What was TEDxTuttle?

On the way back to Oxford on Friday we stopped in at Xander’s parents’ house, where I found myself trying to explain what TEDxTuttle was. “It’s a combination of TED and Tuttle”, I said. “Oh.” On Saturday I ran into Wes and Dave (fellow Torchboxers) at Greens Café. “So what exactly was this TEDxTuttle thing?”, they said. I think it’s time for an explanation that makes sense to you (and not just the people who were there).

TED

TED is a conference where massively successful people give 18-minute talks and everyone schmoozes. It costs thousands to attend. People tend to either give inspiring talks on success and creativity, or demonstrate some futuristic technology.

The most important thing about TED is that all the talks are filmed, and the videos are available online for free. It’s an amazing resource which you should definitely check out. It beats watching reruns of Dragon’s Den on iPlayer.

Tuttle

Tuttle is a ‘loose association of people’ with an interest in social media. The Tuttle Club meets every Friday morning at the ICA (10-12 in the bar). Anyone can turn up. There are usually between 50 and 100 people there, most of whom are wonderfully interesting. There’s no structure (Lloyd welcomes people at 11, but that’s it). People talk.

The most important thing about Tuttle is the connections that are made there, all under the watchful eye of the Tuttle’s ukulele-playing curator, Lloyd Davis. All the interesting online stuff I’ve done in the last year has been somehow connected to Tuttle.

TEDxTuttle

TED is huge. They run international spin-off conferences, and have speakers like Al Gore and Bill Clinton. This year they launched TEDx, which gives any group the opportunity to organise their own TED event. There are some ground rules, and the events are filmed and submitted to TED.

So TEDxTuttle was 90 people (some Tuttlers, some not) in a conference centre at Monument. We watched some TED videos, we listened to some speakers, we drank coffee and chatted. I gave a talk on Babble + Context = Conversation, including live performances of a few of the Tweet Suite movements, and sang the Twitter song.

Photos, blogs etc.

Being a social media event, there was plenty of coverage online, both live and afterwards. Here are a few highlights:

• Adam Tinworth was liveblogging. He covered Maggie Philbin on Tomorrow’s World, Rachel Armstrong on The Future of Buildings, Lloyd Davis on Tales of Tuttle, me on Twitter(ish) and Mat Morrison on Measuring Social Media.
• Benjamin Ellis took some great photos of TEDxTuttle (a couple of which I’ve used on this post under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)
• Andy Roberts posted a quick blog about Rachel Armstrong’s talk on ‘living architecture’ (including a video of Rachel from a previous event explaining her work with protocells).
• Jennifer Jones blogged about TEDxTuttle from an outsider’s perspective.
• Alan Patrick (who organised the event) wrote up his thoughts about the TEDxTuttle event and all the talks.

Tagged with: photos, speaking, TED, Tuttle, tweetsuite, twitter song

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