Category Archive

Suw & Leisa and I are putting together a series of events this summer under the banner of Fruitful Seminars - Suw was the bravest and is doing hers on Friday 27th and now I’m ready to come out with my offering.

UPDATE: Due to a little misunderstanding the seminar will take place one week later, on Weds 16th July, same time, same place, just a different day.

Here’s the blurb:

Social Media and Online Social Networking are transforming our business and personal lives. Few people can have escaped entirely from some exposure to the power and benefits of this revolution in how we communicate and collaborate. But even fewer can claim mastery over the tools and techniques or fully understand how to apply them to achieve specific business goals. Anyway, how on earth can you find the time? What about your “real work”?

In this masterclass you’ll get to work with Lloyd Davis, one of London’s most popular and experienced social media experts. Lloyd will help you understand what social media’s really all about and how to build rich and productive online relationships using simple tools. You will also gain some practical experience of creating some social media and get help with applying what you’ve learned to your personal business context.

The day is designed for marketing and communications professionals who want to understand better just how social media and online social networking can work for them. With no more than 9 participants, you’ll be assured of individual attention. Most participants will already have some experience of at least one aspect of social media, but will want to become more comfortable and confident with a wider range of tools. You should bring along an example of a business issue that you’d like help with.

We’re deliberately keeping these small so that they’re good value and participants can get to learn from each other as well as from me.

You all know someone who will benefit from spending a day in One Alfred Place with me - so kindly escort them (and their credit card) to the button above which will convey them, by means of the magical hypertext transfer protocol, to the booking page.

Photo by Ewan McIntosh

Ugh I’ve had a kind of emotional hangover since about lunchtime yesterday. I feel rotten about getting stuck in a cynical snarky frame of mind. To blame twitter would be like blaming my exercise books for having blank sheets at the back that were perfect for writing notes to pass in class. To blame anyone at NESTA would be like blaming Mr Liberal for not being able to control his pupils. And to blame any of my fellow participants would be saying “they made me do it, sir”. Oh bugger, now I’ve got the Grange Hill theme running round in my head.

But anyway that’s what I did yesterday, I regressed into can’t-be-bothered schoolboy (the one who ended up with average O-levels and piss-poor A-levels), a role I reprised at university as smart-arse know-it-all (who had to pull far too many all-nighters to get a 2:1). People found some of my twittering amusing but it wasn’t really a productive use of my time to sit there snarking, steadily becoming more frustrated and in the end getting, well, a bit depressed really. In fact I felt just the same as when we had that backchannel hoo-ha at LesBlogs2.0. Stuck in a room with far too many smart people not able to say anything while some other smart people sat on the stage and weren’t able to say enough. But I have to recognise that that’s just how I see it, it doesn’t mean that everyone else had the same reaction.

The thing I can take responsibility for is that I went into it entirely unconsciously - I didn’t really look at the programme, as was evidenced by my shock on arrival at the scale of the whole thing. If I had thought about it, I would have known that I was likely to rebel against the keynoting and panelling and would have planned to do something entirely different and positive with the opportunity instead of sitting there and trying to disrupt it. The only bit I behaved in was Bob Geldof’s bit - he’s a great performer and I’ve loved him ever since he tore up that picture of John Travolta on Top of the Pops.

So I’m sorry NESTA for poking you with a stick. I’m sorry Jonathan Freedland for calling you names on twitter. And I’m sorry to myself for using up a valuable day so miserably.

Ho hum. On to better things. I’ve sat in similar events and said “We can do better than this” I don’t think that’s true - it was a great event, but the programmed content was not for me. What I will say is “We can do something other than this - in fact we already are” That’s where my effort’s going today rather than in trying to pull somebody else down.

Bonus Link: The bit that Geldof quoted from WH Murray

It struck me that Clay Shirky’s lovely notion of cognitive surplus has another expression in these panel and single speaker conferences. Where sitcoms mask cognitive surplus, occasions like this NESTA Innovation conference amplify and magnify it. We have 3,000 smart people (ok not smart enough to not come, but pretty smart nonetheless) sitting in a room listening to 4 other smart people on stage. The weight of ideas, thoughts, inspiration and excitement is enormous, and for me anyway painful - we all rush out to grab food and talk rapidly before coming back in to listen to the prime minister. Gaaaah! Cue Desperate Housewives.

Just a snippet. Cross not to have power supply.

Sir Tim says something to the effect of:

People doing interesting things fall between stools. The web has to be thought of as humanity connected, rather than an interconnection of computer systems. And you have to remember it’s big, very big and it’s complex. It’s not apparent yet what all of its characteristics are. We don’t know yet for example what the blogosphere is and how it will behave. We just don’t know - we can’t show that it’s stable. So we have to study it, we have to understand it better so that we can take care of it.

Live blogging a bit from the Royal Festival Hall as and when today. No power in the hall at all, so currently on 53 minutes

We’ve got a whole bunch of big names talking to us this morning, TB-L & Bob Geldof with a rumoured appearance by the PM. First impression - it’s bloody huge! We’ve heard talk of 3-4,000 people. The hall is full and I think we’re just about to be moved out of the front-row seats we’d grabbed by being the first in. It was too good to be true.

Or maybe not. No, we’re sitting still Ha Ha!

A slow project this one. Ask as many people as I can remember to do when I’ve got my camera with me to answer a “simple” question - “What is the web for?”

I tried it out at the Tuttle Club a few weeks ago. This is what came out of the mouths of some of the Smartest People in Social Media (TM)

So there are two ways I want to take this forward. I want to do it with a more diverse group of people, and I want to edit a bunch of them together in a watchable way. Your thoughts on how to do this are welcome.

I have more. I will release them. Soon.

Breakfast and conversation again yesterday, courtesy of OneAlfredPlace and Steve Moore I love the way that Steve keeps playing with different formats. This one involved three cool people (coincidentally all members of my twitterstream) Jeremy, Kevin & Matt from Penguin, The Guardian and Channel 4 respectively, all talking about what happens next in their worlds, ably steered by Rebecca Caroe. As Matt disarmingly pointed out, when you ask people in the vanguard of change what the future will be like, it’s not surprising that they describe a scenario in which there are really cool jobs for people like them. But as I feel part of the same vanguard, I’m not going to disagree with what they were saying. The common thread for me was that they all see their jobs as doing away with technology dependent descriptions of what they do (sell books, paper, TV programmes) towards being in the market for ideas and stories. I wanted to ask to what extent they saw themselves as competition for each other, or more properly for our attention.

