It only seems like yesterday when I was sat in a pub with some fellow Search Marketers from Manchester, bemoaning our constant trips to digital conferences in London. It lead to the classic question:

“How hard would it be to run a large digital conference in Manchester?”

Turns out it was actually quite difficult, given that we all had day jobs and were trying to do this in our non-existent spare time  - how the hell Kelvin Newman manages Brighton SEO so well continues to amaze me!.

SAScon 2010

We quickly got the team at Don’t Panic (great name) on board and the first one-day event finally kicked off in 2010 and the feedback was damn encouraging.

Now a two-day event, tomorrow’s SAScon also move to three streams to incorporate even more great speakers on a wider range of topics.

Plus, bumper ticket sales mean:

a:) There’s even more entertainment at the after-party; and

b:) We might be looking for a bigger venue next year!

We’re kicking-off the event with a “Big Brand ” panel on day one and a keynote from Bruce Daisley from Twitter on day two, while other highlights of the event include a book-signing with Kristjan Mar Hauksson, and the infamous Black Hat SEO panel at the end of day one.

Oh yeah…..and then there’s the Thursday night social:

No sooner do I post about the gamification elements in Duolingo’s new language learning platform, than Google roll out a Chrome extension to help you “immerse” yourself in another language.

It’s less of a structured learning tool than Duolingo, but definitely helps you build up your vocabulary, although I personally find it quite challenging jumping when sentences become a mix of two languages.

Here’s a grab of me using it while catching-up on some reading:

This would actually be something quite cool if run through Project Glass.

La Coruna

As part of my University Degree Im had the pleasure of spending a year living in La Coruna, with the aim of improving my Spanish. The full immersion in the langauge obviously helped me become fluent.

However, seventeen years later my Spanish isn’t as good due to lack of practice, even thought I subscribe to publication such as Punto y Coma.

Fortunately I’ve now been accepted onto the BETA test for Duolingo which is a learning and translation platform to help people learn a language, or improve their language skills, while helping to translate online documents.

The video explains it better than I do;

What further peaked my interest in the platform is the use of game mechanics (trophies, level-ups and leaderboard point systems) to encourage you to keep learning.

It’s a fascinating concept and if elements of it sound familiar, that’s because it comes from the same team that brought the world Captchas. You can see Luis von Ahn talk about the projects in one of my favourite TED sessions here:

Currents feels like a more consumer friendly version of Google Reader with a more attractive format lending itself more to tablets than smartphones IMHO.

I’ve just finished creating my library of publications – a mixture of news, tech and some selections from Google Reader, and I have to say, it’s very easy on the eye.

The Week, as seen in Google Currents

There are a few big photos missing from the platform, such as The Times and Wired, but it’s early days and they have subscription fees to contend with.

The bookshop missed out on two purchases since we then went on to download books we’d seen in the shop, so why not put QR code stickers on the books that can be downloaded to a kindle?

links to kindle edition of book.

- Customers can then scan the QR code and download the book to their kindle or smartphone.
- The bookshop can use an affiliate link and then make 10% on a sale they would otherwise have lost.
- It also allows the bookshop to highlight publications that are only available in print editions.

The fact that the bookshop actually puts the QR codes on the books makes the scanning of the books with a phone more socially acceptable…I waited until I was out of the shop before searching for the title since I felt a little guilty.

Have you seen this already being done by an independent bookshop?

Firstly, Facebook is already used by millions to upload photos so Instagram further reinforces this position in a market place already congested with picasa (rapidly becoming Google+), Flickr, picplz and many others.

Secondly, Instagram is a good source of location data and could potentially be a way of boosting Facebook’s poor efforts in this area.

Alternatively, facebook could simply be acquiring a competitor to “mothball” it.

Let me also caveat that this is the first time I used Google + app on my HTC Flyer tablet to cover an event, so some of the items below may not be applicable to desktop coverage.

So…was it better?

Firstly, the format is more long-form, more akin to a blog, than tweeting so you don’t have condense highlights of the event into 140 character messages. Obviously tweeting teaches you the discipline of being concise, but most of the panels I covered just couldn’t be condensed that much. As a result, I probably generated less spam for my followers who could imply ignore a handful of posts as opposed to tens or hundreds of tweets.

The ability to take and quickly insert photos and screen grabs into the post, without worrying about formatting was pretty neat, as you can see in the example above, plus here’s a link to one of these posts. Being able to add video as well would be great but this didn’t seem possible without starting a separate post.

Ok…but did it have limitations?

The biggest barrier was trying to post from an alternative account. I have my own profile, but I was also set-up as a manager of a business account. It isn’t possible to flip between these profiles in the current G+ Android app.

The next thing I noticed was how difficult it was to reference  people in a G+ post since multiple people have the same name. Plus, there are still a lot of people, even at a digital conference, without G+ profiles.

I would have loved the functionality to save draft posts to re-visit later, since I sometimes wanted to start an alternative post of a quick topics, before reverting to my coverage of the event.

The largest and most obvious drawback is the lack of coverage. With the Google+ audience still growing, I would really have got more coverage from twitter to blogging. As a compromise I summarised a full days panels in one blog post.

I’m pretty happy with the G+ app, so I’ll definitely do this again, but there’s clearly more for Google to do to make the system as slick as either twitter or wordpress.

So I’m in Boston looking for a nice eatery, and I obviously use 4sq explorer. I then see “view menu” on a venue listing. Great!

friendly tweet from Frankfurt Airport

After sharing a 4sq check in on twitter I received this tweet in response. It’s probably automated but a nice touch all the same.