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The Co working space in Lausanne (ECLAU/FB) is an interesting idea for freelancers and those who have some work to do but do not want to work from home or a cafe. There are desks and couches, a meeting space and more from which individual work and team work can be done. I was there for an Apero last night and got to meet a few of the people. At the moment there are four people there using the space full time and another who go there occasionally. For those like me who go there very occasionaly we can drop by and work there if we so desire. It’s easy to get to from the motorway and apparently not too hard from the center of Lausanne. One of the members is a cat, apparently he loves to come in through one window, sleep on the couches and distract certain people before walking out through a window at the other side of the space. What’s interesting is that the participants of L’Eclau think of him as a sort of alarm clock. He’s there to remind them that they should take a little break from the work they were doing. I know quite a few people in Lausanne now so it might be an interesting place to meet some people when there are some collaborative efforts to be done.

This morning whilst tweeting with Fahran Rehman we decided that we would like to organise a twitter event in London with a difference. Twestival and twinterval are great ideas but we’re thinking of doing something over a period of two days that would be like a podcamp but over two days and we need your ideas to make it worthwhile. Already we have 27 people on facebook interested in the project and another 6 so far on tweetcamp. It would take place in London in the not too distant future normally. The reason for it taking place in London is that there are over 10,000 twitter users theoretically based in London already so we might expect at least two to three hundred to come along to participate. If you’re interested in participating then put your name down and let’s get the project underway and see how much interest we can gather.

I believe I’m living the social media lifestyle, that is that wherever I go I have both my mobile phone and my ipod touch. As a result I am never more than a hotspot away from the world wide web and it’s content. In Switzerland I’m online as I hike through the mountains taking pictures which I can then upload to flickr for you to enjoy. That’s also the reason I decided to start a new blog called The Social Media Lifestyle. The purpose of the new blog will be to explore the thoughts and conversations I have with non social media nuts and why they are not interested in being as active as we are. I have based my first serious post around a conversation in the TGV from Paris to Geneva and some overheard comments at a cinema in Switzerland. What I hope to achieve through this blog is to shift the conversation away from how advertisers can promote brands and products and instead promote the adoption of new social tools such as Facebook, twitter, seesmic, flickr and plurk to name but a few. We’ve got to find the best way to explain to our audience why and how the social media will improve, rather than degrade their lifestyle.

Here are some old images of Geneva in Switzerland taken over a century ago. You can see how the land used to look and how it looks now. You can see some of the old streets and the contours. Now it’s a mass of buildings and the relief is hidden. [caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Geneva many years ago”][/caption] Then Such a contrast between the two. And the gare de Cornavin And to see how it is now For more images of the set.

Today I had the pleasure of meeting Ornit Barkai, a documentary producer working on a documentary about the social media. Her project is one which I am particularly interested in because she is taking an exploratory approach through interviews to see what the social media are, She told me that she has documentaries with Jeff Pulver and many other interesting social media people. This also includes some friends of mine, Phil Campbell and Chris of Ourmaninside.com. For part of the night I took her camera and was filming footage for her as I knew the people and which were the key moments. The seesmeetup itself was great in that I was able to meet at least twenty to twenty five seesmicers I already knew and help make these friendships at least a little more passionate if nothing else. In saying passion though I mean that we know each other in the physical world rather than the two dimensional ethereal existence brought on by people behind computers. You have to realise that the social media are not a nine to five thing. It’s not that you walk away and the social media fade away. The social media, are by definition about friendships, not about platforms, not about products, not about anything else. it’s not something that you should step away from when you walk away from your computer. It’s something that you should experience at all minutes of the day. You know that I overheard a conversation by some young girls speaking about instant messaging on the mobile phone and one of them was surprised this was possible. She’s younger than me and she’s unfamiliar with this. You, social media people, should think about this. If you’re working at getting people to listen to your brand and feel more connected you’ve got to take the time to converse with everyone around you. By converse I don’t simply mean answering when they message you. I mean that you have to take an active interest in who they are as individuals. You have to keep an eye on what’s going on at all times of the day. By this I don’t mean that you can’t do anything but social media but you do need to show an active interest. If I write about one topic or another as a tweet I really appreciate seeing people respond and that’s not just my feeling. A lot of people feel that way. I’ve seen it quite a few times. I really feel the social media need more people to think of them as a lifestyle, communicate all the time, because if you don’t you’ll be flooded. Communicate one or two messages every hour an your audience will not rush to write to you during the ten minutes you’re online. It’ll help you not feel flooded. I was really enthusiastic about the documentary idea although when thinking about the way the social media and it’s people are at the moment I feel slightly dissapointed. It’s not everyone that dissapoints me, just certain individuals.

richard - Dec 1, 2008

Dan: I will do, decided to start a new blog at the same time, in parallel with this one. I’ll keep an eye on your blog by the same opportunity. Dean: It was nice to meet you outside of England for a change, away from the usual anglo saxon environment. I did create a secondary twitter account but for the moment I don’t use that one much although I may need to push it back into service for those that don’t like me to saturate them too greatly. I’ll let you know when it’s up and running once more.

