Amplified08 was the most interesting social media conference I’ve attended in ages.  Heck it was the most interesting damn conference I’ve attended!  So what was so amazing about it?

It was put together in just 6 weeks and advertised entirely on Twitter.  I started to notice Twitter hash tags for #Amp08 and followed the conversation to the Wiki.

There was hardly any drop out in attendance – over 200 people were there – and boy it was HOT in some of the rooms.  Not bad for a free event on a freezing cold and drizzly day in London.

It was Tweeted live throughout the event.  Each session had a different hash tag e.g. #Amp08 #21 so you could easily follow the conversation online.  The hashtag was in the top 5 searches at one point during the evening – beating Thanksgiving!

4 of the meeting rooms were streamed out live onto the internet using BlogTV – here’s a recording from one of the (emptier) rooms…

Most people were twittering how things were going from their mobile devices – a ratio of 2.1 I’d say.  Hardly anyone was using their laptops – some used tiny ultra mobile PC’s the rest was 50:50 Mac: PC usage.

The event was really low cost – NESTA provided the venue, coffee and wine. no marketing, no costly websites – just a blog and a Wiki

There were some really influential people there.  BBC, Channel 4, Guardian, Reuters news, Google, lots of news and media people, networkers and independent marketers.  All part of the conversation asking for advice and contributing freely.

Live Twitter feed gave questions and some food for thought as the sessions ran.

Sessions all ran to time – Amazingly well managed!

We really could learn a heck of a lot from this type of event on how to connect effectively with our audience and key influencers, run successful events and reach out to new markets.  Marketing team take note…

So well done to the team for such an amazing event.  I’m really looking forwards to Amplified09

I’m escaping out of the office to go to Amplified 08 in London today, partly because I’m really interested in social media and the topics that will be covered, but mainly because this whole event is a classic example of how well social media, and social networking works at bringing the correct people together.

I started to notice #Amp08 tags appearing on my Twitter feed a few weeks ago so I followed some of the links through to the wiki registration page.  Liked who else was attending, read the blog and followed a few more twitterers to get a bit more information.  I registered and watched the event grow.

I’ll be interested to watch the round the world participation – quite an achievement from a low budget approach and I’m also there to meet up with a few pals from different social networks that I’m involved with – like Sue, Toby and Shani .

More later… blogging from the event perhaps?

In case you didn’t notice the news the other day, the last security update patch we did removed malicious software from over 1 million PC’s this week. 

How was it done?  The Malicious Software removal tool.  This is what it removes.

So if you spend time on any of your friends machines removing worms, virii and trojans and nagging them about administrator permissions when logged in, then it may be worth downloading this onto a memory stick and carrying it around with you. 

Cos you never know when you’ll need it…

This made me smile especially in the light of Andrews comments about microblogging the other day. David’s post titled A brief history of micro-media has a great cartoon on the demise of micromedia.

There’s a lot of discussion at the moment on whether Twitter has had it’s day, whether blogging is past it’s best, or whether this and other forms of social media are still gaining general acceptance across the wider audiences… 

Perhaps David has got a point though and one day we’re all going to say absolutely nothing to each other electronically and start to talk to each other face to face instead..  Now there’s an interesting thought…  

Thanks to Microblogger for the image.

***** Edited. fixed broken links *****

The quick answer is no.  I had the opportunity to interview Mary Jo last month in the UK when she talked about her book.  I recorded the session and I was really pleased with the results.  So after John’s team edited the rough recording to get the repeats out of the session, I asked the wonderful Mike if he would host the final podcast on his SharePoint site for me.  So you can listen to the podcast here (it’s 10mb and runs for 44 minutes).

So what do you think?  I think she comes across different in person to in print, much less serious, much more light hearted.

But then it might be my friendly interview technique :-)

Heck I like Sleeveface.  It’s clever, it’s fun and you don’t need to use photoshop.  All you need are vinyl record sleeves, and a camera. 

I love this image -  very clever use of perspective too…

so here’s how you do it.

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and have a look at the Facebook group to follow the buzz too...

so if you’ve got nothing planned for the weekend and want to mess around with your record collection – here’s your chance!

