I was reminded of this today when I found myself telling the #tuttle2texas story again, to a bunch of people who knew very little about me or the social web. I talked, as usual, about how I learned to keep asking for help and keep trusting that the right help would turn up. They were primarily gobsmacked that I took the accomplishment of traveling the breadth of the USA, fuelled by social capital so lightly, that I didn’t talk about how proud I am of what we did or speak with more enthusiasm about how amazing it was.

It *was* amazing. Lots of you helped make it that way. I could not have done it without you. But here’s something: I don’t think I’ve acknowledged for myself yet that you might never have done it without me.

Same goes for Tuttle as a whole. It isn’t about me, it never has been, I couldn’t do it on my own. But the people who are interested in the social web in London (and Birmingham, Cornwall, Long Beach etc) probably wouldn’t have otherwise done something quite the same.

That’s one of the insights I’ve been given as a result of asking for Linked-in recommendations. There’s stuff hanging about in this world that wouldn’t be here if I had been around. Good stuff, that people like and value. Not necessarily big stuff, but stuff that’s important to those people whose lives it has touched.

To those who’ve been trying to tell me this for years, I’m sorry, I’m a bit slow to catch up.

And then there’s the invisible stuff. A common thread in some of the recommendations I’ve had this week is the idea that you might not see what it is that I do.

David Jennings says “His craft works so well… that it’s almost invisible – ditto his leadership…”

Johnnie Moore puts it like this: “… one of his finest qualities is his humility and reluctance to show off and put other people in the shadow.” and “He will help make connections and realise the potential of networks and he’ll do it so skilfully that you might not notice him doing it.”

Jo Jacobs uses the ‘c’ word: “His work… has been the catalyst for so many other collaborative ventures and meetings”.

Nathalie McDermott says: “Lloyd… provides the perfect conditions for others to meet, spark off each other and make things happen which is a rare talent.”.

But if you can’t see it (unless you get to know me and look up close), how do you know whether it’s really there? How do you distinguish this from the Emperor’s New Clothes? And if you didn’t pay for it and it went away, how would you know? Would you really miss it? What difference would it really make?

No other earth-shattering insights for now. If you can see something obvious that I can’t, please do point it out.

If you’re reading this you’ve probably dipped in your pockets or helped in some other way already. Thank you. If you’re inclined to do one more thing perhaps you could encourage others to do the same as you did for me.

If you’re just catching up you can find other posts about it here and here.

I am doing well at producing stuff, writing, making art, making stuff happen. I am enjoying it and people around me are enjoying and benefiting from what I’m producing.

However, I’m running very low on fuel. In terms of physical energy, I really need a break but more urgently, monetary fuel – the income from my residency at C4CC covers about a third of my monthly spending needs and I haven’t done any other paid work in the last two months. I’m now at the serious point where important bills aren’t getting paid. I believe I need to bring some organisation to selling what I do to create stronger flows of income.

I need someone or some people to help me do the following:

Set up web-based ways of selling my art – I’ve had a couple of commissions, but I’d like to do more and sell prints of smaller works that I’ve done.

Organise and find paying participants for Social Art Field Trips – I’ve had very positive response to the content of these, but they need to be managed and have more energy put into selling them.

Manage the creation of a number of books for self-publishing – repurposing content from tuttle2texas and other projects.

Find and sign-up new MicroPatrons

Create a better web presence for Tuttle to facilitate online community participation in experiences like Tuttle2Texas

I’m trying to do all of these myself at the moment, as well as everything else and I’m open to the idea that that might not be possible at all, let alone when I’m “running on fumes”. So while I can give a great deal of guidance and direction on what needs to be done, I think it’s more about finding willing and able pairs of hands to do it than getting more advice on what else I should be doing.

I am not in a position to pay up front for this help directly but it’s all about generating revenue so would expect to work out with you a way of sharing revenue once it starts flowing and I’m over the current crisis situation.

If you’re not able to help directly with this, perhaps you could consider signing up for my Micropatronage scheme, contributing a small amount each month towards easing the flow. Or maybe you have another idea for me. Open to all.

It’s a group posterous blog collecting the “most interesting” pictures that people have posted to Flickr. For those not in the know, Flickr has a measure of interestingness and I’ve been fascinated to watch how “interesting” some of my pictures are measured to be by this algorithm.

