Digital Biographer™

Blog08 Amsterdam: A-List Bloggers line-up expands, early bird discount ends tomorrow. October 7, 2008

Posted by David Petherick in : 2.0, Conferences, NewsPapers, authority, authors, corporate blogs, digital biographer, social media ,

Blog08, Amsterdam, on the 24th October 2008, has added some great bloggers to its line-up, and tomorrow is your last chance to get an early bird discount to save €45 on the entry fee,

Blog08 Logo I’d recommend you get your name on the list today, as the early bird discount, means it’s only €150 to attend, rather than €195. With a mention in Parool.nl, and being all over the Dutch media today, and online in the likes of AD, Metro, and Trouw, the reduced price allocation may be gone very soon. You also have the chance to win a free seat at the Speaker’s Dinner on the night before the conference if you buy before Thursday.

Use this special discount promo code to save €45: digitalbio

This will be the rock’n'roll blogging event of the year in Europe, with a great host in Patrick de Laive, a great venue, and an amazing program that, of course, includes performances from a rock band… and an after-party at Odeon, Amsterdam.

And of course, it takes place on a Friday… leaving you free to enjoy an extra day or two in Amsterdam. Assuming you survive that after-party, of course.

Speakers list…

Pete Cashmore
Pete Cashmore has built his own blog empire with Mashable, a blog about social networks. It ranks 10th in the world.

Hugh MacLeod
Hugh MacLeod from GapingVoid is a cartoonist and professional blogger, known for his ideas about Web 2.0 marketing.

Tim Overdiek
Tim Overdiek is Deputy Editor-in-Chief at NOS News (Dutch national public broadcasting) and an avid promoter of blogging.

Scott Rafer
Scott is a successful internet entrepreneur. He currently is the CEO of Lookery and previously of MyBlogLog.

Gabe McIntyre
Gabe McIntyre (aka GabeMac) is a pro Vlogger in Europe causing disruption with his videos. Currently host of Mobuzz.TV, he is a Bad Mother Vlogger…

Clo Willaerts
Clo Willaerts combines her job at Sanoma Magazines Belgium with blogging, nurturing her social networks and organising Brussels Girl Geek Dinners.

Nalden
Nalden is an influential music and lifestyle blogger who managed to get a large following on the spectacularly designed nalden.net.

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten
Boris is a serial entrepreneur. His most recent project is the successful Web 2.0 blog The Next Web.

Paul Bradshaw
Paul is the man behind the popular Online Journalism Blog and senior lecturer at Birmingham City University.

Piet Bakker
Piet Bakker is a professor at the Hogeschool Utrecht and a longtime blogger on free daily newspapers.

>> See you there.

Hot diggidy, here’s Dipity! Great free interactive timeline toolkit. August 20, 2008

Posted by David Petherick in : 2.0, NewsPapers, authors, blonging, digital biographer, microblogging, share, social media, streams ,

Sometimes, a name escapes you. This name escaped me when I was referring to an online tool that let you create your own private or public timeline of data, images, or references. Digiddy? Diggedy? Dittley? Bo Diddley? It just did not come to the front of my mind.

The name I was looking for was “Dipity“. Below, you can see how the increasing online-savvy LiverPool Post has made a timeline of 20.08.2008 to celebrate Liverpool’s year as City of Culture.

The service from Dipity is a great way to share images, text and video, and place them into a contextual container which automatically assumes an interactive timeline format. It’s an excellent way to tell a story about an event in a linear patten, but with non-linear input from amny different sources or individual contributors, and it’s worth visiting the site to see some examples of how Dipity is being used.

I’m working on some projects that involve usind Dipity and some of its associated ‘mashup tools‘ to illustrate an individual’s biography and ‘lifestream’ as outlined at British Blogcasting Corporation - and this is, of course, almost made for anything you’d want to call a ‘digital biography‘!

Digital Biographer cited in The Times: “vanguard of a social revolution” July 31, 2007

Posted by David Petherick in : NewsPapers, digital biographer, mainstream media, online identity, social media ,

I always fancied myself as a revolutionary… and now ‘The Times’ has made reference to me as the “digital biographer” in an article entitled:

Log on and rediscover the generation gap
Facebook and MySpace are in the vanguard of a social revolution.

The article outlines ‘a vast shift taking place in how a younger generation is defining its social life and privacy‘ and gives a glimpse into the workings on online social networks for those who may find the erms superpoking, wall-posting and hikkuping quite alien.

Although I do appreciate mention in The Times, I had to send them a note to clarify that my prices start from £369, for a profile makeover here at Ecademy - a fact that was perhaps a little more clearly outlined in a BBC interview earlier this month: “Meet the digital biographer“

As a no longer strictly youthful 43, I can imagine that I might want some or all of my youthful scribblings and photographs, so important to my self-image and my peers perhaps 20-25 years ago, to not be accessible to my peers now. Luckily for me (and probably the world at large) there was nowhere to upload that material until I was in my thirties. (I only got a PC in 1985 and email address in 1987)

However, something the article set me thinking about is that perhaps there is a future business model for MySpace, Facebook etcetera in simply allowing people to airbrush their history when they wish to? A “digital eraser” might cost you an ‘administration fee’ perhaps, and a total ‘whitewash’ will involve you visiting several sites, or having an agent act to remove your footprint across different networks. For a more considerable fee, you might pay to have your records sanitised rather than erased, so that you seem like an all round clean living model of perfection to prospective employers / partners / insurance companies / credit agencies?

As a pointer to this trend, there are sites that have aggregated such content and can pinpoint your membership of social networks, and act as ‘reputation lookup’ services such as Rapleaf…

Full article at The Times Online: Log on and rediscover the generation gap

You’re a Nobody unless your name Googles well - Wall Street Journal May 9, 2007

Posted by David Petherick in : NewsPapers, digital biographer, ecademy, googlicious, online identity, social media ,

It’s official - well, it is if you rate the Wall Street Journal’s front page as authoritative - if your name doesn’t Google well, you can have problems with your credibility - and not just with prospective employers.

You’re a Nobody Unless your Name Googles Well published on the 8th of May 2007, cites the example of Abigail Garvey, who, when she adopted the married name of Wilson, began to be questioned on publications she listed on her CV (résumé) because they weren’t finding the publications in online searches.

In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves — or their offspring — to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites’ member lookup functions. But, as more people flood the Web, that’s becoming an especially tall order for those with common names. Type “John Smith” into Google’s search engine and it estimates it has 158 million results. (See search results.)

Ask.com estimates about 7% of all searches are for a person’s name, and more than 80% of executive recruiters said they routinely use search engines to learn more about candidates, according to a recent survey by ExecuNet. ExecuNet published “Growing Number Of Job Searches Disrupted By Digital Dirt” in June of 2006, which found that “35% (of executive recruiters) have eliminated a candidate from consideration based on the information uncovered online - up significantly from 26% just one year ago.

So, aside from naming your children carefully after a Google search, and including your full name in all online postings, how can you reach the top of Google?

The answer is actually very simple: Join Ecademy: - Just create an online profile at Ecademy, and within as short a timescale as a few weeks, by following simple techniques to add structured information to your profile, and adding blogs and marketplace content relevant to your expertise within Ecademy, Google will rank your name, link to your web content and web sites. The cost is minimal - £10 ($20) a month lets you raise your visibility, as well as become part of a strong business network that’s been growing quietly and organically since 1998, when social media really was not on anyone’s radar.