Now where’s that Madonna album?…

Mashable points to a little app that allows you to follow anyone who follows you on twitter.  It’s called twollow

will save you a bit of time with twitter admin – which you’ll lose in all the noise that following all of these extra people will generate.  Neat idea though…

I’ve always believed in the pay it forward way of life – making someone's life a little bit better so that they pass it on.  There’s a nice list about Random acts of kindness here that I thought I’d share with you.  It’s also something that you can do technically too.

Show someone how to do something differently.  It may be just sharing the keyboard shortcuts for cut and paste if you’ve watched them use the icons on the toolbar, or show them how they can put their computer into sleep mode if you watch them shut their PC down the traditional way. Little things like that can make a huge difference to productivity and to the way they work.

Show them something new – that they may not know about – like Photosynth, like Bluehoo, like, Brightkite.  They might love it.

Tell them about something that captures their imagination – like Surface, like the worldwide telescope

Help them out with their PC issues – after all – you know more than you think you do and it’s amazing just how much you can improve peoples mood and outlook on life by showing them how things work.

After all isn’t that what we all do?  Telling people about the great stuff we do with technology, enthusing about hardware, software, gadgets, toys.  Well you can spread the word too and pay it forward too…

I was going to write a series of blog posts talking about Windows Azure from an IT professional’s perspective and how it works from an infrastructure person point of view.  I have a couple of posts partially completed in draft which I’ll post next week.

But to start things off, at Microsoft, we normally give you a really high level view of how things work.  So I’ll start with a video.

This shows the evangelists and architects from the UK team explaining in really simple terms how Azure scales.

Thanks to George for pointing this out and Alex for posting the video.

Back to writing the serious stuff now.  More later…

Technorati Tags: Red dog,Azure,cloud services

Even though I have my phone number on my blog, I don’t get too many calls – usually valid calls from customers who need help, or from people who want genuine advice.  But on Saturday I had my very first Nigerian scam call.

Me: Hello

Him: Hello, am I speaking to Ms Eileen Brown

Me: Yes, how can I help?

Him: I’m from Nigeria and I found your number on the web

Me: Yerssss…….

Him: and I wondered if you could tell me your email address

Me: Why do you want my email address?

Him: So I can do business with you.

Me: You can’t do business with me, you’ll have to do business with my company

Him: I want to do business with you

Me: Who do I work for then?

Him: I don’t know

Me: Well I suggest that if you don’t know who I work for then you’re going to find it quite hard to do business with me

Him: but I want your email address to do business with you

etc. etc.

This back and forth went on for quite some time, him trying to get my email address from me, and me telling him that if he knew who I worked for it would be really easy to do business with the company.  On and on it went back and forwards until I got bored with his lack of knowledge about who I was and how easy it would be to do business with me.  heck if you search on the web, my email address is on the Technet UK website!

And he didn’t have the sense to hide his number from me either.  Thank you caller ID.

So if you’re bored with the thought of scammers or have ever received a call from Ghana at +233 2402 14572 too, please have some fun too.  After all – he’s paying for the call :-)

So Jerry Yang is going to step down from being CEO at Yahoo according to Adam at Mashable and Maggie at the BBC.  With shares at $10 or so I’ll be watching with interest to see where he’ll be off to next.  And it will also be amusing to read all of the news bubbling up around the blogosphere as to whether we’ll start negotiations to buy yahoo again and at what price… 

Will we?  I really don’t think so…

I often wonder what makes a blog post interesting enough for people to read the rest of the post and realised when I saw this post the other day that it’s the catchy title and first couple of lines holds the attention.

I don’t usually read the unlimited potential team blog but this post held my attention demanding further reading about the far reaching impact that technology can have on peoples lives.

So I’d recommend that you take a bit of time to browse the site and have a look at some of the things we’re doing in Central and Eastern Europe that don’t actually conform to some of the things you traditionally associate with Microsoft.  Their mission is to “enable sustained social and economic opportunity for those at the middle and bottom of the world’s economic pyramid—the next 5 billion people”. Wow…

I’m really impressed.  This team is making such a difference to so many peoples lives – and I’d so love to work for them…

Kevin pointed out that he’d found the new updated Windows Live services have been launched along with a new refreshed home page.  I’d noticed the new look Hotmail the other day when I logged in, but I was really impressed about the range of things that are on offer and will be coming up over at Live.

I’ve had my Hotmail account for almost 10 years now and, at I’ve signed up to new services as they’ve been released.  I dump any service that I don’t find useful – some after a few weeks, others after months.  So what do I still use?

