What I'm doing

Oli Barrett’s Whistlestop Tour 2008

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One of Oli Barrett’s favourite things is to get that initial buzz and release of energy when you meet someone new. He’s also terrifically passionate about entrepreneurship, especially among young people – remember Make you Mark with a Tenner?

To give a kick start to Global Entrepreneurship Week, which starts on 17th November he’s off on a worldwhide Whistlestop tour over the next three weeks, running his famous speed networking events with his equally famous speednetworking whistle across 12 countries to talk entrepreneurship around the globe. By the way, if you’ve ever done a speed networking slot with me, you’ll know how much fun this can be – but Oli is the man who taught me everything I know.

I grabbed a few minutes with him this morning at his launch do in Covent Garden.

All the details are at the Unleashing Ideas site and I’ve given him strict instructions to blog and tweet as much as he can.

You’ll find pictures on the flickr stream for unleashingideas
Video will be on the unleashingideas YouTube account and Oli will be twittering as theWeek

Keep an eye out for his stuff as he bounds around the globe – and especially if you know anyone in Mexico City or Santiago, Chile that could help Oli out, give him a shout on oli@unleashingideas.org

What I'm doing

Social Media Empire – Lite

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One Man Social Media Empire LiteSome time ago (yikes it was nearly 2 years ago!), I went through my One Man Social Media Empire bag and showed you the kinds of kit I could carry around with me for social reporting. I think it’s time for an update – because a lot has changed.

1. Portability of kit & device convergence
2. Mobile data connections
3. Social Media Friendly Web apps

all of these add up to me carrying a very different (and less physically stressful) set of essentials.

The kit

I still use the famous one man social media empire canvas bag (although I now have two, thanks to Helen) But now the stuff that I have to have for blogging on the road or at events has shrunk down to what you see in the picture plus the N95 that I used to take the picture, naturally.

1. Nokia N95 – this is the powerhouse – it replaces the laptop, minidisk, DV camera and stills camera in the original kit bag. Wow. For once the advertising copy undersells the product – “This is what cameras have become” and this is what computers, and audio recorders have become too.

2. Notebook and pen – I still need to scrawl – it’s still the most efficient method of data capture, regardless of the seeming redundancy of retyping – you don’t retype everything and somethings you only look up once – also sometimes you’re only writing something down in order to keep someone else happy. All that and what I wrote on Creative Choices the other day about longhand.

3. IGO portable bluetooth keyboard – for those times when my thumbs run out of juice – ie anything more than a caption or bunch of tags. If I have to write a paragraph in the field, it’s worth cracking this baby open. It took a little configuration love (and double-checking by @whatleydude) to get it talking to the N95 but it was well worth it. I wish I could say that this whole post was written with it but it wasn’t, because I’m sitting on a comfy chair at home – the post I pointed to above was typed on it though – in Starbucks.

4. Power lead – still need this. Will be augmented with a spare battery and charger for serious gigs where power’s harder to come by. Would like to try a solar powered charger, but suspect I wouldn’t get much out of it in the UK given our current climate 🙂

5. External mic and gubbins to connect it to the N95. Unfortunately you can’t just plug a mic straight into the phone and use it. Fortunately, you can buy a couple of adapters for a few quid from Maplin that will connect a mic to the TV-out cable that came with it. A bit cumbersome but very useful in the noisy circumstances in which a social reporter often finds herself.

Mobile data connections

I’ve got an “unlimited” data tariff from O2 and somehow through loyalty and asking the right questions, I get that together with plenty of minutes and texts for £22 a month. Hurrah! I’m waiting for the letter telling me that the unlimited isn’t as unlimited as I thought because I’ve over done it, but it hasn’t come yet, despite some serious goes at it. One of the benefits of the N-series is the wifi which means that I actually don’t upload massive amounts very often – only when it’s vital to get something up immediately, and I’m finding that that’s less frequent than I thought. Although I vaguely understand the difference between EDGE and 3G when they pop up on my phone, it doesn’t bother me much – if I *need* to get online without wifi, then I need to do it regardless of the signal.

