On a sparkling September day Edinburgh looks its beautiful best but while sun shines on the capital (for today anyway) the international spotlight has shifted westwards for a different kind of cultural excitement as Glasgow prepares for Social Media Week .

Glasgow is the UK host of this huge international event. That’s no mean achievement when you consider the other Social Media Week cities include some of the biggest and most exciting on the planet. In alphabetical order (how else could you do it?) there’s Beirut, Berlin, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Los Angeles, Milan, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo and Vancouver.

Oddly, unless we’ve been looking in the wrong places, old media (rightly interested in Edinburgh’s festivals) hasn’t paid much attention to Social Media Week so far even though the Financial Times is one of the sponsors.

But the FT is in no doubt why they are doing it. In the past year they have noted an 83% increase in social media traffic and 20% of their new subscribers are arriving by mobile.  In other words, the FT has seen the future and it is mobile.

“We’re all just scratching the surface of what will be an explosion of mobile use,” says MB Christie, head of product development for FT.com. “An explosion of mobile means an explosion of social media.”

And why Glasgow? According to the SMW website it’s no easy task choosing the right city – the deciding factor is finding strong City Partners. Or to put it another way, people and organisations with social media expertise. (See Glasgow sponsors and partners and judge for yourself).

Not a problem in the land which invented the telephone, television and fax, those forerunners of social media, as Fiona Hyslop points out in her guest blog for SMW Glasgow. The Scottish Cabinet Secretary of Culture and External Affairs officially launches Social Media Week on Monday 19 September opening a programme which ranges from the Twitter 140 character story book to spreading world peace; from crowd-sourcing cash to rebooting the economy.

Exactly how Scotland and the rest of the world (or indeed, old media too) can benefit from mobile technology depends on imagination and enterprise yet to be unleashed. So we’re very much looking forward to taking part in the conversation during Social Media Week. We’re going to be in great company, we have a few ideas of our own to share – and they already involve both Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Pictures by Andrea McCarthy from a collection taken for Walking Heads audio tours, (top) Glasgow Music Tour and (bottom) Edinburgh Comedy Tour.