I was wondering how you might collate the most interesting pix from a group of people and get them to reflect on what comes up. Thankfully posterous.com has been developing faster and faster of late and I was able to set up a site in a few minutes to capture this. Now that it allows posting by anyone (with pre-publication moderation) and has static pages, it’s really easy to set something up for whatever it is that we now call user-generated content.

There are instructions here for how to submit something. Basically you just send a specially formatted e-mail. Kyle McRae (who knows a thing or two himself about curating UGC!) was the first to contribute, even before I thought I’d publicised it at all. But have a go. Of course you may not have a flickr account or you might not have very many pictures there – a very good reason to get one and start adding to it!

I’ve also added a Facebook page that it will be autoposted to for those of you who like to see stuff within that particular walled garden.

Let’s see how it goes.

[UPDATE] Anjali points out that it’s a similar idea to pixtories Yes – I think it’s nice though to have people’s thoughts on things that they own, but which have been picked out for them, rather than things that they think are interesting themselves.

We got talking about being artists (go back and click on that link to Mike’s site if you don’t know his work – go back and preferably buy something from his gallery!) and being blocked and what we need to do to keep relatively sane and solvent and working and happy and stuff and it seemed worth exploring them a bit – especially how they relate to my experience as a nascent Social Artist.

First of all we talked about the need for artists to be with other artists.

Artists need to spend time with other artists.

The rider to this is that we need to spend time with people who are in their flow, who are looking after themselves and doing their work. If we are blocked, it’s these people who will feed us and help us through – it’s far too easy to find other blocked artists to hang out with, who reinforce and rationalise our own blocks – then we just all get depressed together!

And even if we’re not blocked, it’s great to spend time with people who understand the creative process, who get what it’s like so we can all remember that this is normal and it’s the people who don’t do it who are weird…

Signs that you’re with the right people are: they’re encouraging you; you and they are smiling and laughing together, preferably at yourselves rather than others; you’re both talking more about the work that you’re doing now, rather than the work you used to do once or the work you’d really really like to do one day if only someone else would give you a chance.

Signs that you need to find some new friends are: the person talking to you is only talking about reasons why it’s hard; you’re feeling low and so are they; you hear yourself whining; you find yourself thinking about that project, you know the one, and how it’s never, just never going to get done.

So get out, and find some shiny friends instead!

That’s why I keep going back to Tuttle. It’s a place that attracts all sorts of creative people in large numbers. Creativity and different ways of thinking thrive among these people. It’s where I get my fix every week. I know you all think I’m doing it for you, and that’s true, but I’m doing it for me too.

One of the people who replied was Tim Difford who said he was going to something called #huddsms, which following a little trail I found out was the Surgery.

When I got to Leeds, it quickly became clear that getting on wifi or even getting a phone signal was going to be difficult around the Royal Armouries where the conference was taking place, so I thought I’d pop down to Huddersfield (only 20 minutes & £4.70 return on the train) and see how I could help.

The Media Centre is in the middle of the town an easy little walk down the hill from the station and I presented myself, my credentials and my willingness to help with anything that was going. I’m really glad I went. It was brilliant and there was a lovely buzz about the place.

I managed to squeeze in a coffee before I was introduced to my first (and as it turned out only) “patient”. David Quarmby is Chair of the Kirklees Visual Impairment Network (KVIN) committee and he wanted to know how social media might be useful to him and his colleagues in engaging with the 4,000 or so people in Kirklees who are registered as having a Visual Impairment.

I was immediately humbled by David’s determination to use the web regardless of his disability. He uses the JAWS screen reader to guide him around each page. This means that his experience of the web is of a tinny voice rapidly reading out link titles and button text – which can either be overwhelming because of the sheer amount of information squeezed on pages designed to be seen, not read, or else mystifyingly silent because important screen elements are hidden within graphics or whizzy bits of ajax which the screen reader stumbles over.

Nonetheless we pressed on, trying to see what a wordpress dashboard “looks like” through the screen reader. It turns out that you can find the elements of the Quick Press form that’s now included in wordpress.com and probably with some tweaking that may be useful. However, it still seemed difficult, surely someone must have done this before. I put out a tweet to ask for help – asking whether anyone had experience of blogging tools for people with visual impairments. In the meantime Tim Difford joined us for a bit to try out other possibilities, thinking about podcasting for example.

