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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.
One of the things twitter has taught me is how fragmented our social networks are. Not everybody who reads this blog knows everybody who reads this blog. So there will be some folk who don’t know Stephanie Booth in fact she teetered on the edge of my network mostly through the european KM folk until twitter made us all feel much closer.
When I last saw Steph, in Berlin at the girl geek dinner, she had a twinkle in her eye and shortly thereafter announced the reason to the world – Going Far is going to be her vehicle for running cool events and the first of these will be on May 16th in Lausanne – Going Solo a conference for people who work by themselves (and with others) on a freelance basis, covering how to run things in a business-like way, how to market, how to charge…etc.
The thing I like about this is that it’s another example of the demand side supplying itself – the speakers already announced are Suw Charman, Stowe Boyd, Martin Roell and Laura Fitton rather than some list of people you’ve never heard of organised by people with no idea of the industry and totally pwned by their sponsors.
There’s a few days left of early early bird discounts but even after that the fee’s under £200 for another month. Should be manageable from most parts of Europe. And unlike many such conferences, you’re likely to learn enough from it to make it pay for itself quite quickly. If you can’t currently recoup the cost of the day, travel and accommodation in a couple of days of consulting, then you *definitely* need to go and learn how to 
Just to be clear – I’m not involved in the organisation of this in any way beyond friendly chats with Steph from time to time – but I have great faith in those involved that they will make it a really special day. I’ll be booking my place just as soon as those invoices get paid
Bonus: You can see Steph talking about it herself in the corridors at LIFT08 last week.
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?
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.
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