Despite large parts of the UK trying to blow away with the attendant travel chaos that staggers those from less civilized climes, we had more than 25 hardy souls braving the elements from as far away as Bonn (yes, as in Germany) and Cardiff (yes, as in Wales), for free beer, wine and nibbles (Thanks, Fleishmann Hillard!) and some incidental chat about social media.

There is quite a churn in these meetings so far, though some suckers keep coming back for more, so we started with round-the-room introductions. There was a wide variety – media consultants, media creators, bloggers, photographers, marketers, entrepreneurs, geeks, visual-thinkers and many more.

We then broke into smaller self-forming discussion groups for the bulk of the time we had together. Broadly summarised there were people talking about:

• Living life completely online vs offline, the problems associated with life-cacheing mixed in with speculation about the shelf-life of YouTube videos and timeliness of social media generally.
• Visualisation as a global language – ask Dave Gray for a picture of this one 😉
• The variety of perspectives and channels in using social media for marketing (pictured above), the problems of measurement and the difficulty of matching ‘channels’ and ‘audiences’ ( not to mention the difficulty of using those words or finding others to use…)
• Where does trust come from? Knowing the source? From the content itself?
• Global perspectives – diverse and complex developments in other parts of the world and the predominance of the mobile phone rather than the desktop as social media tool.

I plugged membership, pointed people to the London wiki and the mailing list as tools to keep in touch and encouraged people to come up with suggestions for topics and activities. I’d very much like us to *do* stuff at these sessions as much as *talk* about doing stuff. We’re going to go with the Third Thursday of the month as a regular slot, though we may shift venue around Central London – 15th February will include a post-Valentine speed-datingnetworking spot 😮

cross-posted from the Social Media Club blog

Five years ago today, before this blog was a twinkle in my eye (hey, months before i’d even first heard the word ‘blog’ drawling out of Euan‘s mouth – “bloahhhhgh”) I made an important decision.

I decided I was going to stop drinking alcohol. Not at all unusual for me in the second week in January, but this time I stuck at it and five years later, not a drop has passed my lips, one day at a time (sometimes shorter intervals were called for – “If I can just not have one this lunchtime…”) I know I’m not “cured” or stopped for good, just that I have no intention of going near a drink today.

I had learned early in life that I had a fairly huge capacity for drinking. I reasoned that as I could, therefore I should. But I was really hurting myself (quite obviously and spectacularly at times) and (less consciously, but nonetheless materially) the people who knew and loved me.

When I first stopped, I wanted to be the one who did it all by myself. I’d smile and wink at people who admired *my* ‘willpower’. However, what I want to make clear above all is that I have not ever done this on my own. It’s been a journey of slowly lettting down my defences until I was willing to admit what I had previously found absolutely unacceptable: that I might occasionally (heh!) be wrong and that I needed to ask for and gratefully receive the help of other people who (for this moment at least) knew better than me.

This birthday means as much if not more to me than the belly-button day. I’m FIVE today, so watch out!

Wow!

photo by arquera

Sometimes life gets better. Sometimes it gets worse. Sometimes it just gets plain weird and this is one of those times. So yesterday I spent finishing off editing audio for Online, trying to chop up a whole bunch of video shot last Thursday into something useful, walking round Mayfair and Knightsbridge with a couple of bottles of wine and a camera and then listening in on the live feed and the backchannel for Leweb3 (also known as Le Meltdown, Le Politics and Le Tsfuckwiththeusers). While the snarking about Loic raged, I got a phone call from Jeffrey Walker in California.

Now it’s been a while since a software company president called me from San Francisco, so I took his call. (btw Dave Winer had just announced in the leweb backchannel that it was raining in Berkeley so I dropped that into our conversation 😛 ) Turned out Jeffrey wanted a record of the goings on at the Atlassian User Group at the Hilton Tower Bridge. I was just about to leave for there anyway, so I took my one-man-social-media-empire bag along and did the business. Karma++

There are photos on flickr:

There are three podcast files:

Scott Farquhar on the Atlassian Roadmap.
Lee Bryant from Headshift on their use of Confluence with clients (including a generous mention of my contribution to a recent project).
Mike Cannon-Brookes on how Atlassian use their own software in-house.

Video interviews with Mike, Livio Hughes and a selection of Atlassian users will follow as time and my brain permit.

[Update: Sam Sethi just announced via Twitter (now that’s weird) that he’s been fired for not removing Loic’s comment on the TechcrunchUK blog. scoop by Ben who knows a thing or two about messing with SixApart]

I’ve already posted a bunch of pics to flickr. I probably have something to say about the day, but it won’t come out in words at the moment.

For now here are four white guys (sheesh – there goes my diversity merit badge) each giving their own take on why it’s important to keep talking about podcasting.

Alex Bellinger, Kevin Anderson, Brad Gibson, Adam Curry

Last night I took my son up to the Pump House Jazz Club in Watford to hear his Grandad playing. I have been very slack in ensuring that my kids have fully appreciated their musical heritage on my side of the family.

