• storm. flashes of lightning. claps of thunder bouncing around the downs. pretty cool view from my study #workingfromhome #sickfamily #lewes #
• Ouch – imagine having completed on your house purchase yesterday… http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/mar/24/stampduty-firsttimebuyers #
• I'm at Newcastle Railway Station (Neville Street, Newcastle Upon Tyne). http://4sq.com/6GpgEA #
• I'm at Sage (UK) Ltd. http://4sq.com/c5PwTD #
• Facebook tightens its grip on the mighty Google – Times Online : http://bit.ly/beh5TH #

Plesk can be handy if you want to get a simple hosting situation up and running but is an absolute nightmare if you want to get into any nitty gritty on the server that might require some custom configuration. So how do you go about installing Symfony on a server running Plesk? As it is one of the common frameworks that we frequently need to be installing, I thought it worthwhile publishing my notes on the steps we need to take:

To allow deployment via rsync from Symfony – in Plesk, enable user to access via SSH by checking: “Shell access to server with FTP user’s credentials (/bin/sh)”

http://tinyurl.com/yfnsxvn

John who works next to me said WTF… who on earth thinks this optimizes todays graphic designer, he’s like a 1980’s throw back! He is actually just like an Account manager!

Thanks to the wonderful Valerie Casey of the Designers Accord for showcasing this fab infographic at her SXSW keynote.  The graphic featured in the New York Times earlier this month.

I'm sure the truth is a little more complicated, but all the same this graphic really makes a powerful case...

“Tesco opens new off licence” ; )

Thanks to the wonderful Valerie Casey of the Designers Accord for showcasing this wonderful infographic at her SXSW keynote.  The graphic featured in the New York Times earlier this month.

I'm sure the truth is a little more complicated, but all the same this graphic really makes a powerful case...

I'm now back from my trip to Austin and pleased to say that the panel session went just great!  Big thanks of course to my co-panelist Rand Schulman and our moderator Joanna Burton.

I want to blog about it in a bit more detail, but for now I thought I'd just collect together the online resources that support the panel.  It's pretty amazing just how much content has been generated around a single panel - perhaps an indication of how interesting people found the subject.

So, vaguely in date order we have:

1) Original proposal on SXSW Panelpicker

This is the original idea for a panel which was commented and voted on.  Looking back, the list of questions answered looks fascinating (What are agencies for?, What kind of marketing do customers really want?...).  Shame we didn't really get to all of these in the final panel.

2) Slide deck on Slideshare

The proposal then got kicked around into this final presentation - the session itself was formal presentation followed by Q&A.

3) Twitter comments on #toomuchmath

Every panel at SXSW had a pre-set Twitter hashtag, although some panels (including some keynotes) didn't do a great job of publicising the tags before the session. Luckily I caught a session with Cliff Atkinson reading from his book The Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media earlier in the week, so borrowed the idea from him of putting our hashtag and Twitter name on every slide. 

I'm sure that this helped generate a ton of comments on Twitter - mostly favourable, although being English I have fixated on the negative ones :-)

It also definitely helped that we had a nice short hashtag.  This wasn't an accident - Rand's PR agency Launchsquad liaised with SXSW to get this sorted out, so good attention to detail Emilie Cole!

Apparently searches on Google for 'toomuchmath' during the panel were bringing up live results off Twitter - hats off to Google for this, as the tag wasn't showing any traffic before 9.30am on Tuesday.  I guess that's what realtime search is all about :-)

4) Live blog

Daniel Slaughter did a pretty amazing job of writing his notes up into a live blog.  My takeout from this is that if I used more slides with really simple bullets on them and maybe talked a bit slower, people might do better at taking notes.  Oh well...

5) Lunch.com reviews / ratings

Lunch.com launched a community feature at SXSW - and to show how it worked, they put together a SXSW Community where every panel (and party!) could be reviewed and rated.  I think this is a great idea - and in our case it generated a fantastically detailed review by Derek Overbey which I really appreciate.  We're currently rated at a +2.6, dragged down by a single negative vote from Robert Scoble - was he even at the panel?

