It’s almost the end of a trip that covered London, Oslo, Grimstad (both in Norway) and back to Providence, RI, where I am as I write this post.  A lot happened on this trip, which I could not really get down to write about, but as my book is nearing being sent to print, much final feedback and insights for the next book, emerged.

But here’s the Web Journal part of the post – which I write as much for myself as my readers – because there is value in recording what attracts attention.

For one thing, I just got done listening to the entire webcast recording of a Semphonic broadcast on Social CRM and Data Warehousing – the sound isn’t great, but as usual, the content is fantastic.  Pretty much anything Gary Angel touches is gold, from an analytics standpoint and I’m probably one of his most ardent fans.  I’m still trying to make up my mind about xChange this September, haven’t been there for a few years, but given that Gary has contributed material that makes up much of the substance of  chapter 7 and 8, and fundamentally articulates some of the most important aspects of my book.

I feel it may be time for me to reenter the Web Analytics community (not that I ever truly left), even as much as eMetrics, this year, is going to take place in October in New York, and it would be strange if I didn’t try to attend it, perhaps speak at it (though it may be too late for that).  Be as it may, it appears as if I should attempt to be there, being my book will be out as well.

I didn’t read as much on this trip as I normally do.

An impromtu interview took place at Heathrow Airport Friday after arriving from Norway and waiting for my flight back to Boston. A quick interview with Marshall Sponder, @webmetricsguru at LHR T3 was conducted by @Jag who runs Communities for Antivirus maker AVG.

That reminds me, I think, ongoing, I’m going to think about what the main themes of Social Media Analytics are, so when I’m asked, I’ll be able to rattle them off, more as a press clip, and save the remaining minutes to really focus in on some impromptu points to make.  Well, we all live and learn.

A thought a few posts were worth noting that I read recently such as

Booming Social Media Trends to Consider

How Videos go Viral - Actually, I wrote part of a chapter on this in my book and used Sysomos MAP, to boot to track it. In my case, I took the example of the Keyboard Cat, but that part ended up being deleted due to space concerns. I guess what survived in the manuscript is what really needed to be in the book and the other stuff, got dropped out.

Financing Start-ups by Friends and Family by AVC – I have a few friends who have done this successfully and have made a few tiny investments myself into others start-ups, when I liked the concept and thought it was worthwhile.

Gary Vaynerchuk, Guy Kawasaki, Avinash Kaushik and Bill Taylor Walk Into A Bar… and it sounds like a good conference.  Avinash, btw, wrote the forward to my book.  Usually when Avinash Kaushik attends a conference, it’s worth attending.

 

So, what where the highlights of this Europe trip?   Well, it’s easy to point out the main ones:

1. Dinner at Giles Palmer’s house (founder of Brandwatch) in Brighton, UK on Saturday night May 21st – Brighton was a trip, and it’s always enjoyable to attend.
2. The Web Science Trust Event I attended (and wrote about in my last post) a week ago.
3. Meeting Mark Rogers of MarketSentinal for dinner the same day.
4. Meeting Danny Dearlove of Facecount for coffee last week (Famecount has a case study in the book).
5. Dinner in Oslo on Tuesday night (it stayed light till after midnight).
6. Flying to Grimstad, Norway and spending 2 days working with the Integrasco team, a fantastic company.   I saw first hand what they were doing and how Integrasco prepares groundbreaking reports for their mostly handset clients – a real revelation – this is Social Media Analytics, from an Analytst’s perspective, done right.   So often, it’s done wrong, that when you see someone actually who knows how to build and deliver solutions, you want to scream .. Wow!
7. Dinner at one of the founder’s house it the outskirts of Grimstad Thursday night …. fish was for dinner.   An interesting evening.
8. Traveling back to the States via Grimstad, Copenhagen, Heathrow and then Boston – 20 hours of travel.
9. Finally, staying in Jimi Hendrix’s room last Monday night in London, the very first place he stayed when he got off the plane from New York, in 1966… read about it in my last post.
10. Having lunch a contact at the British COI (Center of Information) – got a pretty good sense of where things are going with the Brits.
11. Almost running into David Barrowcliff  @dbarrowcliff . Darn, he passed me on the street, didn’t even know I was in London. Ha, small world.
    