Mark has captured the nugget in what Matt said about some current C4 research on teenage net use.

“Seems one girl the researchers were following was hanging out online doing amongst other things a spot of the hi-speed Instant Messaging that only the young can really manage for any length of time.

She had sorted all her contacts into 6-7 or seven groups - schoolfriends, family etc but also “bitches” “wankers” and so on. What was striking though was the way in which she switched contacts between the groups in real time. Even if the members of her different social networks remained mostly consistent over the short term, their roles were in constant flux. And those are just the small set of folk she is in regular contact with regularly…”

Read the whole thing for Mark’s point on this (as well as some bonus Tommy Cooper) but what struck me was how it fits with what I’ve been saying about compartmentalisation - that the way we dealt with having larger numbers of acquaintances than 150 was to split them up (at least in our heads) and make sure they never came into contact with each other (except when we wanted them all to share something with us - weddings - or where we were no longer in control - funerals - both of which, especially with the addition of alcohol can become explosive situations). I see a lot of people struggling with the problem that online social networks make compartmentalism more difficult. It seems to me that the solution here though is a creative third way - keep the idea of compartments, but treat them much more dynamically.

As usual, I feel I’ve taken hundreds of words to say something very simple and obvious. Sorry.

At our first prototype meeting, I perceived a tension between the people who were interested in making a profitable business and those whose interest was solely in the community possibilities and opportunities for collaboration. I came away unsure of what legal structure would work best - a traditional shareholder-owned limited company or a non-profit company limited by guarantee. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then.

On the same occasion I said something along the lines of: “What I want to create is a platform that enables people to create value for themselves.”

The inspiration for this comes from the tech world - CP/M & MS-DOS, the IBM PC, the Internet, the Web, Amazon Marketplace, Craigslist, Ebay, Facebook - what they all have in common is that no matter how they get paid for or how they’re organised, or whether or not they make money for their inventors, they have also given other people the opportunity to create new relationships, markets and businesses that weren’t possible before (btw, I use big examples so that people will recognise what I’m talking not because I think our little project will be on that scale.)

I want everything we do to in some way support people doing cool stuff on their own. I don’t think we have to own *every*thing and I certainly don’t want to create a walled garden. We’ll get a lot more done by creating the conditions for people to

So turning back to the legal structure, the choice seems to come down to a limited company (or a partnership) which exists to create value for it’s shareholders (or partners) or a company limited by guarantee which exists to… well do whatever we decide it should do - I think it should serve the needs of people interested in Social Media in London - if that’s not too wooly (or too specific) - but I’m open to suggestion. There was broad agreement that limited by guarantee was the right route for us but the aim and purpose does need to be boiled down to something that expresses what we want and allows us (as a group) to do as much good as possible.

So if that is sorted, my mind then turns to the structure of this business. I’ve always talked about the three bits - café, learning, working. But that might not be all we want to do together - other ideas for services have come up in meetings too. Can we make the Tuttle Club our base platform? With no direct services except to facilitate cool stuff happening. Then the first cool thing it does (quickly) is to set up a Social Media Café or perhaps the café space, a learning space and a workspace could each be individual, but co-located businesses. And then it can do other things too as they arise. Or am I making it too complicated?

Let’s talk about this at the next prototype - but there are many who aren’t able to join us there so let’s do it in the google group as well.

OK, here’s a bit of fun.

The London Paper and Capital Radio who sponsor the London Licenced Buskers Scheme are having a data collection exercise Competition for your favourite Busker.

I couldn’t possibly influence your choice of course, I simply lay the following information before you and let you make your mind up.

First a warning. You’ll need to register (grrr…) here in order to enter, but you can opt out of getting too much crap from them. You’re all grown-ups and you can decide what to do with your personal data. I will understand if you feel this is too much to ask.

I would also point out that I’d like to keep my licence please so try not to piss the organisers off with fake data. There are also draw prizes every day for people who enter which you’d miss out on if you gave a false id.

Once logged in you need to go to my profile and click on the voting button. You can only vote once per day but since most people I know are online at midnight, doing it at 11.55 and 12.05 every other day should make it more efficient for you, if less easy to remember. I think you get a notification then of where I am in the chart. Naturally, you should also feel free to vote for any busker you wish. I just hope you can live with your conscience.

Unpacking that it’s a barcamp for people interested in the Web for UK Government - all of those terms are very widely defined.

I’ve been in sessions so far about Managing Risk (war stories about how to get stuff done without getting fired or in a scrap with IT people), Communities of Practice (Steve Dale on the difficulties of getting I&DeA to move from knowledge-repository to connecting people) , Twitter (Jenny Brown opening up a discussion based on why she loves it) and right now I’m listening to Tom Steinberg talking about MySociety. And we haven’t had lunch yet.

I can feel the overstimulation already creeping in. I’m going to do a sesh on Social Media Cafe around 2pm I may also do a Seesmic demo.

Our first little flashmob was quite a success in my view. It certainly showed me that there were people ready to turn up and talk about stuff. It also suggested to me that we need to follow a two-track approach for now.

I’m going to continue to write (as and when I have the space and time) a formal business plan to help communicate more clearly and completely what it is we are doing and to help people understand why they might want to put money into it. I want to get as much feedback and input from others into that as possible so I’ll be blogging about it more regularly from now on as well as organising face to face sessions.

In addition, I think it’s worth trying to keep prototyping and move slowly from the dormobile model towards the travelling circus model. For those who haven’t seen my presentation on this, I characterised the first phase of prototyping as a VW camper van where we just hang out essentially wherever we can find somewhere to park for the afternoon. The travelling circus is a bit more formal - it’s where we would have a venue that remained the same for a period, perhaps up to a month, before we moved on. So how might we do that? From the start people have been suggesting that we should just find somewhere to “squat” but ideas for actual places to do this have been thin on the ground.