6) Interview on WebProNews

Finally here's the unedited stream of a TV interview I did before the panel - where I'm talking off the cuff about some of the ideas we dealt with in our panel.

Will be interesting to see the edited version which I'm promised will be released soon.

Phew - so still to come is the podcast, possibly - I think that SXSW were recording the session.  Anything I've missed?

Here's a heat map of my week at SXSW based on Four Square data mapped to Where Do You Go.  The outliers on the map are mostly trips out to culturally significant TexMex restaurants like Guero's and Chuy's... some are a little mystifying (did I really make it up as far as 20th Street???)

eBay was donating $0.25 to charity for every FourSquare login during SXSW - I "raised" over $10 myself during the week, so this must have been a significant donation taken across all 14,000 attendees.

• Iconic building. Good stuff on. Here for Portico Quartet tonight. (@ De La Warr Pavilion) http://4sq.com/dnf5ZB #
• Emerging from a pile of leaves… blinking. #
• Today I feel like a hedgehog, waking from a long Winter slumber. #

I’m now back from my trip to Austin and pleased to say that the panel session went just great!  Big thanks of course to my co-panelist Rand Schulman and our moderator Joanna Burton.

I want to blog about it in a bit more detail, but for now I thought I’d just collect together the online resources that support the panel.  It’s pretty amazing just how much content has been generated around a single panel – perhaps an indication of how interesting people found the subject.

So, vaguely in date order we have:

1) Original proposal on SXSW Panelpicker

This is the original idea for a panel which was commented and voted on.  Looking back, the list of questions answered looks fascinating (What are agencies for?, What kind of marketing do customers really want?…).  Shame we didn’t really get to all of these in the final panel.

2) Slide deck on Slideshare

The proposal then got kicked around into this final presentation – the session itself was formal presentation followed by Q&A.

3) Twitter comments on #toomuchmath

Every panel at SXSW had a pre-set Twitter hashtag, although some panels (including some keynotes) didn’t do a great job of publicising the tags before the session. Luckily I caught a session with Cliff Atkinson reading from his book The Backchannel: How Audiences are Using Twitter and Social Media earlier in the week, so borrowed the idea from him of putting our hashtag and Twitter name on every slide. 

I’m sure that this helped generate a ton of comments on Twitter – mostly favourable, although being English I have fixated on the negative ones :-)

It also definitely helped that we had a nice short hashtag.  This wasn’t an accident – Rand’s PR agency Launchsquad liaised with SXSW to get this sorted out, so good attention to detail Emilie Cole!

Apparently searches on Google for ‘toomuchmath’ during the panel were bringing up live results off Twitter – hats off to Google for this, as the tag wasn’t showing any traffic before 9.30am on Tuesday.  I guess that’s what realtime search is all about :-)

4) Live blog

Daniel Slaughter did a pretty amazing job of writing his notes up into a live blog.  My takeout from this is that if I used more slides with really simple bullets on them and maybe talked a bit slower, people might do better at taking notes.  Oh well…

5) Lunch.com reviews / ratings

Lunch.com launched a community feature at SXSW – and to show how it worked, they put together a SXSW Community where every panel (and party!) could be reviewed and rated.  I think this is a great idea – and in our case it generated a fantastically detailed review by Derek Overbey which I really appreciate.  We’re currently rated at a +2.6, dragged down by a single negative vote from Robert Scoble – was he even at the panel?

6) Interview on WebProNews

Finally here’s the unedited stream of a TV interview I did before the panel – where I’m talking off the cuff about some of the ideas we dealt with in our panel.

Will be interesting to see the edited version which I’m promised will be released soon.

Phew – so still to come is the podcast, possibly – I think that SXSW were recording the session.  Anything I’ve missed?