rock crowd.

The Google I/O Developer conference took place around the end of May this year. As I wasn’t invited I had to watch announcements on YouTube and follow discussions on Twitter. On day two of the conference Google announced their new project, Google Wave. Google Wave has been dubbed ‘The communication tool of the future’ and is headed by project leaders Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the same individuals who led the Google Maps project.

Google Wave was developed within Australia, not the outback but in Sydney. Geeks have been working hard to produce a system which is to rival the current archaic way to send electronic mail and to build a platform with the ability to merge social networks. Taking aspects of many social media sites which we have seen develop in the last 10 years Google have successfully produced a product which is truly breathtaking.

An email, as you will all know, provides you with an address line, subject line and then the message body. Google Wave works by creating new Waves. These could be likened to the message body of an email. You can add users to each Wave conversation by dragging and dropping your contacts to the conversation. The body of the Wave then acts as a giant tool of collaboration. Uniquely in the sense that each body of a Wave accommodates the ability to feature media formats such as picture and video. The days of attaching files to an email are over with the possibility to simple drag and drop content from your computer onto your web browser into a Wave conversation.

To(…)

Back in 2006 publishers and authors gathered together to file a class action lawsuit against Google Books. It is easy to see why, digital downloads are threatening the music industry and books could be perceived to becoming under the same threat. Just as Google revolutionised the way we navigate the internet, they are now assisting the future of books.

Today the Twitter stream is ablaze as Mashable has spread the news of #GoogleNowOffers. Quite simply Google have announced that they have reached “Our groundbreaking agreement with authors and publishers”. In a much needed celebration you can now ‘Download Over a Million Public Domain Books from Google Book in the Open EPUB Format’.

Of course you will no doubt have noticed that Sony released their “Amazon challenger” a couple of days ago. In some circles it has been announced as the Kindle killer. You may have seen my post ‘Future of Newspapers: eReaders?’. Amazon has been working their socks off to try and release the Kindle internationally and Sony have now given them some healthy competition.

So this news of Sony releasing their Amazon challenger, Google offering 1 million books for download, has come just after Sony is to ‘back open e-book format’. Notice a link between these three stories? No doubt Google’s ePub download offerings will be an outcome with an agreement with Sony. Oh wait! Sony and Google have made a deal.

Without any question of doubt I am very excited by this news. Suddenly the Amazon store is over shadowed by Google’s hoarded book collection and the Kindle’s wireless device is now no longer unique. Sony is now said to be in discussions with newspapers to get digital subscriptions sorted. We are truly witnessing history in the making.

This article has nothing to do with student life, even University happenings. Will even be fairly arbour in nature. I want to ask you a simply question. Why would somebody remove Windows Vista on their laptop? Well, I took the honour to type up a little list earlier.

1. Frustration
2. Annoyance that everything runs slowly even on the fastest system
3. Every waking hour is blighted with pop-up system messages
4. The constant disappointment that Windows Aero was never that great
5. Increased key pressed to find even the most simple system item
6. Frustration (again)

So now that we have drawn up a list (feel free to comment your own) what should we replace Windows Vista with? Although I would like to avoid the word ‘replacement’, a ‘replacement’ for Windows Vista would be stray fuse around the house, a broken spoon on the floor or a novel written by Alan Titchmarsh. No, what we are looking for is an improvement. What we need is a system which is fresh and exciting. So, I took the liberty to type you another little list.

1. A system that provides more eye candy than a lap dance
2. Remains at the forefront of operating system (OS) developments
3. Will not cost you a single penny or leg
4. A human literate system
5. Easy expandable options
6. Up right stiffening joy

As the horribly obvious title of this article suggests I have replaced Windows Vista with a Unix based OS. As the sadder ones of you may know Unix comes in two large variants, commercially and publically. Notably, the Apple OS and the very slightly underdog Linux OS.

This month Unix celebrates its 40^th anniversary and so what better way is there to celebrate Unix than to install Linux on my laptop? Using Linux as a main OS is a bit like diving into a swimming pool hoping that the man fills the empty abyss with water in time. Questions have plagued my technological corrupted mind, such as: Will I be able to do all my work on Linux? How reliable will the system be? How(…)