Web Wednesday V36.0 - May 5th

Calling all Asian Digerati!

For our third birthday, we have the pleasure of bringing you acclaimed filmaker Siok Siok Tan, who's latest creation is "Twittamentary", a crowd-sourced documentary about how the real-time web is changing social encounters around the world.

Siok (Twitter: @sioksiok) describes herself as "a filmmaker, entrepreneur and a honorary geek with a deep passion for great storytelling in the age of real time web". She is also an internet entrepreneur who has built Niurenku, an online video venture in China focused on sports, music and youth culture. Siok previously worked as an executive producer for Discovery Channel in Asia. The shows she produced have clinched more than a dozen awards and nominations at the Asian TV Awards and the Golden Bell Awards. Siok has also been a visiting lecturer at the Beijing Film Academy, where she directed a documentary about the Beijing Olympics (Boomtown Beijing) with the assistance of her students. Siok holds a Bachelor of Arts degree (Honors) in Comparative Literature from Brown University, USA.

We'll be having other birthday surprises so do come along on Wednesday 5th May at Volar Bar & Club, Basement, 38-44 D'Aguilar Street, Lan Kwai Fong, Central, Hong Kong.

The mixer will kick off at 6:30pm and wind up around 9:30pm, with the interview starting at 7:15pm. We'll be showing extracts of the documentary.

If you're on Facebook, do sign up here so we know how many people are coming. If not, you can sign up on this blog.

As per usual, there's a HK$100 entrance fee, including one complimentary drink. Our lovely assistant, Vivian, will issue receipts if you need one. (For students, you can get in for HK$50 without free booze). Thereafter, all standard drinks will be charged at special happy hour prices.

We will donate 10% of entrance fees to help fund the completion of Twittamentary.

Looking forward to seeing old faces and meeting many more new ones!

Napoleon Biggs
Founder & Host - Web Wednesday
Head of Digital Integration, Fleishman-Hillard Communications Asia

How to manage a social media overload

[This is an extract from a recent article published in Media on 26th March 2010. Read the full article here].

Social network overload? Napoleon Biggs, vice-president and head of digital integration for Asia-Pacific at Fleishman-Hillard, shares his secret on how to deal with more than one online presence at a time.

I'm suffering from social media overload! Maintaining my social media presence has become a burden. Being a person that thrives on social interaction, I never thought that I'd reach this stage in my life.

Let’s start with some history.

In the beginning, there was Facebook. The world of status updates was simple. Facebook even told us how to start the sentence: “Napoleon is …”

Then along came a punky upstart by the odd name of “Twitter”. Its open platform rapidly encouraged people to share links (with URL shorteners, like Bit.ly), upload and comment on photos (with Twitpic), retweet other people's thoughts and star your favourites. All this within the space of 140 characters.

The world of status updates changed overnight. Now everyone and his mother is offering status updates, be it Sina Weibo, Google Buzz, Plaxo Pulse (recently renamed "Stream") or Me2day memos.

Thanks to the creativity of the open source world(s) we currently inhabit, there are quite a few tools out there to manage all these conversations and they are all heading in the same direction.

Many started as tools for managing Twitter conversations, like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Seesmic but have now integrated Facebook as well. Ping.fm allows you to manage your status updates across multiple platforms at once. But, I’m going to run through a tool that I find works very well in an office environment, for managing your work and personal messaging platforms.

It’s called “Digsby”. No it’s not related to the large fluffy dog ‘Digby’, but is almost as faithful to its master’s demands. The software comes in Windows, Mac and Linux versions, and can be downloaded at www.digsby.com.

[Read more on Media.asia]

Emergency relief to Qinghai Earthquake

Following our established tradition, we will donate 10% of the entrance fees at the upcoming Web Wednesday event (6:30pm - 9:30pm, 21st April at Volar) to help Oxfam Hong Kong provide emergency relief to survivors of the recent earthquake in Qinghai, China.

You can also donate separately on the Oxfam HK website (oxfam.org.hk).

Oxfam is catching up with mapping technology to show where they are active as per below. The map was created using MapMaker.

Web Wednesday V35.0 - April 21st

Note: Event postponed to 21st April at Volar, Lan Kwai Fong.

Calling all Asian Digerati!

Given the renewed buzz about ebooks created by the recently launched iPad, I thought it only fitting to invite Greg Sung, the Founder and CEO of aNobii - "the neatest thing for booklovers since paper", to speak at this month's social mixer on Wednesday 21st April at Volar Bar & Club, Basement, 38-44 D'Aguilar Street, Lan Kwai Fong, Central, Hong Kong.

Greg will explain how he has successfully tapped into people's passion for reading to create a community of digital bookworms, who have shared over 19 million titles via personalised bookshelves. We will also discuss how aNobii is using barcodes, iPhones and iPads to make the reading and book ordering experience so much more convenient.

If you're on Facebook, do sign up here so we know how many people are coming

The mixer will kick off at 6:30pm and wind up around 9:30pm, with the interview starting at 7:15pm.

As usual, there's a HK$100 entrance fee (paid at the door) which includes one complimentary drink and access to the whole event. Our lovely assistant, Vivian, will issue receipts if you need one. (For students, you can get in for HK$50 without free booze). Thereafter, all standard drinks will be charged at special happy hour prices.

We will donate 10% of entrance fees to Oxfam Hong Kong.

Looking forward to seeing old faces and meeting many more new ones!

Napoleon Biggs

Founder & Host - Web Wednesday

Head of Digital Integration, Fleishman-Hillard Communications Asia