Now, though, courtesy of the sterling persistence of Lee Thomas (londonfilmgeek) we’ve got a couple of initial sessions booked in the upstairs dining-room at (Norman’s) Coach and Horses in Greek Street (corner of Romilly St, opposite Kettners). To say the least, the place does have some media history. Far less significantly it was where we had the recent Seesmic Dinner.

We’ll be there from 10.00 to 13.00 on Friday 1st February though the landlord would no doubt welcome you staying on for a later lunch and drinking in the bar for the rest of the afternoon if you really can’t tear yourselves away

I’ve put a simple page on the wiki for sign-ups - just so that people know who else is coming.

Right, so I’m now on the look out for more places like this and I thought I’d blog the requirements and what’s in it for the venue and see who out there might have have somewhere we can use or at least see whether you can come up with suggestions of places to approach.

What the venue gets - people, punters, customers, you know, dosh-givers - especially at those times that are usually a bit slow. More people drinking coffee and eating cakes, sandwiches and other geek comestibles (erm… I suppose I mean beer here, especially on a Friday lunchtime). Moreover the people it brings in are well-connected and quite influential in their own circles. And we’re generous - if you give us nice things like wifi and electrickery, we will say nice things about you. Don’t forget that when we say nice things, we say them quite loudly on the internet (a global network of interconnected computing devices), where they stick around forever getting clumped together with other nice things and thus bringing you warm fuzzy goodness - the kind of warm fuzzy goodness that encourages cash out of people’s wallets and into your till.

Our requirements - we’d like a space please that we can, however temporarily, call our own. It’s great if it can be demarcated in some way (a separate room, those three tables, etc.) and we need free open wifi (if you don’t have this, we can talk about how we can help you set it up) and access to electricity points. Errr.. that’s about it, really. Anything else, I think we can work around.

Know anywhere like this? Own anywhere like this. Let me know - my contact details are up at the top of this page.

So my busking adventures continue - I was at my second home, Bond St tonight - quite quiet, lots of small change dropped, but also lovely stuff like the lady who gave me a rose and the other who said I was the best thing she’d heard on the tube [compared to the coaches on the Bakerloo Line, presumably ].

Thanks to everyone who’s come to see me so far - Emma, Russell, Jamie - and all those who’ve sent warm wishes via twitter. I’m having a great time with it.

Counting the money is giving me lots of fun. I have a spreadsheet going with the following metadata: date, day, time, location so that I can do some analysis. So far I’m averaging a bit more than minimum wage… but not quite up to my consulting day rate. No matter, the most important return I get is something I’m not quantifying precisely: the number of smiles and winks.

Today I met a Busking Manager for the first time. These guys get to go round the network, checking in with buskers that everythings alright and making sure that people have turned up to the right pitch at the right time. I’m also getting to meet more and more of my fellow performers. Most are really nice, but I have to say that a number of them are just bloody miserable, I suppose it’s like anything, but I do think there are a few who buy in so much to the suffering artist myth that nothing could make them happy.

The most obvious thing I’ve learned is that people with shorter legs walk more slowly than those with long legs. It’s really noticable when a train comes in, the crowd just gets shorter as it passes by - you just don’t see these things when you’re in the crowd yourself.

Photo by Russell Davies

So in the previous post I went on (and on) about relationships online and off-. The next point is that we seem to have grown up with a prejudice that online relationships are “not as real” or “not as good” as those we create offline.

While I am prone to this myself, when I think about it, it turns out to be piffle - people are people and the way we relate to each other doesn’t deteriorate as a matter of course just because we do it online. Some people behave very badly to others online, in ways that they wouldn’t dream of doing “IRL” but I’d argue that most of us now have more than one solely online relationship which is every bit as good as some of those that we have with people we see every day. And what is interesting, and I’ve noted before, is that online activities enhance relationships that began offline and vice versa. The distinction is disappearing, but I think that while things are still blurry, at this stage of our learning about relationships mediated by technology it’s a good time to look at some of the dynamics of how we get things done in this environment.

As well as Online/Offline, there are two other dimensions that I think are important to look at. These are the Formal/Informal and Group/Personal axes. We’re more used, I suppose, to thinking about the informal/formal axis in the context of the group, but I see both in my personal, individual life too (though there it can be easier to think about it as what’s conscious and unconscious). I don’t like gratuitous use of 2×2 matrices any more than the rest of you, so I hope you’ll forgive me, but I think it’s worth thinking about this space.

One of the first things I notice when thinking about this is that on the one hand social software is bringing more of a focus on the informal lives of groups (organisations, businesses if you like) while it brings a kind of formality at the individual level, by simply codifying our relationships, making things explicit that before were just understood - turning huge chunks of our personal lives into data (which by the way still doesn’t seem to belong to us - but that’s a whole other VRM kettle of fish - and I’m glad brains like Doc’s and Adriana’s are working on it).

However, that’s just another diversion from the story. Phew. The real point is what we can see when we extend the 2×2 to a 2×2x2 (cue: strangers in the night) with online/offline as the third axis.

In a purely offline world, think about how new stuff happens. I have an idea one morning, maybe in the shower, it percolates up out of my unconscious in a formal-ish way, maybe I write something down but perhaps I just take it in my head to work. Around the coffee pot, or the water cooler, I have a conversation with people and mention my idea. “OMG,” somebody says, “that is awesome, I’ve been thinking about just the same thing” - (OK, so this doesn’t *always* happen, often people have more interesting things to talk about, like their cat’s arse) “and what we could also do is X, Y and Z”. “OK,” I say, “let’s get together later and talk it through” So we do, and we work it out and we come up with a really cool way of expressing it and it gets adopted as part of the way we do things around here (or a ‘pro-see-dure’ if you are a dork).

In the purely online world, there’s a similar process. “Ping! Idea!” (personal/informal) write on blog (personal/formal-ish), a few people comment, create a google group or suchlike, knock up prototype, show it to friends (group/informal), come up with neat way of inviting new people in - bang - it’s an every day part of the web that we suddenly can’t do without (group/formal).

