Temporary School of Thought

January 6, 2009 Lloyd Davis 5 Comments

Here’s something Tuttle did for me.

Last Friday, at the first, select, meetup of the year, I got a tweet from @jjsanderson saying that a friend of his was trying to get in but couldn’t find the back door. Typical stuff for me on a Friday. A moment later, Vinay Gupta came up the stairs giggling. It seems Vinay giggles a lot. I suspect it’s probably an important part of his persona as Swami Havabanana too but that’s a story for another day.

So we get talking and it turns out he’s into providing yurts in developing countries; hexagonal yurts built out of 9 rectangular panels (six sides, three cut diagonally in half for the roof) of whatever you might have to hand – a hexayurt if you like, in fact that’s what he likes and it’s his twitter handle.

We get on well, we all have a good laugh. He and @debbiedavies hook up with @jjsanderson over video skype on his acer aspire. Another tuttle win. And so later on I follow him on twitter and check out his blog. Lots of yurt and overseas development stuff. Then on Sunday I see that he’s pinged the Tuttle blog with a post. While he doesn’t say much about his Tuttle experience but he does talk about going to a squat in Mayfair and what’s going on there this week. And then he posts some video. Oooh. Nice. Interesting.

Now I’m back at work really but I’m taking it fairly easy so I resolved to go along today and tomorrow and see how it’s rolling. It’s rolling. I missed the laughter workshop I’m afraid, but got there just in time for a lecture on Polish History (that’s of Poland, not Mr Sheen) which included a participative play about a king who got eaten by mice. I was an uncle, one of three, who were poisoned and out of whose rotting bodies the mice came. Bloody typecasting!

Then we went into another room (it’s big, it’s a bloody big Mayfair townhouse this squat, with servants staircase and everything) for a juggling workshop. Workshop leader, forgive me if I’m wrong but I thought your name was Jacob – could well be but there did seem to be lots of Jacobs – anyway, you got me juggling more than I’ve ever done before, thank you.

Then it got too cold and late and I needed to do some y’know grown-up stuff so I said my thank yous and buggered off. I’ll be back tomorrow when Vinay is giving a talk on erm…. yurts I think.

So yeah, it is in a squat and all of the people there looked suspiciously as if they were at least half my age, but they were all very very friendly and nice and genuinely interested in finding stuff out.

Here’s some juggling:

What I'm doing

processing…

January 5, 2009 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

I’m drawn to processing It reminds me of my earliest programming – there was a limit to what interesting things I as a 13-year-old could find to do with text on a command line but when displays got just that little more sophisticated you could make pictures. Pictures out of lines and dots. Joining dots to make lines. Turning pixels on and off. Making graphs of mathematical functions. And then there was colour. Wow – 8 glorious shades of colour.

With just a little learning and lts of time for experimentation you could do a lot. Now though it feels like you’d need to know an awful lot in order to make something pleasing. And now that I can display full colour, hi-res photographs on my screen, photographs that I took seconds earlier on a phone with it’s own hi-res display (!) the old stuff doesn’t quite feel as satisfying.

I think I need a good project to get my teeth into, somewhere we haven’t been before. Maybe this isn’t the programming environment for that kind of bold experimentation, or maybe there’s something that this sort of simple graphical programming has been waiting for.

What I'm doing

Oral his-stories

January 5, 2009 Lloyd Davis

We like to talk, don’t we? At least some of the time. Chatting, telling stories over and over in different ways and with different embellishments, all the while helping us to work out who we are and who we’re not, what we might choose to be or do next. But also who we’ve been, who did what, what’s been done (or tried) what’s been talked about before and so what’s fun to talk about again.

I’ve found this history bit interesting in online communities. It’s not as important to some people as it is to others but I often find myself playing the role of reminding groups of what was said before and why, as a reminder of where we’ve been together, why we took certain decisions together or else to help out a newcomer who’s repeating the mistakes of the past, going down a real blind alley.

I was reminded of it when coming into contact with some of the “old-time” seesmicers at LeWeb. It’s only a year since the peak of seesmic for me, but a lot of what we were talking about is lost. And I noticed this at the time that as the community grew quickly there were a set of first behaviours or topics that were obvious when yu were new. But because seesmic didn’t have an inherent way of recording what we’d learned, the understanding and the rituals and traditions that came about could only stay alive as lng as the people there were willing to keep talking about them and reminding each other of them. The traditions were loosely held, it only took a few people to make up a new tradition and for a few people to leave for a once fiercely guarded tradition to be discarded.

There were many reasons why my seesmic activity tailed off, but one of them was that a greater proportion of my time was spent on watching new people go through the initial phases and I was left either waiting for them to catch up or spending my time helping them to catch up more quickly. Less time for me to be creative and just enjoy the flow.

There sees to be a difference for example between talking to people at Tuttle about how it all started and what I think of it all, between that and the tangible stuff on the web that you might find if you were bothered to research it. Does that mean I need to write down more of what I say to new people every week? Or has the saying f it been enough, are there enough people who know the story in rder for it survive without any other effort? Or might that lead to a distorted story? Is it important? Is it valuable? What would be lost if it were forgotten? And what is the definitive story anyway? Is there one? Or is it that my version is dominant because of my role and repeated attendance?

Dunno.

What I'm doing

wordpress.com support for flickr video

January 5, 2009 Lloyd Davis

oh, thank you.

How to embed Flickr Video on wordpress.com

What I'm doing

audioblogging again

January 3, 2009 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

Realising that it’s 4 years since I first bumbled into podcasting, I’m overcome with a zealous need to return to the form.

So I got myself a new recorder (minidisk and linux no play nicely) and went for a walk.

