The hall at the Banqueting House

So, then, to the sumptuous surroundings of the Banqueting House in Whitehall for the Walpole‘s Awards for  Luxury.

It was a well-attended and extremely well-orchestrated event and the awards (of which there were seven, plus a special award for Dame Vivien Westwood whose, er, distinctive speech I really hope to be able to track down on YouTube and treasure forever!).

I was really pleased to see Bremont Watches get an award  (I’m a fan of their ALTI-Z, cream face) and Net A Porter picked up a deserved award for best online luxury site.

In all, a fun evening and good to catch up with so many people.

I’m pleased to be able to announce the second Innovation Forum event, being organised by Nico Macdonald with some small input from me. Nico and I are collaborating on a Future Media Summit and these events support our research, develop debate and the roster of issues we’ll cover as well as giving us some insights into formats that can work over and above the traditional lots-of-people-in-a-hall-with-powerpoint paradigm (that’s frankly exhausting just to contemplate!).

Nico says:

The recent debate around the call for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct highlighted the growing importance of the online ‘political commons’. Historically the political commons has been shaped by political parties, civic organisations, and news and current affairs media. Increasingly people cleave to the latter for engagement, but its ability to facilitate a political commons — from the BBC’s ‘Have Your Say’ to the Guardian’s Comment is Free — is not yet proven. Is this a challenge of business models or technical constraints? Lack of understanding of users or failure to design the right kind of spaces? Or the product of broader social phenomena we have yet to understand? We are taking the debate offline — and invite you to come and contribute.

The Guardian are kindly hosting the Forum at their newsroom so I’m looking forward to that. There’s a £15 charge to cover wine etc afterwards, but I do have 3 tickets available as freebies for the needy/budget-less: give me a good reason for a freebie by email!

Once we have people registered then we’ll be soliciting questions in advance (Question Time stylee) so that we can ensure that the debate is focused, sharp and covers the role that the media can play in facilitating online debate – rather than having a general ‘jam’ about blogging and UGC (zzzzz).

Really interesting ‘Innovation Reading Circle’ event last night, arranged by Nico MacDonald and kindly hosted at LBi by Lorenzo Wood.

The evening had an interesting ‘twist’ in that the author, Professor David Edgerton, joined us and gave not only an intro to the book, its genesis and the academic context but then participated in the conversations and addressed questions at the end. Part “interesting chat”, part “book club” and part “seminar”, it was a really interesting evening.

Nico will be writing a meta-review of the evening (to which I’ll be contributing my notes, so no review here for the moment!) – link to follow shortly.

One of the downsides of being Editor is being nagged for freebie tickets to our conference. One of the upsides, of course, is being able to say “yes”… I have 5 free passes to the conference – see below for details.

There is no need to send in your children’s birth certificates, nor even the deeds to your homes. Simply register to receive the newsletter and then email ‘editor@internetretailing.net‘ with the title “gimme a free pass”.

You will then be entered into a Digital Hat, shaken vigorously by our publisher and five lucky readers will be informed that they, yes they, will be attending Internet Retailing 2006, our inaugural conference.

I’m informed that the conference is nearly sold out and so these tickets don’t carry a guarantee of a chair, but I’m sure that we’ll be in full compliance with Fire Regs and Health and Safety laws.

This also means that people can stop mailing me with sob stories, offers of gifts, threats of revealing secrets and even offers of exclusive stories: just mail ‘editor@internetretailing.net’ as above and the magic cyberpixies will do the rest.

CLOSING DATE: midnight on 19 September, 2006.

Notes:
1) no-spamming guarantee. You’ll get signed up to the newsletter if not already a subscriber: please say in your email if you don’t want to be registered.
2) Terms and conditions should probably apply, but other than privacy they don’t. Our publisher-owner-lord&master’s decision is final, and no warranties are made nor implied as to the existence of either a “Digital Hat” nor “magic cyberpixies”.

This looks interesting – pity I can’t be there on 3 November.

Google’s stated mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The presentation will give a tour of some of the ways Google tries to fulfill that mission with emphasis on the legal issues that arise.