What I'm doing

Social Media Club London January Meeting

I’m leading the meeting of Social Media Club in London this coming Thursday. It’s free and refreshments will be provided.

Of course the first rule of Social Media Club is TALK about Social Media Club.

All are welcome. If you don’t know whether you’ll fit in, this is what the SMC about page says:

Social Media Club will bring together journalists, publishers, communications professionals, artists, amateur media creators, citizen journalists, teachers, students, tool makers, and other interested collaboraters. Essentially the people who create and consume media who have an interest in seeing the ‘media industry’ evolve for everyone’s benefit. We are more than just USERS, we are the reason the tools exist – we are the people who communicate our thoughts and ideas near and far. Join us and let’s shape the future together!

Excusing the gushing uplift (americans… bless!) at the end, if you see yourself described in the earlier part of the paragraph and you’re in the Greater London area in the evening of Thursday 18th Jan then come along to the offices of Fleishmann Hillard at 40 Long Acre. For those not in the know, Long Acre is the street that runs (roughly) along the top side of Covent Garden and is where Covent Garden Tube station is. Nearest tubes are Leicester Square and Covent Garden.

We’ll kick off at 6pm and be done by 8.30. No doubt some of the more sociable types will continue conversations in the local bars, eateries or strip joints.

Please let us know you are coming by registering here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/43902313 46 people already have!

This is the third meeting – to see reports of the previous meetings search technorati for social media club london

The agenda for Thursday is on the wiki – it’s your meeting, so if you think this is a load of rabbit droppings, get in there and make some other suggestions.

tag: & & & &

What I've Been Doing

Sobering thoughts

3 Comments

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

What I've Seen

The power of the PS

2 Comments

Evelyn Rodriguez:

p.s. I’m very serious when I say that 2007 will be the year that folks get that social media will be likened to a communal table rather than a printing press. That social media has more in common with barbershops, trading posts, village bazaars, coffeehouses, piazzas and plazas, eighteenth century Parisian salons, troubadours and minstrels, theater, and Homeric poetry than it has with newspapers and television.

And so it is… and so it is

What I think

5 things you didn’t know about meme

8 Comments

minimeThanks Rachel for tagging me. I’m not a very secretive person (you may have noticed) so this feels quite hard. I’m sorry if you’ve heard any of these before.

1. My nickname at middle school was BB which came about on a trip to France when I was sitting on a coach in tight jeans, an older girl shouted – “God, ain’t that kid got big bollocks” It stuck.

2. I have ‘A’ levels in German, French, Latin so spent my 6th form going slowly mad from translation fatigue. Actually that’s not quite true, I spent my 6th form hanging around the Swan Theatre, getting laid and getting drunk which I count as the main reason why I got an ‘A’ for General Studies.

3. When at drama school, I particularly enjoyed the stage fighting course, but as a result of not paying attention in the “learning to fall” sessions I dislocated both my shoulders (on separate occasions). This is why I may refuse if you ever need carrying up the stairs and one reason among many why I’m unlikely to be seen bowling at cricket.

4. I have never taken a driving test. I had a course of lessons when I was 19 and one this summer, but I have never felt ready or motivated enough to go through with the formalities. This year could be the year… or maybe it couldn’t!

5. I was thrown out of my first student digs in Guildford just before Christmas 1984 because my landlord who was a milkman was sick of meeting me on the stairs coming in from a night of debauchery when he was going out to work. He pushed a note under my door saying “This is not a halfway house. Make sure you and your things are out of here by the time I get back from work today” I did.

Even harder, is thinking of 5 other bloggers who haven’t been tagged yet. That will have to wait till later because….

today’s my birthday. I’m 42. That just feels absolutely mad. I’ve never felt so disconnected from my solar age. It just doesn’t seem to matter one jot to me – not that I feel some other age, just that I’ve come to see that the number is totally irrelevant.

What I'm doing

Quiet? QUIET????

3 Comments

If it’s quiet on this blog of late, the partial explanation is twitter.

It’s kinda diverting the energy that usually goes into blogging. It is a temporary diversion as I’ve also got some big posts to get out too, but they might come slowly over the festive season.

So if you’re pining for Lloyd-related updates, come and join me here: http://www.twitter.com/LloydDavis sign-up, add me as a friend and wa-hey! Xmas 2006 will be remembered as “that time we’d just started twittering”.

[ha ha! Just got back and realised i hadn’t switched from ‘draft’ to ‘publish’ now that’s what i call *quiet*]

What I think

An inside job

1 Comment

I want to make clear that I don’t say the following from any position of superiority. People who know me well know how rude and controlling I can be when I don’t get my own way.

But it occurs to me that working at Six Apart must be tough.

Mena to Ben Metcalfe at Les Blogs 2 : “You’ve been an asshole to people all day”
Loic to Sam Sethi about Leweb3 : “Sam, you’re an asshole”

If that’s how they speak to customers in public, I hate to imagine how they speak to each other behind closed doors when things get rough.

What I've Been Doing

Sometimes it gets plain weird

1 Comment

Sirens in KnightsbridgeSometimes 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'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.