When the online/offline distinction gets blurry, the group/informal space is the interesting one, but unless we work for YaGoogleSoft, or are willing to sell our souls to Starbucks, we don’t have a wifi-enabled space to meet and chat around the coffee machine, dropping our little ideas into the conversation and seeing where they might end up. So the Tuttle Club idea is to create a physical space for the rest of us to play around with the offline counterpart to the read/write web and online social networking and to see what happens when (at least in this city) we have somewhere to facilitate that online/offline bootstrapping for a whole group of people who have little in common yet except that they’ve seen the social media light (and that, if we’re lucky, will be tomorrow’s story).

Yesterday I was knocked out that not only had 20-ish people signed up to come talk about the Tuttle Club AKA London Social Media Café (and bring their own coffee and a donation to help pay for the room) but they pretty much all turned up and treated the idea seriously like it’s really going to happen. At the risk of over-thanking, which is probably impossible since today is Thanksgiving anyway, thank you again for your participation, contribution and general good humour.

I put up a page on the wiki for people to write about it and link to what they thought if they wrote/filmed/recorded/drew something about the day. However all I did was to list the names of people who have come.

So if you were there - go here and say something about your experience of the session and what you’re going to do next. Please do also tell everyone you know about what a cool time you had and what you liked about it.

If you weren’t there but are still interested in what happened - go to the same place and have a look. If when you get there, there’s still nothing but a list of names, find someone on the list that you know and use every bullying technique you have at your disposal to get them to open up about it online.

Is this the most dangerous door in London? It’s at the bottom of the escalators at Vauxhall tube station. Or perhaps this the tube worker’s equivalent of schwag stickers on your laptop.

Yesterday, I saw Loïc make a plea for people to come in & make video quickly to show to a journalist, Erika Brown, who he was talking to over breakfast.

So we piled in with gusto, naturally. This is not new. I’ve seen people ask for irc contributions, blog comments, blog posts using tags, tweets usually from the stage of a conference or a demo they’re doing somewhere, to show the network effect - that the net is alive and full of people and doing stuff all the time. I still think it’s cool.

Apparently later (according to Loïc’s daily summary) she was asking why we do this stuff - what’s in it for us. Good question. Don’t know the answer, but don’t think I’m not thinking about it. (BTW - I worry though that when someone outside the group asks “what’s in it for the people in this group?” they’re actually asking “and how can I exploit it in some way?” ie “What’s in this phenomenon for me?” but that’s a whole other lifetime’s blogging)

I have been thinking though about what happens when they try to scale seesmic up. Right now, there are two interfaces essentially - one is the public timeline with every post in it (though it can be filtered for friends and for my vids too) and the other is twitter which announces new videos if the user has provided her twitter details. I’m following this by tracking</a “seesmic” in twitter, so I see everyone regardless of whether I follow them in twitter or not (keep up!) *and* I see every other reference to the word “seesmic” too. Clearly I’m obsessed.

Now this is something we’ve seen before. What starts as a little trickle, becomes a steady stream, becomes a mighty torrent of unmanageable information. Weblogs.com started out like this but was in stream/minor tributary mode when I first saw it. Ah me, I used to love to sit at audio.weblogs.com late in 2004, CTRL+F5′ing to see what was new. When I joined twitter about a year ago I had about 10 friends and some of them were in way different time zones - minutes would go by without an update - now I have it running in my im window and it’s like a constant ticker tape - in fact it’s now going too fast.

Seesmic will (probably) follow the same pattern in terms of the increase in the number and rate of contributions. What I’m interested in, is what happens when seesmic becomes like audio.weblogs.com today. Now at the beginning, although there were some podcast directories, audio.weblogs.com was the best place to go because you could see everything and everything was worth at least a glance at the title. So what happens when the public timeline is whizzing past as fast as weblogs.com? What about when my friends list whizzes as fast as twitter. Well, I’ll miss stuff, that’s for sure, I’m missing stuff on twitter and in my feed reader right now because I’m writing, but the other problem is that while twitter can be scanned, if I want to find out what a seesmers just said, I have to click and open a video. The only way I can see is RSS (with enclosures, I think too - gulp!). This is why I’ve made a feature request for (at least) my feed, a feed of my friends and a public timeline feed. I also want to see feeds for particular tags. We can’t see this metadata at the moment, but I’m filling it in (are you?). And then I want a big tag cloud so that I can follow the zeitgeist of seesmic and dip into a feed based on tags. So I’m expecting that I will then subscribe to certain feeds and go to seesmic from time to time to dip into stuff that I’m not subscribed to. Oy! I think I might like to keep seesmic down to a manageable little community of 150 diverse international shiny new toy freaks

Now, this brings us back to Erika’s question: “What’s in it for us?” Why do I do this? Why am I obsessed with shiny new toys like this? Because I like being part of this little group - just like podcasting was 3 years ago. And I want everyone to have the chance to have this experience. Why do I choose some and not others. Well a big differentiating factor is in the previous paragraph - I’ll repeat it - I made a feature request and I’m sure it will be considered and may get somewhere if it’s thought a good idea by the community. Why am I sure? Because I made the feature request that we should have voting on feature request, and it was implemented. So now we’re voting on what things we’d like to see. That’s what’s in it for me, a small bit of satisfaction that an idea I had sitting at a screen in London could ping around the world and get created before my very eyes *and* I believe that I’m not special, if it can happen to me, it can happen for everyone, if they want it.

No screenshot to go with this, can’t be arsed to edit - is there a skitch clone for Windows?

Just in case anyone hasn’t seen my big chopper yet:

So here’s an idea for members or regulars at the London Social Media Café.

You make LSMC a friend of yours on last.fm. When you come in, you swipe your card so our central electronic brain knows that you’re there. From here you’re in a group and the sound system plays radio from last.fm based on type of music favoured by the group of people who are in the house today.

Does last.fm work like that? I’ve never been able to listen to music and do computer based work at the same time, so it’s kind of passed me by.

Remember this?

Well now there’s this.

So I did this to see if it helps in any way.