While we were talking about audioboo, phoneboo and ipadio, I had a flash of inspiration. Tim was explaining how simple some of these services are, so that you as a user are just making a phone call and when you’ve finished, you have, automatically, a podcast that could be shared through an RSS feed to a widget on your site.

This is what cleared the neural pathways for me – how about using posterous.com as a blog for KVIN which gets populated simply by David sending it e-mails, with attachments for the multimedia elements – everyone has e-mail and David, no doubt has an e-mail client that is optimised for his use – we all breathed a sigh of relief and had a cup of tea.

Meanwhile my twitterstream was generously sharing thoughts on the subject as predicted by the third of Dave Snowden’s Knowledge Management principles. Since the moment has passed somewhat, I haven’t, and I’m not going to, follow up all of these in detail, but if you’re interested, I hope you find a summary here useful.

@jobsworth pointed me at @dnwallace who keeps a blog called Lifekludger: “On it you’ll find information about ideas, devices, methods and custom uses for ‘everyday stuff’ that could be used to adapt, build, kludge, hack or make things work for people living with disability, as well as links and opinion on useful existing devices.”

@technicalfault showed us AccessibleTwitter.com a slimmed down version of twitter.

@simonjball pointed to Web2Access.org.uk with some tests and good practice guidance.

@cataspanglish pointed to @alisonvsmith who immediately popped up with her blog Pesky People which “aims to profile the lack of proper access by Disabled and Deaf people on the web, inform, complain, campaign.”

@ipadio reminded us of it’s own applicability

and finallly @x333xxx asked “why not ask @rnib’s professional services team? “

All good stuff and I’ll be pointing David in the direction of this summary.

Photo credit: Tim Difford

Epsom, Surrey. KT19

Waterloo Station Ticket Hall, London. SE1

North End Rd, London. SW6

So it’s time for this again.

Sorry, I can’t help myself.

Seems Rupert, Mike, James and Dan are all having a go too.

The same bit of my brain that lures me into Google Reader and Twitter far too often. “I need to read a little bit more and then I’ll get down to writing.”

No. The only thing that gets me writing (and I love writing, I really enjoy it and I always feel good when I’ve done some) is sitting down and writing. Reading just takes up time, gives me little ideas that get squirrelled away in my head and rattle around like acorns. They rarely get out where they were supposed to go (here, on the blog) and just add to my levels of anxiety, depression and occasional psychotic delusion – which tend, to be honest, to get in the way of writing too.

Gaaah.

Oh that’s better.

Day 7 was Sunday. This seems to have made the streets of Nice more busy, especially it being mid-August, what with sunday-trading being a mortal sin ‘n’all (it turns out – I saw it on the telly, I’m not going to research it further, find your own link, I’m on holiday – that this weekend was the beginning of sunday trading)

We started with the (predictable but still severe) disappointment that is le petit dejeuner – particularly severe given that I don’t eat bread or croissants or butter or jam and so was restricted to coffee. So I watched Ewan chew his way through a baguette and then it was back to the handy supermarket.

I’m having trouble now remembering. The morning was spent on the beach – I went for a swim and spent the rest of the time, really not looking at topless women, no really trying not to look, or at least, not to stare – trouble is, every time you look somewhere else, a new one wiggles into place. For example, the amply-proportioned lady underneath the red striped parasol in this picture promptly sat up just after I put my camera away.

The afternoon and evening consisted of food and catching up in my feed reader and going for another walk and some crap french telly in our room. Oh and getting bitten by fleas in the room too. Thanks.

Ah yes, I remember, the other thing was I went over to the train station to book the tickets and found that it being a Monday in mid August when lots of people are going back to work and school, there were no places on the train I’d wanted to get to Paris. In fact there were no places on any direct train to Paris on Monday. Or any obvious indirect routes. So I had to (well actually I was quite pleased to, it made for a nice treat after our hotel experience) get an upgrade to first class on a TGV from Marseille and we’d have to get the slow local train there first. I booked the Eurostar tickets back to London at the same time – it started to feel like we were near the end.