Hotmail.  I use this daily – I’ve got 2 non alpha numeric characters in my email address and I get 1 junk mail per month.  I wish I’d had non alphabetic characters in my UK hotmail account as this gets “quite a bit” of spam.  Shame I can’t rename it…

Live spaces.  I talk about my home life, my chickens and my “hobbies” here as well as sharing photos with my family to reduce the amount of email flow backwards and forwards.  Having a “home” blog allows me to separate my work and my home life and it stops my mother asking me tricky questions abut Exchange too :-)

Messenger.  I use this in addition to using Office communicator with PIC to communicate with buddies.  The messenger bot on my blog home page goes straight through to this too

Live Writer.  Offline blogging.  How the heck did I ever manage without it?  Cutting and pasting with word just wasn’t the same – and now the ease of inserting images has made the whole blogosphere much more dynamic

Sky Drive.  I’ve got loads of folders on here, some private, some shared, some public (to share documents after a Connecting Women in Technology event for example)

So what am I REALLY looking forward to?

Event homepages.  About time too.  That’s really useful for anyone who has a community and doesn’t have the knowledge to create an effective web presence – these updated services look like they’re going to give you exactly what you need.

So it’s certainly good news at least for the Colchester Chicken society…

Technorati Tags: live services,hotmail

Aargh! I’m turning into my mother.  Growling about poor spelling on signs in the food market, grumbling about poor apostrophes but this example has made me mutter all week about falling standards in retail.

It bothered me so much, I went back to the shop last night (which has branches throughout the UK) to take a photo.

Where’s the quality control here? Or am I just getting old?  But I did have some fun musing about what the alternative meaning of the label could possibly be…

Off topic I know, but as a frequent flyer I was fascinated to see this simulation of planes flying around the world.

watch the traffic increase as night turns to day – and the amount of night time flights over to Europe from the US.

Hat tip to Kim for searching this out.

I’ve  been meaning to blog about this for a while – but as I didn’t go to tech.ed last week, it sort of slipped my mind.

Deeps went around tech.ed in Sydney asking people who had a technet plus subscription what value they got from the subscription.  Here’s the video of their interviews.  Alex did the same in tech.ed Barcelona and I’ll share the finished video with you when it’s ready.  I think we need to do a webcast too about the sort of stuff you get in the actual subscription as so many people aren’t really aware of this.

Thanks to Jeff for the original post…

One of the key concerns about whether to implement Unified communications in an organisation is who has the skill set to manage and administer it.  Since UC is relatively new, finding someone with hands-on experience of UC is going to be an issue. So what you need to look out for is the correct mindset as opposed to the particular skill set  You’re going to need someone who knows how to learn and who enjoys learning as the technology evolves.

I suppose as long as you have a basic but solid grounding in Windows and Exchange Server technology, you’ll be able to make a natural transition into the role  - it’s a natural extension of the Exchange Administrator role.  So you see how important the server team is when you’re considering UC deployment.

There are lots of perceptions about hiring someone with telephony experience too – but as far as telephony goes, the UC administrator need only know enough to be able to communicate well with the PBX/telephony team and find out what they need or hire an outsourced telephony vendor to help with the voice deployments.

And finally, during a project you need to roll out Unified Communications in a series of waves, starting with your committed enthusiasts to a wider set of users, and from less critical applications to more critical ones. This way your early adopters, who treat setbacks as a learning experience, can find potential problems before they can cause a loss of confidence among less patient users.

I like the idea of these LabCasts.  You follow along the webcast and do hands on config yourself using Virtual Labs.  I like playing with the interface  - it helps me learn faster so I thought I’d forward some of these on in case you’d like to join in to these labcasts.  Info follows:

6/11/2008 TechNet Labcast: Exchange Server 2007 (Part 4 of 5): Configuring Unified Messaging and Enabling Remote Client Access (Level 200)

With Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, employees get anywhere access to their e-mail, voice mail, calendars, and contacts from a variety of clients and devices. Join us for part four of the five-part Exchange Server 2007 series. In the labcast series, you receive practical technical information and learn proven techniques by watching demonstrations and using hands-on virtual labs that require no complex installations. In this labcast, we cover configuring Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging and remote client access with Exchange Server 2007.