There’s more I could write about, but I’ll stop here … want to enjoy what’s  left of Memorial Day.

Well, I thought that title would get some attention, but actually both are  tangentially  related.   Monday I was at the Web Science Trust event at the Royal Society in London (I’m writing this post from my hotel in Oslo, Norway, btw).    Here’s a link to a video provided by the Web Science Trust including many of the speakers from Monday’s event at the Royal Society.   As it so happened, I was caught in the footage though the Web Science Trust has not made it possible to embed the video, so I’m just providing an image  below, though you can see the movie by clicking on the link at the beginning of this paragraph.:

Yesterday’s event was pretty well attended and excellent – plus the video at the link above was very well produced, esp as it was produced overnight (usually, these types of videos take weeks before they are ready).  I am intrigued by the term “Web Science” which, as used by the Web Science Trust, is the study of the changes occurring on the Web and how we can make the Web better; Web Science includes scaling the Web, Net-Neutrality, Privacy, W3C Protocols for Web Browsers and HTML5, as well as many other things.  In fact, there are a few programs on Web Science being taught in the United States , and internationally, and I would like to get involved, esp though my book.

On this trip to London I happened (quite by accident – as if anything happens by accident) to stay at the hotel (Hype Park Hotel) that Jimi Hendrix lived for four months when he first arrived in London in 1966. I’m not a die hard Hendrix fan (though I know a few people who are) and decided to read about Hendrix and see if his room, #51 was available to stay in.   As it turns out, it was, on Monday night (my last night in London on this trip).  So I decided to stay in room #51.  Besides, it’s Jimi Marshall Hendrix whose room I was sleeping in Monday night – figured it would add to the experience, and it did.

I guess Jimi Hendrix stayed in other rooms such as 86 (though the front desk told me only about room 51 – not the same as “area 51″).

I was pretty young when Hendrix died, and was only vaguely aware of him in the early 70′s.   Now, I’m more interested in the story, now that I stayed in his original room, at a time when he was an unknown, just at the verge of the  meteoric rise of his career.   And, I took a video of room 51; here it is, below:

Well, leaving for Grimstad in a few hours where I’ll spend a few days before heading back to the United States.

I’m at the Royal Society in London this morning as an invited guest of The Web Science Trust for a all day symposium on Profiting from The New Web.

Tim Berners-Lee spoke this morning (then dashed out, did not have a chance to speak with him, but I am ok with that – next time, we’ll speak) about the study of Web Science, and the growth of the Internet (that he helped invent) has grown so pervasive that we need to stand back about the implications of it’s growth and governance.

In particular, when Tim Berners-Lee spoke about privacy and the belief of the W3C, that data should not be locked down, but the use of open data needs to be contextual, I saw a new industry materializing in my mind, before me. While Tim posed questions, concerns and problems of the proper use of data I saw solutions, however imperfect they may initially turn out to be.

For example, technology I mention in my book, semantic analysis, highly tuned machine learning topic based categorization rules is capable, today, is possible, that can determine whether a piece of information picked off the web can be used, and for what.

As far as the panel on the intelligent use of open data, I feel what the Brits are debating about we, in the United States, and particularly in New York, have a head start on (about 18 months, if I had to guess).

Also, the use of the term “WebScience” is very interesting to me, and the foundation of this conference today. I feel what Tim Berners-Lee is really saying is we need to formally study the effects of the growth of the Internet, to step back and think, perhaps as a social scientist, estimate and map the changes with an eye on implications of the growth.

I will post more about the conference today, and also follow tweets at #newweb.