I didn’t really notice how seedy Amsterdam was until we arrived in Berlin which is generally trying to be very smart and stylish. But yeah, day 1 – we flew out of Gatwick at 1.30 so arrived at Schiphol at 3.30 local time. Ewan needed feeding and we needed change for the ticket machine so had a little stop at Burger King before getting the train into Amsterdam Centraal. Our hotel was a little walk from the station – would have been littler if I’d been paying attention. Didn’t really take much in when we got there, just dumped our stuff and put the air conditioning on as it was getting muggy outside.

Went for a walk around the ‘hood to take the air and find some food. found some sex shops, ladies in their knickers and coffee shops along the way. Last time I was there it seemed the coffee shops were quite discreet, now however Amsterdam was under a thick haze of dope smoke and the multitude of other tourists doing that special slow tourist walk that infuriates me in London, but even more so when on holiday because I’m supposed to be chilling out about that sort of thing.

We had a curry and pootled about a bit more.

Back at the hotel we found that the a/c was making funny noises. Every now and then it would buzz, like a buzzer on a quiz show. But it wasn’t regular, so just when I thought it had stopped, it would suddenly do it again and make me jump out of my skin. Also we realised that the church next door really was ringing every quarter of an hour….

I went down to reception to talk about the air-conditioninug. “Which room are you in, shir?” said the clerk in his perfect Amster-Englischh “410″

“Oh yesh. The air conditioning does make a noise in that room, I found out lasht night”

“So what can we do about it? My son’s gone to bed and we’ve unpacked, I don’t want to move!”

“Well you’ll have to talk to the manager about it in the morning, oh and it will keep making the noise after you’ve switched it off, just not so often”

So I went back and switched it off and it was true, it continued to buzz just a little less often gradually. So we opened the window and tried to get to sleep. It wasn’t easy as I became convinced in my half sleep that someone was going to climb in through the window from the balcony opposite. buzzz. clang-ding-dong. silence. silence. buzz.

And then the headboard started making noises when I moved. A clacking sound that I first decided was the boy snapping his teeth together in his sleep and I thought it was more like a crocodile. Eventually I did drift off for a few hours but it wasn’t the best night’s sleep I’d had.

Oh dear this all sounds like a dreadful gripe. I’m actually having a lovely time!

And I’m helping out by showing some folk how to blog and post pictures.

I first heard of Bletchley Park in 1986 when I saw the pre-west-end run of the stage version of Breaking the Code with Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing at the Yvonne Arnaud in Guildford. It’s a hugely touching human story of course but also intriguing that so much was going on during the war that we had no idea about.

I went at some point around 1991 I think, to a Computer Conservation Society open day at the Science Museum and Tony Sale was talking about the prospect of rebuilding Colossus. Some people were looking at him clearly thinking he was bonkers, but he did it nonetheless.

Then I read Robert Harris’s Enigma about ten years later when I was in need of fiction to read just after my finals. It is fiction, it is a bit Ripping Yarns but it’s also thrilling and brings the whole story to life.

So I was not at all surprised at what I saw when I arrived yesterday morning. It was good to see Christian as always and Bill Thompson was there, recording some stuff for his Digital Planet show. Highlights were the ever growing National Museum of Computing with it’s mainframe room, new PC gallery and nascent supercomputing room with a stonking great CRAY YMP-EL sitting in the middle of it. Adam Bradley is working on getting it going, apparently. He’s 14.

Then we popped over to the mansion and a special treat to be allowed to see and photograph inside Station X itself, an MI6 transmission station, high up in the tower. I heard yesterday that the X is like the X in OS-X it just means Station Ten, rather than being anything particularly top secret, although of course it was, y’know, particularly top secret.

Another unexpected treat was the cinema and film projection museum. Real geekgasm material here, mainly because it was such a surprise to find it all in such a small nondescript building. Great place for a solobasssteve gig, I think. By the time we got to the reconstructed bombe machine, I was running short of time and blood sugar. But there’s still an awful lot more to see. I’ll be back.

One particular idea that Christian floated was to turn some of the derelict concrete buildings into a geek warren – make it safe, run in a big fat net pipe, add some soft furnishings and get some use out of the space again at least for a few years, with a use that’s congruent with the place’s history for housing the sharpest mathematical and computing minds.

And if you haven’t done so before or recently, chuck some money in the pot to keep them going.