When I was a child every Sunday meant a trip to the Shantasea (later The Jug, now no more) in Albert Street in Central Birmingham to hear Big Syd’s band, a group of local jazzers playing in a mainstream side of traditional style – it’s where I heard many of the standards over and over again, one of which is usually going around in my head. And many Saturdays, especially in the summer, were filled with fetes, marches and shopping centre openings.

Later, Tony joined the New Delta Jazzmen and then the Zenith Hot Stompers for twenty-odd years (I cut some of my first public performance teeth with occasional guest vocals). His description of his current activities is:

“I now play 3rd trumpet in the 11-piece band Harlem, 2nd trumpet in the Big Bear Stompers, 1st (and only) trumpet in Jon Penn’s All-Star Hot Five, lead a ‘Condon-style’ band called Kaminsky Connection and play in ad hoc trios or quartets, usually backing singer Judy Eames.”

and it was with the ‘Frisco style Big Bear Stompers with Judy on vocals that we saw him last night. Another treat was to hear Keith Nicholls outside of a dance band and to see him and Eve no matter how briefly.

I last went to the Pump House about 20 years ago to hear Tony with the Zenith. The club doesn’t seem to have changed at all on the inside (outside a plethora of superstores has sprung up around it) and the crowd of regulars were heartily vocal in their appreciation of the Lu Watters and Turk Murphy offerings.

[bonus: in the bar, tony spotted a rogue apostrophe]

tags: jazz & my dad & tony davis & judy eames & watford & frisco

This lunchtime I had to be home to greet some very nice eastern european workmen who were coming to fix up my letterbox (we’re having a whole revamp of the common areas in Dolphin Sq)

What I didn’t realise was that they were also removing the catch on my cubby-hole (where I put my rubbish to be collected, nightly) and replacing it with a little knob to match the big shiny knob on my front door. I did polish my knob a few weeks ago and it came up spiffingly (though I didn’t get any admiring comments from the neighbours) but now it looks really lacklustre compared to it’s little brother.

So which do you prefer – my big shiny knob or my little shiny knob?

Not much time for original blogging today – so a little trip to the archives instead, especially for those who are relatively new here. For some reason, this song feels very apt at the moment…. (ignore the rambling bit at the beginning, unless you’re interested in what podcasting was like back in the early, early days)

Even though we’re all now in our forties, Rufus, Adrian and I cannot escape the fact that we are still the same little boys, just a bit larger, greyer and in some cases, balder.

I trundled up to York on Sunday evening (thumbs down to GNER for their wireless not working, thumbs up to Best Western Hotels whose wifi was not only working in my room and all over the hotel, but was free too). I was there to cover, in blog form, an I&DeA conference on Rural Excellence.

I’m currently selling this service as “Rich Records” and Mark Hucker, one of the agency’s most forward-thinking senior managers (thanks for the fiver, Mark) asked me to use their communities of practice software to pull together something for people to talk about during and after the event. Since the CoP stuff had difficulty embedding video initially (it’s OK now) I put up a wordpress blog to run in parallel so that people could see everything together – which means that you can go and have a look yourselves without having to go through the registration with I&DeA. Of course, if you have a real interest in rural issues or other areas that the agency deals with, I’d recommend signing up with them anyway, but for the casual visitor go look at the blog for now (until I get asked to take it down).

Anyway, another thrill of the two days was to get to meet and interview Prof. Heinz Wolff childhood hero from his time on Young Scientists of the Year (shockingly little of this show survives on the interweb) and The Great Egg Race. Prof. Wolff gave us an entertaining after-dinner speech on the need for greater risk-taking in society (including some potentially hair-smouldering pyrotechnics) and then he addressed the main conference talkign about using traditional aspects of rural society to solve 21st Century urban problems. I particularly liked the idea of using old ladies to staff call centres – “Oh, yes Uncle Harry had that problem too, and do you know what we did with him? Well…”

After everyone else had gone home on Tuesday evening, came the least-planned, but most heart-warming bit. I made a last-minute arrangement with the author of Knitting Yoghurt, whom some of you will recognise from her blog and whom I haven’t seen for 20 years, to dash across from York to deepest West Yorkshire for an evening of Yorkshire Pudding… meat-free toad in the hole, getting to know her delightful children (a discussion on which was the toad and which the hole and an exploration of German vocabulary for fruits and vegetables) and then sitting by the fire and reminiscing over a lovely cup of tea. In the morning, after meeting the assembled playmobil folk, I had to get on a train at 10.50 to be back in London, but it was a lovely, spontaneous thing to do – clearly those red pants are working.

I’ve been advised by several people that I need to be more exciting… or something. I think what people see is inconsistency – they know I’m a pesky imp inside, but the outside tends to be a little more subdued.

It was suggested some time ago, that a little gesture I might make to myself would be to have some red underpants. No I don’t really understand it either, but I’m open to suggestions and so, albeit after a little while – OK 2 months – of procrastination, I headed this morning to Marks & Spencer’s flagship Marble Arch store and found me a pair of red boxers.

Co-incidentally, it’s coming up to the anniversary of that whole G-Room shower gel/shampoo thing so for those of you who’ve missed seeing me naked, I present to you today, The Man in Red (Pants) with music by the man in black.