Leweb for me was about two things, meeting my seesmic friends and meeting new people. It’s through meeting friends that are familiar to me on the web that I had the best times. In particular I enjoyed meeting with Alex, nutrisionist 2.0 as is mentioned in his tagline. What was great about meeting him is the amount of hours we spent just chatting about one thing, then another. It was fun to get to know the person behind the persona. What was also fun was meeting someone like Tiil. I hardly knew him until Leweb but he’s a friendly person as well with some interesting ideas and a different point of view to my own. In particular it was interesting to watch as he described Seesmic to people that were not yet familiar with the social network. Of course there’s Marion. She’s the one that asked me whether I actually wanted to come to Leweb and for that I’m grateful. It’s not often that you get invited to such an exclusive event to meet with so many interesting people. After this of course there’s Whitt and Clare. During the actual conference we didn’t get to chat much but over the past few hours we were in Paris enjoying some organic food before some macaron at Ladurée and some very thick hot chocolate. That was a nice place. What was interesting about this meeting, aside from the food was the conversation, just hearing about things from a different angle and seeing why certain people should be appreciated more than we give them credit for. Of course it was a pleasure to meet KDFA. He’s often on seesmic filling the timeline and he’s known for “Le Bar est ouvert”, an occasion which happens on a daily basis when he opens a bottle of wine and the community follows suit for a more convivial atmosphere. Then there’s Dean. I know him from a few meetings in London and at a podcamp in England and he’s another interesting person to talk to. Another person that has some ideas and is trying them out. He’s the one that got John Cleese to give an interview to seesmic in seesmic style rather than the traditional kind. Then there are Seb and Virginie, two seesmicers I see a lot because they live just 20 minutes away by car. They were both working on providing some coverage of the events in the form both of pictures of participants and the layout as well as of interviews that should be online shorty. Then of course you have Valvert, Baptiste, Patrice Gabin and many other seesmicers who were present as well. They’re interesting to meet. I also met some other people of interest working on a number of projects. Kate carruthers is an Australian friend I’ve been tweeting with for many months now and I finally got to meet her at Leweb and that meeting was pleasant. We sat in one of the lounges and it was an opportunity to discuss the social media and explore, at least to some extent how we picture the word within a broader context. Two words she liked to use together were Social computing. It’s not that I understand in depth what she means but it’s nonetheless an interesting branch of thought to be explored, in parallel to my own ideas. Sandrine Passeriaud is a person I’ve met at a number of events in London but I never really got to chat to her till leweb. It might be because, as we were in a french speaking Environment, and away from London, we felt more comfortable. That’s another occurence I’m happy about. Taylor Barr was often present on the seesmic booth but I didn’t make one connection yet. The day before he was meant to fly out to Leweb his plane was cancelled and so he was delayed. We exchanged a few videos on the topic and it’s only two days later, during the seesmic dinner that we understood that we actually knew each other from seesmic. That’s why seesmic is a great tool. It’s about meeting a few people you may not have known beforehand, even if at first hand you don’t remember why you knew someone. Hermione was one, Stephanie booth was another, then people like Dan martell. We talked as we walked from the seesmic post Leweb dinner to the techcrunch party and that was long enough to get an understanding of what we both do. I’m speaking about this because I didn’t stay more than twenty minutes at the techcrunch party because it was overcrowded and I was too tired to spend much time present there. As much as networking is about the event and the organised parties, it’s also about the walking from one location to another. There are many more people I met but I’m pretty tired now and I wanted to mention by name or nickname those that I found most interesting to meet during Leweb. If you’re not mentioned it’s not that you’re not interesting. It’s that I need to get to know more of what you do before being able to speak with any authority on the topic

Piotr - Dec 2, 2008

Looks like a hardship assignment!

Loic Lemeur giving an interview to a journalist with a nice big seesmic logo behind him.

There’s also the social side. Hermione of Techfluff.tv and Alicia L’americaine . There’s a video I should upload of Hermione dancing with three mariachi but I’ll do that once I get access to more bandwidth.

The stage isn’t even ready at Leweb but already the networking started this evening as a few companies presented their companies and what they can do. At the same time i got to meet two London friends as well as some others. It’s seesmic that invited me so there’s a good chance you can find me at the seesmic stand at various moments of the day. As I’ll be online from there you should see my tweets and even my seesmic videos. I know I don’t seesmic much anymore but this particular week may be a little different as you might guess. If there’s anything you’d like me to find out more about then let me know and we’ll see what I can do to help. What I’m looking forward to is meeting the people behind the avatars whether from twitter to seesmic to a number of other platforms.