Thinking that either slopping this in your iPod and listening to it might take your mind off a boring 10-minute walk or listening to me huffing and puffing in light drizzle might make you think “I can do better than that loser”.

Had a little wander around a little bit of Soho on Wednesday to see what I could see that might be of use to someone thinking about a London Social Media Café. I only covered Brewer St, Wardour St, Dean St & Berwick St and the thoroughfares in between (you know the places you’re most likely to trip over Charles Frith at 5am… allegedly)

I took some pics of the ad boards from commercial property agents. Lots of upstairs offices. One or two boarded up or broken down café type spaces including one with a To Let sign in the window.

Left me wondering whether LSMC could operate in what is existing office space. Obviously you’d lose the passing trade, non-social-media traffic but still not sure how much that would be anyway. Also, don’t know if that sort of thing means a change of use and therefore requires some government interference, or looking at it in a more practical way, what you can get away with without upsetting Westminster CC.

Bonus pic: Before I got that far, I went and snapped the New Piccadilly which is now closed and boarded up. Anyone (Russell?)have any pointers to stories or info on whether the signage or any innards have been preserved?

Battersea Power Station was all lit up last night, apparently for some night shooting on “Rory’s First Kiss” which turns out to be a fake title for the new Batman movie rather than Snogging in South London. No bangs, flashes or maniacal laughter was audible from this side of the river, but apparently the crew will be around for another week so maybe there’ll be more.

I was invited yesterday to see a demo of Mippin which is being launched today by Refresh. Very, very simple stuff to read web content on your phone. I like.

I remember being interested in their previous (and still going strong) product, mobizines (Scott describes mippin as mobizines on steroids) but was put off by the restricted content available and the java client. These Refresh guys have taken the good idea from it - we want to be able to read cool stuff as easily on the phone as you do on your desktop - but they’ve moved away from the horrors of transcoding a 15″ experience in its entirety down to a variety of small mobile screens and gone for the fact that most sites already produce content in a presentation-independent form - their RSS feed.

As a service, you can look at it two ways - as a “publisher” I get to include my RSS feed in their database, then if I want to I can opt to splice ads into the feed (in the same way that feedburner does) from which Mippin takes a small cut. Bigger publishers will want to customise the way that their feed is displayed and they can do this too.

As a “user” I can subscribe to the feeds I want and I can search for terms (or URLs) to find new stuff - so for example putting the URL for this blog into the search box returns a picture and title and a link for each post. A click on the link takes me to an uncluttered version of the post. Perhaps a little too uncluttered - the links have been stripped. But there is another link there to go to the original post (and you can pass it on by mail, sms or twitter - nice) There’s a kind of history page too so I can go to my regular reads. I see it primarily as an RSS reader for my phone. So of course my feature requests are to make it behave a bit more like an aggregator - I’d like a river of news view. I’d like to be able to define groups of subscriptions and get a river of news from each. I’d also like to be able to turn off ads, oh yes and I’d also like a zeitgeist tagcloud to be able to see what’s hot. Scott was boasting that moving from downloadable client to browser meant that their development times have been slashed, so I expect to see my requests implemented well before Christmas

As an aside, the experience is still dependent on the browser though - I want a really good free browser for my Windows Mobile Smartphone - IE just doesn’t cut the mustard, although I’m also tempted by a Nokia 800 or an iTouch.

Disclosure: I was given two cups of delicious coffee (and offered more). There was cake. Mike Butcher ate some cake, but I stuck to coffee.

It seems that London’s opera critics think that Sally Potter’s Carmen is, well, a bit crap. I can’t comment, I haven’t seen it yet - but I still love the blogging and videoblogging over on the ENO’s mini-site. A couple of the critics have been a bit sneery about the whole 2.0 angle on this but I think they’re missing the point - the show may be gimmicky (err.. I don’t think opera folk call it a show, but you know what I mean) but the blog isn’t - I really think it’s taken a big step in a new direction for the Arts, opening up the creative process and the backstage, as the production progressed, rather than filming a fly-on-the-wall and then stitching it all together later. This shows up “what *were* they thinking?” as lazy rhetoric - you could have seen what they were thinking by following the site. The real question for the critics is “if they’ve been talking about what they’re going to do for so long and in such detail, why did the bits you don’t like in the production come as such a surprise to you?” and why weren’t you writing something about it back then?

I really hope that the ENO has the courage to keep that material up and to carry on with this experiment now and into future - it adds a layer of interestingness before you see the show as well as afterwards - it’s icing on the cake. As I say I haven’t seen the show, so I don’t know if this is an occasion to peel the icing off and give the cake to the dog or whether this is professional critics talking out of their arses again. Now is the time for the Carmen folk to get the conversation really going - fight back or surrender, doesn’t matter which, but say something.

The thing is that critics are part of the problem with opening up performance to a wider audience. The good news is that their power is diminishing as we gain the opportunity to hear people we know and trust talk about what they like and don’t like. I much prefer getting recommendations from my friends and I look forward to seeing some ordinary people’s reaction to Carmen, people who don’t have any prejudice against ENO and don’t already have a fixed opinion about how this opera needs to be done in London today.

I went to a C4 Education screening last night entitled “TV is dead?” My answer - read my blog (two years ago! - funnily enough about the same time as I started thinking about blogging for theatre) The bit in the programme where, if I’d been at home, I’d have been shouting at the telly, was when someone from the Beeb trotted out the old line that in future, as media professionals, they would be the people that we could trust to sift out the crap. NO, BBC, STOP! I don’t want your opinion on what’s crap and what’s not, I want you to make excellent programmes that no one else can make. More “Dr Who”, “Comics Britannia”, “Windscale”, “The Mighty Boosh” (oh God! *More* Storyville, not less!!!!) and fewer animals stuck up trees and celebrities who can’t tap dance.

Phew!

I really liked that younger people were included in the debate in a fairly unpatronising way, though friends and other regular readers know what I think of panel sessions.