7/11/2008 TechNet Labcast: Exchange Server 2007 (Part 5 of 5): Using Local Continuous Replication and Cluster Continuous Replication (Level 200)

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 enables new levels of operational efficiency through capabilities that optimize hardware and networking investments and features that help make administrators more productive. Join us for part five of the five-part Exchange Server 2007 series. In the labcast series, you receive practical technical information and learn proven techniques by watching demonstrations and using hands-on virtual labs that require no complex installations. In this labcast, we cover using Exchange Server 2007 local continuous replication and cluster continuous replication.

113/11/2008 TechNet Labcast: Exchange Server 2007 (Part 1 of 5): Installing Service Pack 1 and Transitioning from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007 (Level 200)

For most businesses today, e-mail is the mission-critical communications tool that enables people to produce the best results. For IT professionals, delivering a messaging system that addresses these needs must be balanced against other requirements such as security and cost. Join us for part one of the five-part Exchange Server 2007 series. In the labcast series, you receive practical technical information and learn proven techniques by watching demonstrations and using hands-on virtual labs that require no complex installations. In this labcast, we cover installing Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) on Windows Server 2008 and transitioning from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007.

14/11/2008 TechNet Labcast: Exchange Server 2007 (Part 2 of 5): Configuring an Edge Server and Compliance and Retention Using Exchange Server 2007 RTM (Level 200)

For most businesses today, e-mail is the mission-critical communications tool that enables people to produce the best results. For IT professionals, delivering a messaging system that addresses these needs must be balanced against other requirements such as security and cost. Join us for part one of the five-part Exchange Server 2007 series. In the labcast series, you receive practical technical information and learn proven techniques by watching demonstrations and using hands-on virtual labs that require no complex installations. In this labcast, we cover installing Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) on Windows Server 2008 and transitioning from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2007.

20/11/2008 TechNet Labcast: Exchange Server 2007 (Part 3 of 5): Managing and Administering Exchange Server 2007 Using the Management Console and Management Shell (Level 200)

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 enables new levels of operational efficiency through capabilities that optimize hardware and networking investments and features that help make administrators more productive. Join us for part three of the five-part Exchange Server 2007 series. In the labcast series, you receive practical technical information and learn proven techniques by watching demonstrations and using hands-on virtual labs that require no complex installations. In this labcast, we cover managing and administering Exchange Server 2007 using the Exchange Server 2007 Management Console and Management Shell.

21/11/2008 TechNet Labcast: Exchange Server 2007 (Part 4 of 5): Configuring Unified Messaging and Enabling Remote Client Access (Level 200)

With Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, employees get anywhere access to their e-mail, voice mail, calendars, and contacts from a variety of clients and devices. Join us for part four of the five-part Exchange Server 2007 series. In the labcast series, you receive practical technical information and learn proven techniques by watching demonstrations and using hands-on virtual labs that require no complex installations. In this labcast, we cover configuring Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging and remote client access with Exchange Server 2007.

So it’s time to talk about some of the features in Windows 7 after the bits were given out at the PDC last week.

I haven’t installed Windows 7 to try it out myself as I wasn’t over there in Los Angeles, so I had a look at Matt’s blog for some screenshots.  And I like what I’ve seen.  Especially the Libraries feature.  What a great idea.

The ability to collate all sorts of different types of files in one place appeals to me – setting custom views too.  Brilliant for someone who isn’t too organised with their own filing system on the PC (like me).

Direct Access – No more VPN – Woohoo! – I really hate going through our VPN to corpnet so this will be fantastic for me.  All that’s needed is for the admin to enable it.  Excellent

AppLocker – as an IT Admin I would have LOVED this!  it would have made my life much more easy.

Matt has a much more comprehensive list over on his blog and you can read all about it on the Windows 7 site. 

So I’m now really looking forward to the beta availability internally…

I noticed that Mark has posted some great tips for using Office Communicator which I thought I’d share – and also add a couple of my own…

If you don’t want to be disturbed then set your status so that you do not get any Alerts – or any sounds.  After all you don’t want to be disturbed.

Set your notes so that people know where you are

Then you won’t get the “are you in the office today?” type of message – everyone will know where you are.

Thanks to mark for these tips (and the Live meeting tips too.) Next post on tips for using Round Table perhaps? :-)