Everything is easier these days except, well, y’know, finding something interesting to say.

I see, for example, that wordpress.com now provides a handy shortcode that displays a player:

but here’s a link to download if that’s the bag you’re into. And it should turn up in the RSS giving a surprise to those still subscribed through iTunes or some other podcatching mechanism….

What I'm doing

2008 in pix

December 31, 2008 Lloyd Davis

January: The Seesmic gang came to town and we had dinner and a little snooze in a room that was to become much more familiar over the year.

February: The Tuttle Club/Social Media Cafe starts meeting regularly at The Coach & Horses in Greek Street.

March: Took a trip to Berlin to cover a conference and sample the local political graffiti.

April: Flickr started hosting video, but as yet they and wordpress.com haven’t worked out a way of embedding them 😦

May: I didn’t vote for Boris

June: was interesting, again.

July: We got 2gether in Shoreditch and put the world to rights.

August: I finally made it down to the Bude Jazz Festival.

September: Dead mouse at Tuttle strengthens our resolve to shimmy down to the ICA

October: Back to Berlin for a bonanza barcamp and a more human-sized Web2.0Expo.

November: I got to meet my newest nephew Sethan (seen here with his Granny)

December: At LeWeb in Paris, not everything was going down the toilet.

What I've Been Doing

We Die

December 29, 2008 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

Nipped into Woolworths in Epsom today. This corner was part of my Saturday morning ritual for quite a while. Every week, the small Davises and I would go to McDonalds for lunch and then into Woolies to spend their pocket money. This corner was the Barbie corner – every week, we’d decide whether R wanted to save her money for something bigger next week, or have another Barbie. Pretty much all of the time it was another Barbie, but it took a lot of thinking and a lot of walking around that corner, looking at everything that was on offer. Now it’s gone.

Worth re-reading the first bit of Cluetrain. The first words (the title of this post) were ringing in my ears while I walked around.

As a bonus, my feed reader had this christmas cracker from Nick Booth. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes! (and like all the best posts it’s gotten richer with the range of comments – read ’em all)

What I've Been Doing

Yet Another Year

December 23, 2008 Lloyd Davis 3 Comments

Oh blimey, I seem to have turned fourty-four. It just makes me laugh again. My practice today is to see deeply that the numbers mean nothing – not that I’m unaffected by it, but that it carries no meaning, no weight.

I had fun today. I tried to keep up with all the Happy Birthdays that came my way by mail, twitter, facebook, plaxo (!) but was unable to say thank you directly. So thank you all again, indirectly for making the effort to say hello, it means a lot to me. I had a slow-starting day, then lunch with Katherine in Soho, then I went and took part in #twitpanto – so much to be written about that, it was an anthropological treasure trove. Then I went shopping and came home with enough wii-related goodies (yes inc. wii-fit) to keep me chortling over the next few days. Spent the evening with the kids – ribs and chops (no wings today) telly and present wrapping stuff.

I have a wonderful life. I’ve found something to enjoy in every day this year and I have so many lovely people to be grateful for.

So thank(s for) you.

Photo: cc-by Annie Mole on Flickr

What I've Seen

A little bit of politics for you

December 16, 2008 Lloyd Davis 4 Comments

Lovely to see the JFDI crew heading for Thomson Reuters again yesterday for #askDC a little talk by David Cameron and then a Q&A that promised to include some questions from Tweeters. It was a re-run with extra manpower and sparkly bits of the Gordon Brown do in the same room at Canary Wharf a little while ago, when Christian qikked the PM thus getting a 2 or 3 second scoop on the “live” internet feed and the BBC.

I love it – I’m a news junkie – I can’t get enough of this stuff and these guys supply it very well. It also fits very well with some work that I’ve been doing within Government that I *still* can’t talk about properly, but hopefully will very soon.

So what next?

In following the pattern of traditional news media with live coverage they show two things: firstly that there’s so much more that mainstream media could do, if they could be bothered to learn and let go of their ideas of how things have to work. I think this is the main reason Reuters are doing it, but (yes there’s a but) what it also reminds me is that there’s a whole lot more to news than instant live coverage and, even more importantly that there’s a whole lot more to social media than getting a few seconds scoop on the big boys.

There’s a limit on how live you can get. So in certain circumstances we can get a scoop pretty easily just by happening to be in the right place at the right time or to be witness to something that otherwise would not get any coverage because the benefit from the story doesn’t outweigh the cost of sending a 5-person camera crew. However, when it comes to set pieces like yesterday, the marginal speed gain from live-streaming from qik is wiped out by the drop in quality – the added value is in the contextual stuff that together the guys were creating while running around and pulling together stuff from twitter, flickr and qik.

What the social stuff is best for is the slower, longer-term story-telling, the relating. The repeated application of this kind of reporting is what really wows people, one-offs are fun, but ultimately unsatisfying, because we don’t, we can’t get under the skin of a story in one morning. Yesterday we got a very very broad look at a very shallow event – I’m interested now in how we get depth as well as breadth.

Once Cameron had finished speaking, BBC News fell back to the studio and analysis from a specialist political correspondent. I think we need now to be looking at how we provide that sort of added value, of contextualising stories, breaking them down and looking at them from a range of perspectives. And we get our context by writing and creating other content tangentially to the story that the subjects want to tell. The social reporter interviews the bit-players, junior officials and also-rans because what they think and say tells us as much about the main story as what the official speech-writer managed to squeeze into a time and space designed specifically for conveying a precise message to a relatively small group of hacks. Then by making all the content available, not just the annointed bits that push “the message”, we, the reader/viewers get to filter and re-mix to help make sense of it all.

Things are getting really cool.

Photo: Sizemore