The other point about this is that it’s so much easier to see whether there’s wifi available with a phone than having to crack the laptop open.

Apps

So not only has everything got smaller, more portable and easier to use, but the apps on the phone and in the cloud are so much better too. For example, the video editor on the phone means that I can cut stuff, add titles and upload without transferring to a PC at all – for simple stuff this is great, it just cuts a huge amount out of my workload.

Using Shozu, I can easily upload to flickr, moblog, phreadz, blip.tv and 12seconds and it handles auto-GPS tagging most of the time.

Tweeting through m.twitter.com is fine regardless of connection. I have a bunch of bookmarks in the browser for search terms through search.twitter.com as well as my facebook and flickr. I use the gmail app for mail – again, made even easier with the iGO keyboard.

For video that absolutely positively has to be streamed live I have lovely qik of course, though I’m finding that the times when I really need to do this are less than I thought – still for instant interaction it’s fantabulous.

Scribe means that I can now blog directly here from my phone (preferably mains powered and with the keyboard) a-may-zing.

Still to solve.

I need to work out the best way to make all of the content that ends up on the web fit together – what order do I need to do stuff in to make sure that it goes to blip, phreadz, twitter and flickr to get maximum exposure and opportunities for conversation? Also, (gulp) when I’ve managed to optimise that, how do I keep track of it all and take part in whatever conversation arises?

How do I get the most out of my battery and what’s the solution, is it spares or portable charging?

Scribe is a very early beta it can be a bit flaky – also I need to be able to easily pull in pictures from flickr and generally integrate with my web2.0 bits.

If I do need to take video onto the PC for editing, y’know complicated stuff, it still does take a while to deal with – is it time to get a mac? (ducks)

Uncategorized

Better plumbing at No. 10

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26072008959The backlash against the new site from the Prime Minister’s Office has begun. Neil McIntosh just popped up in my feed reader tearing it apart for limiting conversation and some poor planning/research around the branding of the video channel. And then Tosh minor chimes in on twitter: “@DowningStreet – turn on your comments”

In my view, what’s happening here is that we’ve got some better plumbing installed, and while that in itself does a little to raise the quality of the drinking water, there’s so much more to be done and part of that is recognising that plumbing isn’t just about delivering water, it’s about providing a circulatory system to support and enhance something that’s going on already.

I’m not certain that just turning the comments on is the way to go, immediately. Of course it would be great to open up the conversation online but I do think the whole thing is still too fragile to withstand the shenanigans of people like this.

The work now should be to build some more solid two-way relationships between No. 10, online journalists and bloggers. My first question would be why press people like Neil haven’t been more intimately involved in the project already. Many people are still impressed when the guys on the @downingstreet twitter feed reply directly to questions and comments. When Obama was here and I was hanging around outside, I had a significantly different experience simply because we had a feed coming from inside and questions were answered in real time. Yes, our government departments are too opaque, but from where I’m sitting, I see much greater will to move towards real transparency than we’ve had in the past. This is a small enabling step towards it – let’s support it rather than knock it down straight away.

What I've Seen

Huddle Gov Muddle

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Huddle make some great collaboration software. I first met Alastair and Andy at Open Coffee more than a year ago and they’re very nice chaps. I’m also a fan of Mike Butcher. But when I read Mike’s piece on Huddle’s study of opinions of “public sector workers” I hoped that he’d just skimmed the press release badly and regurgitated it without thinking too much – entirely understandable – it’s nearly holiday time.

However the press release is available on the Huddle site too. Though the actual study and important details of methodology are not, we are told that it’s the result of talking to 202 local authority officials a few weeks ago.

My gripes are:

  • The use of “public sector workers” to describe the study sample as in “more than half of public sector workers (52%) are disappointed with lack of innovation in IT services”. No. More than half of the officials asked maybe, but 202 people in local government are not necessarily representative of the public sector as a whole.
  • Government with a capital G usually means central government and the executive in particular “One third (32.5%) believe the Government’s IT problems could be solved by buying from local, UK-based companies” So were these local government people asked about the Government’s IT purchasing policy or their own?
  • The confusion of unwillingness to adopt social software in local government with Central Government IT overspends.
  • No details of what sorts of local government officials these were – either in terms of service area or in terms of seniority or responsibility for decision making.
  • An assumption that IT departments are the problem – is there evidence that those authorities that have banned Facebook have done so entirely on the say so of IT? Surely it’s more complex than that?