This is all part of mainstream media’s schizophrenic stance on news and uncertainty. Swinging this way and that and promptly forgetting that today’s chip paper was the thing that they desperately wanted us to believe and buy yesterday.

Depending on your temperament, the effect of all this is either panic or complacency – neither states help you to assess the risk accurately or be ready to act if or when you need to.

It’s all helping me remember:

1. Thank God I’ve got a blog where I can say what *I* think today without worrying about it being taken as gospel, or worrying about anybody reading it at all. Also that I have so little invested in it that I can say half-baked stuff without fear of having it all taken away from me. I will probably change my mind tomorrow, but that makes me human, not stupid. I am comfortable (here at least!) with saying where I’ve been outright wrong.

2. I’m happy for my stuff to stick around on the web. Maybe it will be useful to someone today, maybe tomorrow, maybe sometime in September, maybe not (and for all values of “useful” including ‘finding some fat fool to have a laugh at’ and whatever I haven’t yet thought of)

3. There’s so much more we can do together than pass on information. We are not information processing machines and neither is this internet that we have made in our own image. We had the idea and carried it out, that’s all I wanted to do with it. So the movie below is released entirely into the public domain for you to do with it whatever you will.

4. The internet *is* for porn. Well, at least it’s for fun as well as for serious stuff. So that’s why, when faced with what to write or do about #swineflu I looked for something that would have more utility than playing aporkalyptic rhyming games (as fun as that may be)

I guess what I’m feeling about it all today is that we seem to be in a first mild wave that seems to be not as serious as we first thought, but if we are to Keep Calm and Carry On, isn’t it worth thinking about what we might do in the case of it getting worse, isn’t it a good time to have a good laugh now in case it all gets too serious to snigger at in a few months time?

We don’t know, none of us know, all we do know is that things can change very quickly and we forget what we thought we knew equally quickly.

In the spirit of this, if we get to a situation of serious pandemic, how might we act responsibly to protect others as well as ourselves? Are we mature enough to be able to think about that in time, recognising that if it gets bad quickly, we might not have much time to weigh up the evidence from research?

Well, one idea is the ultra-simple flu code proposed by Vinay Gupta and picked up this week by Wired. What I like about it is that it’s focus is not “How do we get away from The Infected” but more what can we all do to look after ourselves and each other.

Note: the code used here is v0.1 and subject to change – keep an eye on flucode.com if you’re interested in how it develops (or doesn’t)

So on Friday, I got lots of help from my lovely allthisandbrainstoo collaborator Debbie Davies and Vinay himself to make an alternative public information film based on the code, just to throw another perspective into the mix and approach a serious subject with a bit of silliness.

For anyone without a sense of humour (folk like that do creep in here from time to time), let me be absolutely clear, we in the UK are not in a serious pandemic situation at the time of writing and making this film. I am not suggesting that you have to go out and do these things today. Neither am I suggesting that you follow the code in exactly the way portrayed in the film.

So yes, It’s silly, as you might expect, and I’m sure it won’t be to everyone’s taste, but our hope is that if you pass the video on, we might avoid passing disease on. Oh and kids, the bit at the end of the video is dangerous if copied at home – it’s just a joke, laugh at me, don’t try it yourselves.

PS the whole process of doing this was delayed a little because blip.tv wouldn’t transcode stuff nicely no matter how hard Debbie hit it with a wrench. vimeo on the other hand, seems to rock.

It’s gone bananas. Keep passing it on.

I just asked Colin from 1000heads when I saw him at the Oxford Tuttle to see if I could get a loan camera because they had run the HG10 trial that I was part of before and I knew it worked well for me as a combination video and stills camera.

For this gig, it helped me enormously that I knew my way around the camera already. And it works beautifully, it’s light but robust and to
demonstrate the quality as a stills camera, that pic above of Obama is at the full extent of the zoom, without a tripod.

As a video camera, I thought that I’d be mostly zipping around with my flip for interviews and using the HG10 for stuff that needed to be higher quality especially with zoom. It turned out that pretty much all the video I shot was with the HG10. This is because switching from video to still and back again is so simple so I just wandered around with one camera.

It meant that I had to be a bit more ballsy to stand up at the front with the big camera boys and a couple of times in briefings I was told that I couldn’t video and had to point out I was just taking stills. Minor hassles given what outputs I was able to get.

