Last week I went to the West Midlands ICT Cluster 2009 ICT Conference. I was purely a punter so it was interesting to go along and experience an event aimed fairly and squarely at small and medium sized IT businesses. The shocker was that compared to a lot of Third Sector/charity/public sector events was the lack of social media around the event.  It was a very traditional (and smoothly run) conference, packed with plenty of tech – for example scannable badges for the workshop attendance and capturing details at the  exhibition areas.

It did fall down in a few places, just simple things like a lack of delegate list and no facilitated networking which means a room full of about 150 suits meant it was difficult to get much out of them. The workshops also were very unworkshoppy (at least the two  I attended) and not very interactive. But the most surprising thing especially being an I(C)T conference was the almost total lack of social media. Twitter was only mentioned during one of the keynotes by Chameleon Net MD Vicky Reeves (I now get the link to someone I have followed for ages on Twitter – Ross Miles) and once at the end by IBM megabrain Clive Harris. There wasn’t a hashtag and I’m pretty sure I was the only one tweeting away. It’s not just about Twitter though, there were some pretty special video cameras setup up, but no streaming of the talks (perhaps they were recorded), and no sense of this being part of a bigger community able to engage before, during and after the event. There are some pictures now appearing on Flickr. Indeed there was the slightly strange sight of one of the facilitators running  round the room so that he he could collect the business cards of delegates, apparently so that he could email the presentations (one at a time because they would be ‘quite big’) to everyone after the event.  Hmm Slideshare might be a fractionally more elegant solution there…

This wasn’t meant to be an event review but the take-home message for me (if I weren’t involved in it already) was that for small/medium businesses ICT has little or nothing to do with social media, which is a shame as I think that there is a level of inevitability of the impact of social media in most areas of life (especially as Clive Harris noted, through mobile devices), and therefore business especially for small and start-up organisations.

One presentation and product I did really enjoy finding out about was Sharedband, a UK/US start-up that enables businesses to combine two or more DSL or cable (even WiMax) connections to gain faster up and download speeds and greater bandwidth without having to take on the hideous expense of a leased line. It also provides redundancy too, making it a good option for a resilient business continuity plan. Most interestingly of all from my perspective, was something they are exploring by sharing residential  broadband connections via wifi – potentially helping out areas where people can’t get a good connection, clubbing together with neighbours to beef up their online options.  CEO Paul Evans talked to me about it in the clip below.

At Chain Reaction today doing a bit of social media surgery and sitting behind me are the guys from Noonan Media who are streaming the video for today’s event and the NFPTweetup tonight. You should be able to see the results of their work below

**UPDATE** now the event is over, the archived footage will be posted soon, I’ll link to it when it’s available.

Well you may have noticed a hiatus in the blog for a while there – after an odd day of being Liam Byrne’s blog, unfortunately I lost most of the content from here. The bad news was I hadn’t taken any recent back-up. On the upside – I hadn’t blogged much and was able to retrieve many of the posts from Google’s cache.

But let’s turn this faux pas into something hopefully useful. Back-ups are boring, there’s no two ways about it. That is until you find out you haven’t got any, and potentially a lot of hard work has gone up in smoke (or electrons). Putting stuff on the web instead of your own computer is great, but you still need to have a copy of that data  somewhere else (backing up to the same webserver is no good if it lunches itself)

OK here are some rules and tips

1. What to back-up?
   With something like Wordpress you have two lots of data, you need to back up both of these in case of emergency:
   • Files (just like on your desktop) which may be  uploads, themes, plugins – everything in the wp-content folder
   • Your database (usual MySQL)- this contains all your posts and pages. You can’t really access it directly but you can get the database to export a single plain text file which can rebuild itself (it contains the structure of the database as well as all the data) which can then be zipped up when it gets too big.
2. How to back up?
   Automate, automate automate – You can just do a manual export of all your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags  (go to Tools>Export). The problem is that humans are rubbish at doing boring things regularly and faultlessly, computers are much better at it. Fortunately there are a fair few plugins to help with backing up WordPress. I’m using  two different ones
   • To back up the files – WordPress Backup
   • To back up the database – WP-DBManager

   They work by creating  file that is then emailed to you as frequently as you need it – you may need to create a folder on your webserver where these files are temporarily stored and then email it to something like a Gmail account which has plenty of space and you can file away until you need it…

3. Test your back ups
   Finding out that your back-ups are useless or somehow corrupted is not best done when your blog has disappeared, so you need to test your back-ups by restoring them and checking that they work ok. If you’ve got a second blog then it’s better to do that than play around with your main blog. Because the files usually produced can be unzipped to plain text files you can have a quick check that they look ok in a text editor

If you’ve got any more tips then leave a comment.

Next week I’m going to be doing double duty at two great events – Chain Reaction and the 5th NFPTweetup. I didn’t go to Chain Reaction last year, but it immediately erupted across my Twitterstream as lots of attendees were eagerly tweeting about it, so Iwas really interested in going along this year. Chain Reaction is all about getting people together to change things – as they say:

We provide spaces – at ‘real life events’ and on line – in which people can collaborate with others across the boundaries that divide us and commit their energy to new ideas and new ways of working that will change the world.

