Links for 8 July 2009

• VideoLAN – Open Source multimedia and streaming solutions – The only media player you’ll ever need (although you may want others). It loads quickly and plays everything and has just been released in it’s first proper full version
• FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson – The manifesto for making money by giving stuff away. True to form Anderson’s put the book online for free via Scribd
• Thomas Moronic – There’s just something very cohesive and unfussy about the layout of this blog, especially the ordering of the sidebar. When you spend your time reading RSS feeds you miss seeing the content in the context it was (most likely) intended. I’ve followed Thomas’s writings for a while, inherited when I nabbed Pete Ashton’s OPML file for CiB but rediscovered the blog itself when looking for examples of good writers’ blogs to point to
• Socialreporter – Crowds, tribes, teams: Tuttle turns to consulting – Interesting business model this. Tuttle is the name of a weekly social media get-together in London (from which the format for the Birmingham Social Media Cafe was lifted pretty directly) – “Tuttle has been going very well, and has now spawned The Tuttle Team. This is an innovative consulting approach to discover and understand client needs using a process of refinement through three forms”

Problems with Facebook revisited

Back in November I wrote a post saying that, on its own, Facebook is no good for promoting events. Irritatingly I have an example of one of the problems I mentioned.

The next Birmingham Social Media Cafe event is tomorrow, Friday 27 February. There’s a BSMC Facebook group and now would be a good time to send out a reminder of the event to its members. However, if you try to go to that group you see:

We’ve no idea why this has happened, how long it will be unavailabe or whether it’ll come back at all. There certainly hasn’t been any breach of any terms of usage. If the group is deleted permanently there’s really nothing we can do except start over again.

As I said before, Facebook’s a great tool for organising events and spreading info but (and this goes for all 3rd party website apps/services) if you’re in for the long haul then it can be dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. In the case of the BSMC there’s a (new!) mailing list and the website to help get information about the event out.