I could have done with some time to mess around with the colour balance for the video – a lot of it looks more washed out when processed than it did on the viewfinder – but of course I’d left it to the last minute to get it. I’ve blogged everything I shot, I think, but it’s all here if you want to compare and contrast. Make sure you check out the HD versions.

Also I should have remembered that I’ve switched over entirely to Ubuntu since I last used it and I had a moment of panic when I thought that perhaps I wouldn’t be able to get the AVCHD files transcoded without some serious linux-wrangling. As it was I wasn’t able to find the solution until after I’d left the Excel, but Handbrake is a great DVD-ripper and general transcoder (also available for Mac OSX & Windows, I believe) and once I’d had a little fiddle to get the settings right (using the FFMPEG codec rather than h.264 was the main thing for me), I just set up a big batch process to pump out .mp4′s

Big thanks to Canon and to Colin & Donna at 1000heads for facilitating the process – now what do I have to do to get to keep this baby?

Rory Cellan-Jones on the BBC dot.life blog was looking for the angle on how social media can be used to organise protest as well as report news:

Also among them is Lloyd Davis, a British social media consultant who told me that 25 years ago he’d stood on picket lines during the miners’ strike but was now a little old for that kind of thing. “They might say we’ve all been ‘captured’,” he told me, “but I’m interested in the issues here, and how we can organise our way through this recession or depression.”

Mr Davis and his fellow bloggers have had security clearance so that they can get into the Excel centre and attend the press conferences, which means there could be an alternative view of events from that provided by the mainstream media.

Laura Oliver on journalism.co.uk asked me more generally what we thought we were doing, of course I told her I haven’t a clue:

Yet while coverage has been opened up beyond traditional news organisations and platforms, the independence of reports from NGOs and other interested parties must be considered, Lloyd Davis, who is involved with both the G20 Voice project and the Reuters events.

“How do people like me get to report on thinks like this without getting some help from somebody – including technically?” he tells Journalism.co.uk

“I have been lent an iPod Touch, lent a camera by Canon to do some photographs and video – this enriches what I’m going to produce but in a political environment like this, there’s a question of patronage and sponsorship.”

There is an opportunity however to find new things to say other than the mainstream media, who ‘will already have got an idea of what the story is’, says Davis.

“I think there’s a gap to be filled in the middle that’s not mainstream media and the people on the streets. There are people being brought in to for some kind of semi-social thing,” he says.

“I have to admit we don’t really know what we’re doing. As usual as bloggers we’re jumping in and seeing what we can do.”

Then Lisa Devaney chatted wiith me on home turf at the Tuttle club and reported on her BrandRepublic blog and caught me rambling about what it all meant:

I saw Lloyd today following his exciting experience being part of G20Voice and got to hear his thoughts:

“What gets me is trying to understand what $1 trillion dollars really is, and how it will make a difference in our everyday lives. There is also a huge gap between the content of what was discussed in the communiqué planning, and how this information translates to ordinary people. The people at the top aren’t very good at communicating what the ideas mean to the rest of us and I think we need layers of communication to push through the concepts and better understand the complexity of what is happening. I don’t understand it all, and that leaves me, and others, to have to trust our leaders. But do we and can we trust these leaders? What also struck me is that here was a gathering of great leaders from 20 of the world’s leading economic powers, and not too long ago we were all in a tense situation of possibly killing each other. It is really important that we are at a point in history they were able to sit down and talk to each other about the economy.”

The brief was a five minute talk based around an object that inspires you – the same as the Figures of Speech format that I saw at the ICA gala last year. I looked through boxes of old stuff for inspiration over the weekend but in the end chose something new, something that was given to me last week and which I fully expected to have to give back before I left: my accreditation pass for the London Summit – which describes me as “Blogger”.

I had a comfy fourth slot on the programme. I was preceded by Tom Lucas from UKTV talking about a buddha he gave to his mum and humility; Toby Moores from Sleepydog talking about a microphone, loudspeaker and amplification; and Frances Croxford from Jane Wentworth Associates talking about a book of “Beautiful Writings by Latin Authors” which she picked up in a bookshop when she was fifteen. I was followed by Jonathan MacDonald who talked about the Cluetrain Manifesto and how it changed his life.