Missing from last night was any recognition that the internet is about social interaction not content delivery (just like TV has always been) and so you should be concentrating on making stuff that people want to interact around rather than worrying about how they get it and whether everyone’s paid exactly the right money (whole other rant on that one - tell us straight - how much money gets spent on protecting rights? - how much more or less is it than the amount of money you currently lose to “piracy” - how much more money might you actually make if you weren’t so tight arsed about it all - *hint* watch Radiohead very carefully)

Also missing was any glimmer of understanding that advertising might not work any more. The real question here is “TV Advertising is Dead?” And it comes in two parts - 1. People don’t want to be interrupted or fed commercial information any more, they want it self-service and 2. The current advertising sales model is based on pulling the wool over the eyes of advertisers with extrapolations from sample audiences - what happens when you (and they) start to get real audience numbers in real time based on actual attention data from your viewers/subscribers in a form that makes comparison with other online media forms more like-for-like?

Thanks Adam for pointing to Michael Billington’s piece on theatre criticism.

I wish I had more time to respond, but in the few minutes before I get in the shower, I would add these points:

A great number of the theatre directors I’ve spoke to about in-house (marketing, if you like) blogging they have seen it’s *primary purpose* as circumventing what they see as piss-poor print-bound criticism which can kill a show’s sales just because the critic had a hangover.

Mr Billington should have a look here for an explanation of how to deal with that “relentless din”

I sat in front of Mr Billington at a press night last week. He was very well behaved, as you’d expect. The same can’t be said for one of his peers who threatened to disrupt the beginning of the show because the seat he’d been given didn’t suit his taste.

Is anyone doing (new)media literacy classes for these poor old hacks? How can we help them distinguish between the different types of blogging in theatre, spot the good stuff in among the rest and understand that you don’t have to read them all, any more than you have to read every column-inch of a newspaper.

I just love the Carmen blog from the English National Opera.

It’s exactly what I was talking about here

Well done to the folk at interesource who got it going, but super well done to the ENO people who seem to have taken to it as naturally as I’d hoped. I was really grateful to get to talk to John Berry a few weeks ago and hear his take - I came away understanding that ENO was an obvious place to do this - democratisation of access to opera is one of their cornerstones. We also talked about ‘bootstrapping’ online and offline relationships and I thought I saw a small lightbulb go on.

There’s a ton of cool video on the site - perhaps too many talking heads (but who am I to talk!) but some fantastic music and behind the scenes action. Go look.

I think it’s a great example of post-geek bloggery - as I’ve been saying for a while, make your own fly-on-the-wall documentary of what you’re doing rather than getting a crew in to follow you around and then stitch you up after the event.

When I’ve pitched this idea to other people, the perceived barriers have been (lack of) editorial control and shining the light on the creative process too early. I don’t know what the process has been for creating content here, but I can’t imagine that Sally Potter has had to get her blog approved by a committee every time she writes.

One suggestion - a more obvious place to find CC-licenced images for bloggers to use to illustrate their posts about you

Well, more like I have some compassion for him - but “I have compassion for the fool” sounds like something Martin in the Simpsons would get punched for saying (more Simpsons later).

I went to the Frontline Club last night, actually, thanks Euan for reminding me that I *paid* to go to the Frontline Club and hear Andrew Keen speak about his book what he wrote. I got to meet Richard Sambrook and Graham Holliday and had a quick drink and catch up with Euan afterwards so it was worth it actually.

Andrew is a man who clearly gets something out of being (metaphorically) beaten up by one half of the audience while the other half looks on, amazed and puzzled by the rage of their usually rational fellows. I couldn’t help thinking that this is probably a situation Andrew has found himself in again and again. I felt very much like I was watching an unconscious videotape of the world according to Andrew Keen aged four and a half. He behaves like a picky child. “Don’t want this. Don’t want that. Don’t…. want” So, to save you from reading his book or paying to feed him in some other way, let me summarise what he doesn’t like:

community
libertarians
democracy (he spits the word “democratisation” when he reads from his book)
hippies
Dave Winer
people ’stealing’ stuff on the web
people having the chance to ‘criticise’
people making economic choices
free markets
state regulated markets
anonymity
humility
Glen Reynolds
Tim O’Reilly
Jeff Jarvis
foocamp

By the way, when I asked him the question “So what *do* you want” I included liberty rather than libertarian - yes I do know the difference, but I’d slipped into troll behaviour too - I’m not immune to it, that’s why I have compassion for him.

He said that he wants “an information economy that reports objectively and employs trusted and respected professionals”.

Other classic quotes:

“Who am I to say that people in China shouldn’t blog”
“Journalists should be more arrogant”
“If you’re being paid and someone is editing you, then you’re a professional journalist”
“I don’t like the idea of humility”
“Tell me a blogger who’s better than Polly Toynbee”

stop. sniggering.

The story I took away is that he went to foocamp and got the wrong end of the stick. From the reports I’ve seen, foocamp does not represent what the majority of us are doing on the web no matter how much Tim O’Reilly would like it to. Its exclusivity goes against all of the openness that makes our experience here worthwhile. foocamp’s greatest contribution is the Barcamp movement which was created in reaction to it. Does Andrew know what Dave Winer looks like when he gets mail from Tim?

When Euan called him a troll, and then asked him if he knew what that meant, he said “No”. I said “Liar” I kinda hope the mic picked it up, though that’s not the behaviour I aspire to.

Struggling with my conscience, I whispered to Adriana next to me “How do you handle trolls offline without resorting to physical violence?”. The Simpsons, of course, has the answer - Treehouse of Horror VI - The Attack of the 50ft Eyesores in which Homer steals a giant donut from a collossal Lard Boy advertising statue prompting Lard Boy and several other promotional likenesses come to life and terrorise Springfield. Lisa asks an ad man what to do - he explains that the advertisements need attention to stay alive and so aided by a nifty jingle performed by Paul Anka, the townsfolk’s attention is ironically drawn away from the misbehaving mannekins who all fall down dead.

Tom Coates thinks Andrew should go on the naughty step. My positive experience of parenthood has come from encouraging the desirable, ignoring the undesirable, and getting them in the kitchen making some donuts.

Sorry for using his shock tactics to grab your attention, but as I rode home from listening to the troll, Andrew Keen, I realised there was something I could agree with him on:

He says Web2.0 is just a mirror for our culture and society.