I want to make it clear that I’m sure I probably agree with most of the findings of this report and other people would find some clear facts about staff opinions in this area valuable , it’s the sloppy reporting that I find annoying – can someone who actually knows something about the subject give us a decent summary?

What I've Been Doing

Glimpsing Obama

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26072008964On Saturday, I was at Victoria station on my way to somewhere else and I saw on Twitter that Barack Obama was just about to arrive at Downing Street to meet Gordon Brown. I decided to take a detour on the no. 24 to check it out – having seen the pictures in Berlin, I assumed that Whitehall would be closed off and we’d be diverted around throngs of the placard-waving Obarmy-army – but actually it was all very quiet.

The pavement is being dug up all along in front of the Treasury and FCO buildings as well as in front of the entrance to Downing Street itself. So although there were the usual tourists milling around there was certainly nothing like a crowd but the prospect of catching a glimpse through the gates was very slim indeed. I walked back towards Westminster and saw that a bunch of people were gathering in King Charles Street, so I wandered down to have a look. It turned out that this included some hardcore supporters including the organisers of the local meetup group formed to focus Londoners (and US expats) on supporting the senator from Illinois. The thinking was that the Obama party would come from Downing Street through the FCO courtyard and along King Charles Street to go to the Palace of Westminster to meet the Tory high command. The hope was that BO himself would go walkabout and stroll down Whitehall.

I settled in to wait and wait. I passed the time on Twitter and Qik – getting the first updates and pictures from @DowningStreet and getting help from @jkerrstevens while spotting the security services talking to their cufflinks. George Osbourne seemed to come out of the Treasury (?) in a Google t-shirt and on his bicycle.

A BBC TV crew said they didn’t know if the party was coming this way either but took their position in front of the crash barrier – when asked, they explained that otherwise they’d only be able to see as much as we could see. We knew that the press conference was due for 11am and so were ready for action when we saw the journo’s come strolling out. The crowd, including some delightful little children, started chanting “Yes! We Can!” and got ready with their cameras and phones for the moment when the man himself would surely follow them and walk towards us. But then suddenly a motorcycle escort and convoy of 4 people carriers zoomed out of the gateway, past us and through the gates onto Whitehall.

Momentarily I looked up from my phone which was *not* taking pictures on burst mode as it was supposed to be and saw the familiar, smiling senatorial face as he gave a little wave to the excited but slightly disappointed crowd. I went over to Parliament but again everything was happening too far away and through grills and railings so left him to meet with a man who can’t look after his own bicycle but may be running the country before too long.

Despite the small turnout I can’t imagine that any presidential candidates in previous election years can have generated such excitement on the streets of London. The papers said that they were keeping the visit low key to avoid Obamamania – I’m sure that if he returns here victorious next year, we’ll settle for nothing less than a decent walkabout. My worry continues to be though that the task of getting him elected and keeping him alive for four years in the face of America’s underlying racism seems to be quite a toughie.

london, What I'm doing

Another fine mezze you’ve gotten me into

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I’m going to be playing at Darbucka again with the lovely Lawsons next Tuesday. If it runs the same way as last time, I’ll be on near the beginning with a short set of 3 or 4 numbers. Even though we’ll probably start later than advertised it would be good to get there earlier rather than later to ensure you get full ukulele exposure.

I haven’t finalised my playlist yet but I’m intending to do stuff I didn’t do at the first one (or at Interesting08 ) unless there are any special requests.

Here are the facts, ma’am:

When: Tue Jul 29 2008 07:00 PM
Where: Darbucka World Music Bar, 182 St John’s Street, Clerkenwell, London, LONDON, EC1 4JZ

Not clear about whether there’s an entrance fee but you’re welcome to throw money at my feet as usual.
Pic by Benjamin Ellis on Flickr
cc nc-by-nd

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