For once, I did some preparation beforehand, in fact I wrote out what I was going to say in full. So I thought I’d post it here to expose my pretentious waffle to a wider audience. This is what I said:

This is my pass for the London Summit 2009 – the meeting of the G20 industrialised nations held last week. The bit of it that I’m most proud of is that it describes me as a Blogger. And that’s what I am. My business card says Social Media Consultant or Social Media Tart or Freelance Subversive depending on which version you have, but the bottom line is that I use a variety of media to tell stories and publish them on the internet where other people pick over them. And last week I was doing that at the summit.

Thank you very much.

Not everything went perfectly, but the problems were not of the obvious kind that could have been predicted and mitigated against. They were mostly things none of us knew about how the day would run, what the content would be and how a group of 50 bloggers would react to being thrown together to report on something so huge. The main feedback I gave to G20Voice was that I was very impressed by their flexibility and willingness to learn with us over the course of the two days we were together.

So there’s a bunch of things I think I learned in the course of the two days we had together that I’d like to work out and share here.

The only events I’ve covered before have been traditional conferences or trade shows. There’s always *something* going on, whether it’s plenary sessions, product demos or just delegates hanging around chatting at lunchtime, and so it’s easy to blog without very much preparation or knowledge of the subject area. You can do the standard in through the ears, out through the fingers liveblogging or get out among the people with a camera, jump in and ask open questions, following up with intelligent probes.

The G20 summit was not like that.

The summit happens in private, away from any reporters at all. They talk all day, perhaps have a little argy-bargy, but then emerge with a summary of what they’ve agreed – the communique.

I felt cut off. Cut off from the action and cut off from my online tribe because I was being boring – I had nothing of interest to say for most of the day, because nothing was really happening except the occasional entrance of a Minister or Celebrity Activist. I blogged during the day (and the day before) that I didn’t know what to do to be useful. I wanted to be like the other guys who seemed to know everything about everything and were, no doubt, writing Pullitzer Prize-worthy copy all day long. I kept thinking that I should be doing something else, but when I went and did something, I thought I should be back at the desk and online.

But just because it’s a news event, doesn’t mean you only have the day to publish stuff in. I’m lucky, I don’t have any deadlines or a target for how much to write or create, except those that I make for myself. And I was forgetting that I do have an eye for interesting stuff and so the behind the scenes content that I’ve shared with you seemed like it was a cop out, too easy, just hanging around behind other people being photographed and filmed. It wasn’t until I got it all out and had a look at it that I realised where the story was and that I had stuff that was unique.

So Learning Point #1 Remember you are unique and have a unique perspective. Be yourself and trust that you will be enough.

It helped me to have plenty of equipment so that i knew that when I did have something to report, I’d be ready. I had two laptops, one mainly for tracking stuff on twitter, flickr and the G20Voice site and the other for getting stuff done, writing, encoding video and uploading photos. I was lent an HG10 by Canon (thanks to Colin & Donna at 1000Heads) so I could shoot anything I wanted to. I was also lent an iPod touch and handsfree set (thanks to Best Before TV, especially Karen & Steve, whose touch it was!) so that I could record Audioboos – I like this a lot. I also had my flip camera in case I needed to just do something simple and quick, my N95 for backup photos, video and Qiks and my Edirol in case I wanted to do longer audio interviews.

The thing I’d forgotten was that I’ve switched to Linux on my two laptops since I last had an HG10 and I could have done without all the faffing needed to start from scratch in order to transcode from AVCHD to MPEG. I’ve now found Handbrake which is actually very good indeed especially once you have time to play around with it.

Learning Point #2 Take more than you need and ask for what you want and need. Make sure you’ve got all your software up to date and test loan kit before you get there.

Yes, I felt cut off. But surely I was on a table full of bloggers, just like me? Well no, I was actually on a table full of specialist journalists (in some cases operating in a tiny niche) who choose to mainly communicate online. They were mostly lovely, but there wasn’t a great deal of playful collaboration. There were few other media hacker types of the sort that frequent the Tuttle Club.

I quickly tired of us being referred to as “The Bloggers”. I think if there’d been a media hacker table or just a few more of the folk I normally play with, we’d have come up with something more creative. It might have got us chucked out or severely reprimanded, but it would have been more fun.

