Martin Belam talks and presentations

My next public talk will be on Sunday April 11th. I'll be appearing on a panel with Sarah Hartley and Iain Hepburn at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, discussing "Journalism in the digital age - trends, tools and technologies". Tickets can be booked now.

I use the currybetdotnet blog as a platform for publishing the talks and presentations that I give at conferences and events, and where possible I have also published presentations I have given internally at The Guardian or the BBC.

In 2009 these tended to focus on the relationship between journalism and the digital sphere. I spoke about 'Linked Data and the future of journalism' at the first London Linked Data meet-up, and also published a series of video clips of me being interviewed about news and information architecture by Ben Veasey.

The topics covered in the interview included Internet and intranet navigation trends, perceptions of IA as a discipline, what makes good information architecture, IA in a news context, changes in the delivery of news, measuring news consumer behaviour online and news branding and 'authoritative information' on the web.

Two major public presentations I gave in 2009 were at the #newsinnovation unconference and at WebCertain's "International Social Media Summit". At the former, I presented The tyranny of chronology. This examined how the news industry's obsession with publishing items in chronological order. This seems to preclude us applying richer metadata, to provide better context and topical overviews of the items in the news.

Photograph of Martin Belam at 'News Innovation' by Adam Tinworth

At the Webcertain, my topic was How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic. My Star Trek themed presentation explored social bookmarking, the micro-blogging conversations on Twitter, and blogging.

At Guardian Hack Days I have given lightning talks on 8 Search APIs for Hack Days and Graceful Hacks - UX, IA and interaction design tips for hack days.

I've so far given presentations at two IA Summits. In 2008 in Miami I presented "IA for tiny stuff: Exploring widgets and gadgets". Later that same year in Amsterdam I presented an overview of site search best practice, drawing examples from around European newspaper websites, which was entitled "Taking the 'Ooh' out of Google: Getting site search right".

Other presentations I have given about search include "Smarter searching: liberating information from the Internet" in 2006, and "How search can help you understand your audience" and "A day in the life of BBCi Search", both from 2003.

Finally, the only presentation on the site with swearing in the title is my 2005 Open Tech talk "Putting a F__k Off Dalek on the BBC Homepage isn't big or clever".