Gavin Wray // Carefully crafting content since 2001

The super bunch at Rhubarb Radio have posted the audio of my impromptu talk on geotagging life experiences and the ensuing discussion at the WxWM2 unconference.

Download the audio (MP3, 9.2mb)

Here are the other talks from the event

Yesterday I went along to the West by West Midlands 2 event at the Spotted Dog pub in Digbeth, Birmingham.

Expertly hosted by Shona McQuillan, there were some planned talks plus, following the unconference format, off-the-cuff talks by attendees. If the number chosen by Shona’s random number generator thingy (there’s probably an app for that) matched the number on your sticky lapel label, you stood up and gave an impromptu talk.

My number 31 popped up and here is my attempt to describe what (I think) I talked about…

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I stumbled across an interesting application called Twittersheep that produces a word cloud based on the biographies of your followers on Twitter. This is what Twittersheep came up with based on my followers:

There aren’t many surprises in the words that pop out. In a way, I’m quite pleased that my followers’ interests or specialisms match closely to my own.

It’s still interesting though to see what topics your followers use to describe their own interests and how these topics correspond to what you ‘think’ your tweets are about. It’s the content of your tweets that retains followers after all.
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Yesterday I spent a wonderful hour meeting Attiye Faraji at the sixth social media surgery in Birmingham.

Attiye is a health and wellbeing lead for young people at Health Exchange, which aims to “make health services available and accessible to all members of our community”. It’s a partnership development between the Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care Trust and Birmingham City Libraries.

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I’m a big fan of revisiting posts within a blog and linking to related posts. Whether adding cross-references in the body of the text or at the end of a post by using one of the many related posts plugins, I think they can give real benefits to readers.

Linking between posts is also essential if you’re writing a series of related posts.

But one result of linking between posts has always bothered me. Trackbacks or pingbacks displayed in the comments on your own post don’t make sense in the context of your own site; trackbacks and pingbacks only make sense where other people link to your post.

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