Learning Point #3 is for the G20Voice team (or anyone else doing this sort of work) and comes in two parts: a) All that bloggers might have in common is that they have a blog. and b) Focus the Briefing Day on helping the bloggers get to know each other, trust each other and collaborate and interact online (there’s a whole nother post on this, I think)

I was really pleased with the photos I took of the president at the podium. I know they’re all much the same and that people all around me were taking the same shot too, but I really like that I got them for my very own. I could not have done so if I’d done what I was told. Firstly, I went to the front of the queue when photographers were called. I took advantage of the fact that my pass said “Blogger” while others had, I imagine, “Journalist” or “Photographer”. I used the ambiguity to be a writer when it suited me and a photographer when that’s what I wanted to be. So I then just went up to the front of the hall with the other photographers. It was crowded and the press office guys were going back and forth trying to weed out people who weren’t official photographers. I felt a little inadequate with my little video camera, but I just stood my ground and avoided eye contact with them by looking at my viewfinder.

Learning Point #4 Be confident, use ambiguity to your advantage, go for what you want.

So by the Friday morning, I felt like I was just about ready to get started. I guess the overall point would be it’s OK to learn as you go, keep asking the question of how you can be useful and remember what you learn for next time.

Of course, the press room itself is “behind the scenes” of the summit itself. The 22 leaders and their delegations were off in the Red Zone working out the detail of what was agreed and published. Only occasionally would red-lanyarded people wander into the press & TV area to be ambushed by crowds of bored journalists eager for a story. But what I’m sure you saw most of was well-crafted, polished presentations of those moments and the pieces to camera on the TV stage.

So I’ve three bits of video that show you what’s going on from another angle.

First, here’s Simon Berry getting ready to talk to Bob Geldof. We’d spotted Bob talking to our colleague Todd Lucier and Nick Booth had encouraged Simon to go round and talk to him too and show him the idea of colalife. Nick filmed the real substance of the exchange here but my clip tries to show that even when the people filming and being filmed are fellow bloggers, there’s some further enrichment to come from seeing how it was set up.

Sticking with Geldof, I captured a little of him being interviewed (by someone in the studio) for Channel 4 News (I think). He’s a great performer, as I noted when I saw him at Innovation Edge and you see here the point at which the feed goes live to him and he launches into his spiel. I think it’s good to see what’s going on right next to the camera – can anyone find a clip from C4 to compare with this?

Even when we were in the briefings with Brown and then Obama, pretty much the same pictures were being taken throughout – the great man, at the podium – I was as guilty of that as anyone. So finally, if you watched the Gordon Brown press conference on the telly, you’d have seen a few flashbulbs going off. This is what it looked like from the floor where I was kneeling next to the press photographers.

My experience of them both was that they combined a startlingly deep knowledge of current affairs with the determination of the young to call the previous generation out on the mistakes that we have made so that together we can all put the world right.

They were a great reminder, if one were needed, that I’m too much of a grumpy old man most of the time.

[disclosure: DFID are a client of mine, I have advised their web team on using social media to get information quickly out of crisis areas. I'm not involved with the Youth Reporters scheme.]

I also asked Tom why people should care about what goes on at the summit and he explains the importance of what the bloggers were doing to help us all make sense of the high-level economic stuff from our own perspectives.

Tom is one of the earliest adopters of online social tools among national politicians and he uses them to complement the doorstep manner that makes him a popular local MP. I remember hearing about his early blogging through Tim Ireland in 2004. He’s matured well with the rest of us – he’s a top choice to follow on twitter, skillfully navigating the line between speaking as just another tweeter and speaking as an MP and Government Minister.

Tom sat with us on the G20 Voice desk all day, even when he was in danger of being crushed by the hack-pack when Bob Geldof passed by.

Todd was one of my fellow bloggers with G20 Voice. He’s a passionate Canadian nominated to be in London for climatecafe.org and he explains here just why it was so important that a bunch of bloggers were given accreditation to come along to the summit.

I only found out during the day that Todd is also a fellow seesmic-er. If I’d known and thought about it beforehand perhaps we could have done something together to get people talking on seesmic. I’m writing a post about the lessons we learned – one of them is how to get the bloggers to know each other better and ready to work together better before going into the event. It’s hard.

The video may need some fiddling with – I’ve not been used to using such a flash camera of late and the HD from the Canon HG10 I was loaned might still need compressing down a bit.