I see a new-found confidence, optimism and freedom. I see happiness and laughter. I see a breathing out, a loosening of the belt, a relaxing, a kicking off of the shoes. I see humility and humanity. I see maturity.

He sees threats, groundless criticism, a loss of authority. He sees immaturity and people making outrageous statements in order to gain attention. He sees selfishness and self-centredness. He sees confusion, stealing and interference.

You look in the mirror and you see what you are.

More in the morning…

I’m late. I’m on my way to podcamp uk in Birmingham but forgot that the Victoria line is subject to many and various improvements. This was my first mistake of the day. I think. Maybe I made some others before that, but if I did, their consequences haven’t come home to me yet.

So I waited patiently for the replacement bus service. Watching the thin clouds roll by over Pimlico Tube Station and being patient. The woman next to me suddenly shrieked at the man over the road “Is the bus coming today then?” He smiled, “To Victoria? Yes.” “Not tomorrow then” she muttered. By the time it arrived there were five or six of us. Two hipsters who had probably been up all night assumed their place at the front of the queue, just behind the shrieking woman. A west-end cosmetics sales girl joined me in silent acceptance, and I went upstairs.

I thought as we made our way up Belgrave Road that at least the bus wouldn’t be stopping at every stop along the way, that perhaps the bus would be quicker than the tube with not having to go up and down escalators. I gave inner thanks when the grumblers grumbled their way down the stairs while the driver took a convoluted way into Victoria bus station and pulled out my phone to twitter:

“Late already on my way to podcampuk, forgot that victoria line is down. Oh well, sun is shining & i’m on the bus :)”

Considering while I did so whether to make that #podcampuk or whether it should start #podcampuk or whether that was the right tag to use anyway. Then I realised that I’d made my second mistake of the day almost immediately after coming to terms with my first. I had assumed that the bus would be covering the whole of the Victoria Line but it turned out that only Brixton to Victoria was down and so the bus was shuttling between. I asked out loud but no-one on the upper deck seemed to understand English except a kind German, possibly Austrian or Czech guy who said “No, we go now to Brixton” as we whistled down Vauxhall Bridge Road. So…when…was.. he going to…. turn off… to Pimlico? Err… at the junction with Grosvenor Road? At which point all the folk who had secretly been glad that we’d missed out a station started getting shouty. “WTF! I’m already late” announced one particularly loud African behind me and all I could do was laugh. We were going back almost exactly to where I had started. A return to Pimlico station wasn’t good enough, we were going to get there by going past my front door. The driver, clearly lost, turned into A. Street and, realising his mistake, started to reverse back onto Grosvenor Road and retraced his route. Rumbling and grumbling came from upstairs. The one-way system around Pimlico tube meant that he had to go all the way up to Warwick Way (he put his foot down) while the Polish builders and early-bird travellers of many other nationalities shouted at him that he didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing. They’d tell him the way, they said. He tried to explain that the signs were not in place, and that the route was always changing, but quickly settled down to: “Yes, I know, I’m wrong, I made a mistake, I apologise” The best form of defence is surrender. I hopped off when we arrived at Pimlico and dashed across the road to get on the next one going back to Victoria. We went straight up Belgrave Road. The NAO clock said 07.05 and my train had just left Euston at 07.00

At Victoria I approached a pair of men in Underground vests marked “Happy to Help” - happy perhaps but sadly unable to help in English. I realised that actually I just wanted to talk to someone to explain what had just happened to me, perhaps admit my mistake, have a laugh about it. But no, I just got advice that the No. 73 goes to Euston. I could have made myself later by insisting on having the conversation I wanted but perhaps it was best to just go downstairs and get on a train.

Finally sitting on a tube, I watched a crowd of 19-year-olds (eek! maybe younger!) wandering in a substance-related haze, shouting at each other trying to find the way out. Times have changed. When I were a lad none of us would have been anywhere near as chatty - our drugs were depressants. We had just as late nights, but not nearly such noisy mornings.

Euston at 07.28 - next train to Birmingham at 08.17 so time for an overpriced Americano in Caffe Ritazza (where I wrote the bulk of this) before squeezing into a second class seat (where I wrote the rest) with handy access to screaming toddlers, tutting pensioners, a lady knitting a lilac cardi sleeve and chatty sub-sloane gels with their arses hanging out of their jeans.

Lloyd’s of London - someone pointed out to me the interestingness of someone with my name thinking about opening a coffee shop in this town. (groan)

What it’s not - Some folk have zoomed in on co-working, shared workspaces for freelancers, hotdesking etc. Others have latched onto the club angle. Neither are wholly what I’m after though let’s see what we can do to help both. My motivation is to provide a space for things that are already going on or which would be happening more frequently if there was a cheap(er) easy alternative to an endless round of nero/starbucks/republic. Play and chat comes first, work will be an add-on. I want to write about this more later.

More Yin - talking (with Jason Bates) about why not just join an existing private members club - they’re too yang - sharp, cutting, thrusting, hot, male - I’m after a more fertile, supportive, soft, creative, female space - stop that sniggering at the back!

I’m really pleased to see that people have mentioned things that they’d be willing to pay for other than coffee and the sheer joy of each other’s company

Photo credit: Uploaded by TheLawleys on 14 Mar 05, 3.15AM BST.

I can’t embed it here because of wordpress.com rules, but here’s a link to some video from Charles Frith of some of what I facilitated at Interesting2007

Video: Interesting 2007

Also, don’t know if I linked but here are the slides I would have used, if I’d used slides.

Mike Butcher put a note out this week (after, as he said, Helen Keegan told him to stop talking about it, and just do something) inviting folk to Brunch Bites (yet another extension of the Xbites brand) at the Breakfast Club Soho and about 10 of us turned up. It was another pleasant way of getting to say hello to people. I managed a nice chat with Steve Bowbrick (the waxwork stalker) which was augmented by Luke Razzell after a little while. Luke has just started Blog Friends which I see Scoble just said is in his top 10 Facebook apps, pretty cool.

I also topped up on my face-to-face time with technokitten who is really getting into her stride blogwise - so much interesting stuff going on in the mobile marketing area.

