The Connections Show Conversation

A few weeks ago I had a recorded Skype conversation with Stan Relihan, the host of The Connections Show on The Podcast Network. The episode has now gone live and can be found here.

The Connections Show examines how to use social networking tools to build a business network. Stan is an executive recruiter and I think I can safely say he is Australia's foremost Linkedin user. He asked me to explain Twitter and to discuss how I use Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools.

Please feel free to leave a comment on the show blog, and If you think the conversation is interesting enough to share with others, please go ahead and digg the episode from the show blog.

I hope you enjoy listening to the show, I enjoyed the conversation with Stan. Like me, he is enthusiastic about social media.

Post Sydney Tweetup 2.0

It's taken me a while to get around to uploading my photos from the Sydney tweetup (STUB) back on the 27 Sept; sorry, I've been pretty busy since then. Here they are at last, funny captions are encouraged. If you have any more photos you'd like to show, please leave a link to them in the comments. Check out this video shot at the event too. Nick Hodge was handling the camera.

It was really good to see that a few more women came along this time. We also had some people from out of town, as the tweetup purposely coincided with a couple of other tech events going on in Sydney that week. It was great to see a few people there who had only just started twittering.

A big thanks goes out to those who helped organise the evening, and to all those who came along. It was a fun night. Thanks to Greg Dwyer and Markus Hafner (aka eskimo_sparky) from Happener Recruitment, and to Nick Hodge from Microsoft for their continued support of the event. My thanks also goes out to co-organiser Ajay Ranipeta (aka funkycoda). He has a lot of enthusiasm for encouraging and organising these kinds of events.

Microsoft supplied the food and a couple of copies of Vista as prizes for the best tweets of the night. Happener supplied the delicious beverages 2.0, and Twitter (the company) supplied a few "wearing my twitter shirt" t-shirts to give away as well. Thanks to Jack Dorsey from Twitter for coming through with the goods there.

Sydney Twitter Meetup 2

Well, the second Sydney Tweetup is just around the corner. If you twitter and are in Sydney next Thursday night, come along and join us for drinks at The Aurora Hotel in Surry Hills. It should be a another fun night.

I'm happy to announce that there will be a couple of door prizes given away on the night. One will be provided by Microsoft, the other by Twitter (the company).

A very big thank you to our sponsors, Happener Recruitment, and Microsoft for their support.

Here are some details:

Date: Thursday, September 27, 2007
Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: The Aurora Hotel, cnr Kippax Street & Elizabeth Stree, Surry Hills

Please see twitter.com/stub for more info.

Post Sydney Tweetup Thoughts

The first Sydney Twitter Meetup was held last Wednesday at Pier 26 Bar. Thanks to Cathy Edwards from the Telstra Chief Technology Office for co-organising the Sydney event with me. She had organised a couple of tweetups in Melbourne previously, so it was good to have her encouragement to help this one happen.

It was a good turnout of about 30 people at Pier 26, and I think the Sydney twitterati had a good time. We also had a few people from out of town which was great. Jared Madden and Adam Purcell, who are organising the first PodCamp Australia attended, and Dave King from St Edmonds Lab in Melbourne came along as well. Thanks to those guys for making the effort.

From my point of view, it was really great to finally meet some of my local Twitter friends in the flesh. I also met some people who weren't yet my Twitter friends but are now. I had fun contacting people through Twitter and Facebook beforehand to encourage them to attend. It was all an interesting social media experiment, which seemed to work out pretty well.

If I had one negative comment to make, it would be that there weren't enough women there. As I've mentioned before, this seems to be a fairly common occurrence in interactive, especially on the development and creative sides, and in senior roles. Personally, I really would like to see that change. I wouldn't like to see that continue into this new area of social media either, should it develop into a growth industry in itself (which it already seems to be).

A big thanks to Happener for sponsoring the drinks on the night, and to Nick Hodge from Microsoft for supplying a copy of Windows Vista for the 'best tweet on the night' prize.

Thanks to Tim Buesing and Dave King from Netx and St Edmonds Lab at Netx for recording and podcasting a few interviews on the night. The interviews can be found on the St Edmonds Lab blog here.

Quite a few photos were also taken. In true social media style, a lot of them (including mine) can be found on flickr, here