Big stuff but the line-up of people going is looking great. I’ll be doing a bit of social media surgery alongside the illustrious Rachel Beer, Jonathan Waddingham and Steve Bridger.

In the evening is the 5th NFPTweetup, and fingers crossed we’ll be streaming it live over the interwebs, and I’ll be floating about with a mic and the cameras from Noonan Media, so even if you can’t make it, you can watch and join in on Twitter

Little bit of rebuilding going on.

Normal service will be resumed soon

In the mean time, you can find out more about me and find out how to contact me.

Yesterday I was doing some social reporting with David Wilcox and Steve Lawson for a really interesting symposium looking at how technology can help in (and get us out of) the current cold economic climate, organised by Jamie Young at the RSA.There is plenty more on the blog and the event wasn’t the end of the process as you’ll see in a second.

As well as the keynote speeches and panel discussion the main meat of the day was discussion of four papers that had been commissioned on Supporting Innovation, Sustainable Technology, the Interconnected Society and finally Public Services.  I was live-blogging the last two sessions using CovertItLive and you can ‘replay’ the session to find out what went on.  Jamie is busy gathering together all the feedback the results of this process will be published shortly

• My pictures
• David’s videos and my videos
• The Twitter backchannel (everything tagged #techcold)
• Kathryn Corrick’s write up of the Interconnected Society session

Sorry it’s been a bit quiet around here, one thing I have been up to is helping to organise the first (of many hopefully) Coventry & Warwickshire Social Media Cafes.

As with many things, it started with a tweet with another Paul (Squires) who I met at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe. We both found ourselves on the train going to the BSMC and thought, why can’t we have one closer to home and the CWSMC was born.

With just over a week to go, we’ve got:

• A venue, the Court Street Creative Arches in Leamington Spa

• A sponsor for the all important coffees, Screen WM

• Wifi courtesy of a WiMax connection put in be Konnex networks (did you know Warwick and Leamington are one of the first places in the UK to get WiMax ? I didn’t think you did)

All we need are some people…actually we’ve got a healthy bunch of early adopters signed-up already, but if you’re around near the station in Leamington next Friday 18th Sept from 10am-12pm – pop down and have a coffee and chat about anything digital and social media, with other interested locals – you might be surprised who you meet.

You can sign-up beforehand which would help us with numbers and see if there is anyone you especially want to meet up with.

Thanks also to Ray Smith at Warwick District Council and Sarah Allen for all their hard work in making it happen so far!

There is a video of Ray talking about the Creative Arches on the CWSMC website.

My first day with my own hat on for a while and in London for Media 140. There are lots of twittery people here – and they will be blogging more than me. But the back channel will be interesting…

I’ve been a bit quiet for a while here but (as I mildly trailed on Twitter) big things have been happening. Today I excavated my desk from 3 and 3/4 years of paper-based sedimentary layering and packed up for the last time at ruralnet|uk.

From 1st May I’m joining the massed ranks of the freerange and unjobbed.

It’s been a while in coming to fruitition but I think the slighty queasy feeling in my stomach isn’t a bout of swine flu, but a mixture of excitement and trepidation tempered by the huge support from everyone that has helped me get here. To Dunk, Brian and Rob and everyone else who I’m leaving behind, I’ll miss you all – it has been a tremendous time but I’m not going far (see below)

What will I actually be doing?

In short – more. More of this social media stuff, more blogging, more social reporting, more connecting up, prodding, poking and trying things out.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow?

Well, literally tomorrow I’ll be rambling (stop it at the back saying I’ve been doing that for ages) to rejoin Mohini and Sameena for a walk around Selly Oak Library as part of the Ramblers’ Get Walking, Keep Walking programme. I’m going to be helping them tell the story of their project and hopefully doing as little as possible, as they’ll be able do it all following our session last week

Why solo doesn’t mean solo at all

Of course the brilliant thing about social media is that no-one is really on their own at all.

So I’m really excited to be working with Nick Booth on more Podnosh projects and looking forward to collaborating with the likes of Dave Briggs and David Wilcox (but I’m willing to consider work even if you’re not called David). And I’ll be back at ruralnet|uk to do some training and get involved in some other upcoming projects.

I might even get round to do some blogging…

I’m doing a bit of social reporting today with David Wilcox at the 2009 World Entrepreneur Summit being held at the (more than) Goodenough College in London.

There is some blogging taking place at the Crowdvine social network that has been set up to support the event and the various videos, pictures, tweets and audios (if that is a word) are being collated over at Pageflakes.

David is collecting little audio interviews using his iPhone and something called AudioBoo -importantly you can capture a picture too, so you can put a name to a face.  We’re liking it here as sometimes a video camera shoved in your face can be a bit intimidating, but most people seem comfortable just chatting – and the sound quality is pretty good, especially in a buzzy but noisy venue.  Check them all out here.