Another reminder that we really need a nice cafe/meetingspace/club for social media/2.0 types but I need to stop talking about it and do something.

The most obvious landmark viewable from my kitchen window is the Crystal Palace Television Transmitter. It’s about 6 miles SSW of here and does look like a rather weedy Eiffel Tower.

At 728 feet it was the tallest structure in London until the completion of 1 Canada Square at Canary Wharf (which can’t be seen even from my bathroom window).

The chimneys of Battersea Power Station are far shorter (about 350ft) but they are visible from my flat, if you lean far enough out of the…. aaaaaaargh! splat!

Back in November (gasp! time flies) I told you about Oli’s latest socially-entrepreneurial wheeze: Make your mark with a Tenner

Pigeons are now coming home according to the FT:

Six months later, more than three-quarters of the money has been paid back, a success rate that would delight most early stage business investors.

The biggest profit was £410, generated by a student at east London’s Walthamstow School for Girls, who set up a homemade doughnut business, persuading a local shop to donate ingredients.

She returned the £10 to The Entrepreneur Channel, a satellite television station that funded the scheme, and donated the rest to various charities.

The average profit from the 50 biggest earning schemes was £99.33, according to Mr Barrett.

Yay Oli! Yay Doughnuts! Yay Walthamstow!

It’s remarkably quiet in my living room this lunchtime as Grosvenor Road is closed between St George’s Square and Claverton Street because of the collapse of some scaffolding at the south-west corner of Dolphin Square. We’ve had scaffolding all over for a while since the exteriors are being cleaned. It doesn’t look as if this bit was very high, but I’m no expert. I hope no-one was hurt.

My old friends from the Guildford School of Acting got together in the Union Club in Greek Street (thanks Paul!) to compare grey hairs, pot-bellies and war-stories from our marriages, divorces and other relationships. We were also honoured by the appearance of our former principal Michael Gaunt and head of first year Ian Ricketts. We had a fabulous time, which stretched into the evening when we stumbled over the road into the nearest pub.

I shot some bits of video especially for those luvvies who weren’t able to make it - I hope these give a flavour of what it was like and give you even more encouragement to come along next time.

Angus Deuchar

Paul Spyker

A bunch of folk starting with Ian Tolmie

Another bunch of folk starting with Darren Ruston

Lucy Davidson

Ian Butler

Adam Tedder (and me)

A fortnight now since Interesting2007 and blogging time & opportunities have been scarce (at least on my own behalf) as I’ve just started two big projects where I’m making social media for clients (which is nice). I can’t possibly link to all the lovely people I met but most of them have blogged or flickr’d already. Slide sets are starting to appear on slideshare

I did get the feeling that something shifted, nothing world-shattering, but there was a subtle changing, we’d done something differently and as a result it all, y’know, shifted.

Look it was a one-day “conference” but it wasn’t a conference like any I’ve been to and it wasn’t an un-conference in the Bloggercon or PolicyUnplugged mould and it wasn’t a seminar, workshop, showcase, gathering, conflab or conglomeration - it was definitely not a symposium or a trade-show. It was a bit of a happening, an exhibition, a show & tell, a festival of ideas. And it held my attention all through from 11am to 6pm (I did get a bit of a numb-bum towards the end, but that might have been because I was wearing too many pairs of pants.

But it was a group of (mostly) intelligent people in a hall, sitting on chairs in rows listening to other people speak, one at a time. So what made it stand out as something different?

Nothing was ever more than 20 minutes away - actually that was a lie, because my slot was more than 20 minutes away from Rhodri and his saw (thanks Roo), but I guess no-one got bored with having lunch.

No Q&As - people seemed to accept that the majority of people were not going to speak. I have never seen a good Q&A session except at political meetings. We’ve got blogs now to have our say, or not and none of the speakers were up their own arses about talking to people afterwards - that would have been absurd.

Self-service - we all helped ourselves (as Russell said “we’re all grown-ups and you’ve only paid twenty quid”) but we all helped each other too. I arrived too late to help set up, but it was set up and nobody was crying or running around with scissors - and we cleared away quickly and fairly painlessly. There was no feeling (for me anyway) of separation between “organisers” and “punters” though these two did a splendid job of co-ordination. Also Russell was not “in charge” but he was definitely “in charge”.

It was on a Saturday and few people had a surname, let alone a job-title. The few collars I spotted were all open and any ties were undoubtedly ironic or accidental.

It was actually really good for me not to have wifi. I started off in recording mode as it was (I’m realising more and more that it’s one of my coping mechanisms for being thrust into large groups of people - I’ve been doing it with my camera since about 1979) but if I (and other similarly challenged folk) had the excuse to hide behind a laptop screen, we’d have had a much poorer experience.

It was village-hall-y and Festival of Britain-y and a bit arts-and-crafty and, well, just right for people who’s early life was a mix of oil-crises and moon-landings, dreaming about amazing cities in the sky with hovercrafts and no pollution and peace and smiling children and stuff.

It was hopeful.

As an experience, what was it like? Well, a bit like listening to Radio 4 all day, but with no long programmes, it was a bit like a random walk through the best bits of wikipedia, then again it was like live current.tv for people born in the ’60s & ’70s, or peeking at the RSS reader of someone really consistently smart. Does that help?

There were things I could have done with more of. More variety in presentation style, most people plumped for what we know, which is showing pictures or lists on a big screen. More music, preferably with acoustic instruments - the electroplankton quartet was a fun concept but I wish we’d made more of an effort with ukulele’s and kazoo’s. More analog, 3D art and time to really see the Folksy folk. More fun in the goody bag - I still haven’t used the shaving oil, but it was a point of “ooooh!”.

So some quick ideas for “next time” - Multiple locations - eg InterestingLondon, InterestingEdinburgh, InterestingBucharest, InterestingAmsterdam with video-linkups at set-times throughout the day. Bingo (or some other communal game) perhaps also played internationally via the video-link. Some form of backchannel - the twitter feed worked nicely before and after the day - one computer with a net connection projecting the stream might be cool.

And yeah, you *did* have to be there, really.