IWMW Event 2011: Responding to change

The IWMW Institutional Web Management Workshop is being held at the University of Reading this year and i've finally managed to make it to one! It's currently day two and the Embedding Web 2.0 plenary has just finished. The event seems well attended and it's given me a great opportunity to finally meet some of the people I have only spoken to via Twitter!

The sessions yesterday were very good, I managed to get myself into the Parallel Session entitled 'Content silos and how to overcome them'. This was all based around how best to improve working across all faculties and departments. The key points that came out of it were that there needs to be better ways of sharing content so, clear tagging, good metadata, well structured site and workflows. Luckily we seem to be putting all of those in but it was interesting to hear feedback from other universities who aren't! Some of the people I spoke to yesterday had a huge number of sites, project sites and faculty content all in different CMS's and running different designs which sounds like a complete nightmare!

The key points from yesterdays sessions were broken into a number of heading but the two that stuck in my mind are:

Editorial

• You need to have strong editorial guidelines
• Bear in mind the audience, channel and media relevance
• Go in heavy on the metadata & tagging

Governance

• Clear ownership of content is needed
• Workflow rules should be in place
• Regular content audits are essential
• Carry out regular survey & user feedback sessions
• Taxonomy

A good starting point for breaking down the silo mentality apparently!

So, day two is well under way and it's almost time for the Online Privacy talk. If you wanted to get an idea of what is happening during the day you can follow the hashtag #iwmw11 or check out the website:

Institutional Web Management Workshop 2011:  Responding to Change

Internet World 2011

It's that time again, Internet World is hitting London at Olympia and i'll be attending today. I'll be looking to update the blog during the proceedings with anything that looks of interest! So a short posting to start with saying that i'm not my way... the wonders of blogging via a netbook connected to my mobile which is acting as my wifi hotspot. I love technology sometimes! More later...

The Future of the Prospectus

I had a day out in London on Tuesday to attend the Future of the Prospectus conference at the Magic Circle HQ. Really interesting event covering digital, print and mobile ideas about where the prospectus is headed.

The programme was:

• Luke Mckend from Google
• The Heist prospectus winner discussion
• The Printer's Forum
• TVU - the first iPhone prospectus
• Sean Montgomery - Fonemedia
• University of Surrey - in-house personalised prospectus
• Tracy Playle - Picklejar communications

Bit of a mixed bag, all the speakers were interesting but it was the digital side that was of more interesting to me. (I have a long history of printers in the family so I can relate but am really glad I didn't go down that route!)

So first up was Google, nothing new here as i've seen them at most conferences, only thing that peaked my interest was a mention of YouTube EDU, something to keep any eye on, similar to iTunes U.

Heist Prospectus winners all chatted about their award winning publications.

The printers wanted to stress that they are there to help look at how to save us all money and that we should look at them as an extension of our teams.

TVU showed off their iPhone App, bit of a trend to the day that the iPhone is the way forward. Interesting that Android didn't get too much of a mention despite being on a seriously fast growth curve.

Sean from Fonemedia demonstrated Bluetooth and SMS functionality (both of which we have already). Also, he showed off the idea of using QRCodes on printed materials.

University of Surrey were very interesting, a fully personalised prospectus, printed, finished and sent in-house! Genius idea if you can do it and they looked to be managing a massive process very well!

And finally, Tracy from Picklejar Communications who had some interesting observations on social and digital media. Augmented Reality was mentioned, if you haven't seen it check out the Lego video on YouTube. This could be a strong development area but again comes down to needing a smartphone or a desktop machine.

All in all, some interesting ideas around the development of digital publications, social media integration and printing options. And the conclusion draw at the end of the day?

Even with the best digital offerings we all still like a bit of printed material!