The Future of Technology in Eduction is the kinda event I really enjoy going to – not social media for social media’s sake, but the application of what excites us all to a profoundly important topic.
I enjoyed the day and there were vibrant twitter backchannel conversations.
I’ve embedded below the slidecast (slides plus audio) as a nice lofi alternative to the videos, which are also good and enjoyable.
I’ve also included James Clay’s talk, which was the stand out talk of the day for me: hopeful, fun, inspiring.
(Also definitely worth checking out is Peter Robinson from Oxford University’s comprehensive account of setting up iTunesU, which was very interesting too.)
My thanks to Tim Bush and Frank Steiner from ULCC for inviting and looking after me on the day: they put on an event to be proud of.
Will McInnes wrote this on 12.10.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Events & conferences, Gaming, Interesting, Social media, Social networks, Virtual worlds, Web technology, Widgets box
I’ve just been catching up on my pre-Christmas backlog of reading and listening matter and discovered this little gem on the last Penny Arcade podcast.
Apparently, before the launch of Tomb Raider Underworld, Eidos’ PR company decided to contact all UK press and ask them to not publish a review for three days after its launch if they intend to give it a score of less than 8/10 in an attempt to bump the game’s MetaCritic scores. Of course, it wasn’t long before word spread about — Gamespot UK’s Guy Cocker was the first to innocuously Twitter about it.
What’s more amusing is their obscure effort to cover it up. Or, rather, not. When contacted videogaming247, their PR company responded
“We’re trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos … we’re trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that’s handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don’t put people off buying the game, basically.”
Uh. So that’s cool then. Obviously this intervention didn’t stop any reviews going ahead. Their PR firm’s director later added in an official response
“Barrington Harvey has been working hard to ensure the launch scores of Tomb Raider Underworld are in line with our internal review predictions over the launch weekend – but to suggest that we can in some way “silence” reviews of the game is slightly overstating our influence.”
Cool. So that’s all right then.
Trevor May wrote this on 06.01.09 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Buzz monitoring, Gaming, Mistakes box
As a kind of precursor to the Develop games conference in Brighton in a couple of weeks time, The Guardian Gamesblog’s Aleks Krotoski and Keith Stuart are hosting a games-themed pub quiz at the Caroline of Brunswick, just down the road from here (and well within stumbling home distance too, which is always good).
I’m certain there are enough games geeks here to take on the already mighty (and slightly intimidating) list of attendees from Black Rock Interactive, Linden Lab, NCSoft, Zoe Mode, GamesIndustry.biz, Eurogamer, Pocket Gamer and Future Publishing.
More details over at the Gamesblog.
Bring it!
Trevor May wrote this on 16.07.08 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Brighton, Gaming, Industry news, Virtual worlds box
