The Social Web Team

You can now hear the latest tales from the basement of Heslington Hall on our official Twitter account.

We’ll use it to keep our followers updated about new and current projects we’re working on, the latest news and information from the team, and our thoughts on web issues and developments.

Support queries and requests for work are tough to answer in 140 characters, so please send those to web-office@york.ac.uk as normal.

You can follow us at @UoYwebteam

You can also see the latest University news on the University's official twitter, @UniofYork, and Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/universityofyork.

Social media and graduation

The University's class of 2011 graduated over three days of ceremonies on campus just over a month ago.

For the first time, we made just a tiny effort to coordinate some social media activity around the event. The media would have us believe that everyone and their dog are using Twitter and such like to document their every move, so a big day like graduation would surely be all over social media. Wouldn't it?

What we did

We actually did very little to encourage or promote the use of social media. We did kick around ideas such as asking Greg Dyke, Chancellor of the University, to ask the ceremony audience to take photos and submit them, but we didn't want to run before we walked! So in the end, we just did the following:

• Posted a few tweets on the University's @uniofyork account announcing the official hashtag, #UoYGraduation
• Posted a message encouraging sharing on Facebook and mentioning the hashtag
• Added the hashtag to our digital signage displays around campus

Did anything happen?

There were 50 or so tweets featuring the hashtag, quite a number of which were retweets and a number of those were from other University accounts (see an archive on the #UoYGraduation TwapperKeeper record). We also kept a look out for @uniofyork mentions and combinations of keywords including york, university, graduation and graduate. Here there were quite a few more graduation-related updates, but still only in the dozens rather than the hundreds.

Intriguingly, there were mentions of lots of photos being online, but very few surfaced publicly so I suspect these all reside in private albums on Facebook. A few photos and a couple of videos have shown up on Flickr and YouTube respectively, but that's all.

Was it worth it?

I think it was worth a try. It was all very last-minute and we really didn't do very much to get the word out, so our expectations weren't particularly high but nor did it take much of our time. What was a bit of a surprise was the relative lack of unprompted activity. For all the media hype, it seems our recent graduates and their families are mostly not keen Twitter-ers.

Graduation on Storify.com

Despite the relatively low volume of activity, I stitched together a Storify.com story of the day which I think is actually quite neat. Check out the University of York Graduation 2011 on Storify to see for yourself.

Can you attend a conference without physically being there? Thoughts on IWMW 2010 as a remote attendee

Dan recently blogged about his experience at IWMW this year, so I thought I'd share my experience of the event as someone who wasn't physically there, but was instead following the action remotely.

Being a conference for web folk, it should come as no surprise that it makes extensive use of technology as a way of amplifying the conference experience. The have been live video streams of the talks as far back as 2007, and "backchannel" discussion on Twitter before most people even knew what Twitter was.

On the first day of the event I fired up the live video stream with the aim of watching the opening session. But then the phone rang, and I missed most of that. And then I got called into a meeting. And then something on the website broke that needed fixing urgently. This was a common theme over the three days of the event - I was able to catch the odd bit of a session here and there, but didn't manage to watch anything all the way through.

In spite of the interruptions, I was dipping into the Twitter stream of posts tagged with #iwmw10 as often as I could, which was giving me a good idea of  the key messages from each of the sessions, and how the physical audience were responding to them. As well as being streamed, videos of the talks have been made available to watch on-demand - now all I need is to find some time to actually watch them.

It's obviously not as good as being there in person - a lot of the benefit of being at a conference comes from the discussions that happen outside of the talks (and usually after a few drinks), and there's that pesky thing called the day job that keeps getting in the way. But in times when not everyone can afford to spend three days out of the office, it's not a bad substitute.