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Likemind Coffee morning in London

Two nights ago whilst having a conversation about technology with Fooz on twitter I got a message from Jamie about the Likemind coffee morning in Central London that she thought might be of interest to me. I decided that I would go and it was worth the effort. From what I gather it’s held once a month. It’s a meeting that started around 0830 and continued till 1030 where a few people from various backgrounds in the media came to talk about a variety of topics. It ranged from Facebook and those that influence discussions to Qik, twitter and seesmic. Of course other topics were also discussed. I talked to Mark of Wishful Thinking who wrote the e-book Time Management for Creative People. He has some interesting ideas and his blog can be found here. Whilst talking to him he touched on a number of interestin topics of which i would like to find out more. One was copyright and music for example, recommending a blog or two I should read and from the conversation I am interested in seeing what he’s been writing about. If I’m not mistaken (and I did meet quite a few people) I also talked with Lauralynne about the challenges of finding work but also about twitter, a subject I know well. Arriving at almost 400 tweets she has a very different to the whole twitter thing. When talking to people many of them are not sure what it’s about yet and that’s why talking to her about it was good. I talked to her about how society is changing. Previously when you met people you would meet them in person, be friends with them for a few weeks or months and one of the two would move to another country or another city and so the link would be lost, hence the utility for something like facebook. It then progressed onto a conversation about twitter. I explained my view that twitter is not just about saying what you’re doing. Another person who was listening in asked us to define twitter. I defined it as a multiplatform chatroom that you can take with you. I talked about the key difference between IM and twitter. With instant messaging you chat with someone and you’re telling them about things as if you’re talking and you expect an answer. With twitter it’s about the day to day life. Through following your stream they’re going to come through a lot of noise depending on how often you tweet. That noise is what makes conversations easy when you meet twitter friends. You’ve got three topics ready because you know about the good and bad things currently going on in their life. It means you’re friends offline. Live in a city like London and you meet these people and a physical world friendship can occur. The motivation behind this point was the notion that technologies are helping to seperate people and I wanted to refute that argument with the points made above. If you go through some of my previous posts you can follow the progression of these ideas further. I heard Mark Iddon talk about his blog about multiplatform content and it sounds interesting although I have not yet had the opportunity to visit the site. Another person I came across was Damiano whose blog Nitmesh sounds interesting. It is described as : “A comment on the imploding chaos of the convergence that hopefully entertains, enlightens, educate, reminds and shares ideas that might stand out and make a remarkable difference”. Overall the meeting was good, productive. I arrived feeling both inspired and shattered. Normal, I got to sleep at 4am and got up at 630 because I enjoyed the thought of being able to have more conversations in person rather than via twitter or seesmic.

The Seesmic Dinner

Gia - Jan 5, 2008

Oi! I sat across the table from you for the whole end of the evening! We ‘interacted’… sheesh. ;)

LOL. You tell him! :) - nah great writeup richard. Sorry never got to talk Gia. Maybe at a future one? Thanks! Phil

There should be another event at the beginning of February so that Kosso can join. I’ve also heard from Fred2baro that the French may have one simultaneously in Paris. Could be interesting.

The Seesmic Dinner

Last night I had the good fortune of attending the social media dinner at the Coach and horse in London. It was yet another opportunity to meet people like Lloyd, Sizemore, Phil Campbell, Deek, Rupert Howe, Jess and many other seesmic participants. It was also my opportunity to meet some new people. I met Vinvin and Johann from Seesmic for example. They’re part of the Seesmic team in San Francisco. Loic Lemeur arrived a little later so it was great to meet him to. It’s not everyday (well actually it’s almost everyday) that you meet CEOs of startups. It was also Phil Campbell’s birthday so that added a little something to the party. He presented a new method by which to use eesmic which looks interesting although at this moment in time it is more proof of concept and I’ll wait until it’s developed further before discussing it in depth. I was able to try out the Nokia N95 layout and user interface for seesmic on that night. Loic lent me his phone and I was able to record and post one seesmic post. So far I still think it’s a little slow so i prefer to use the web interface. I got to meet the charming Kittenfluff (unless it’s an imposter as is alleged in a seesmic video from the early hours of this morning;-)) and had a nice time chatting with her and playing around with two laptops, two seesmic accounts and a little seesmic camera ping-pong. I also got an exclusive interview about some mysterious january flies and why the London light is the paper of choice to use as a fly swatter There’s a great picture of me taken by Thayer Warzabidul on Seesmic Take note that There’s seesmicAIR and Seesmic being used in this shot. Two speeches were made, one by Loic Lemeur and the other by Gapingvoid (Pardon the poor sound quality.) There’s one of Sizemore’s videos too. Fooz, Giagia, Jason Jarrett and two or three others were present but I did not get to interact with them as personally for this event. This is a fun group of people are fun to interact with and I’m happy I went to the event. i hope to have many more to look forward to.

Twitter is broken and I want an alternative

Twitter is a great idea poorly executed as a result of which I wish there was an alternative. It’s a chatroom that can be used on multiple platform which is what makes it so interesting. The managment however have decided to cancel Api support, or at least throttle it. As a result of this conversation is floundering. As a result of this action twitter has become notoriously unreliable and people are no longer able to keep up to date with what people are doing quite as easily. This has resulted in many of my favourite tweeters being far more quiet. Others have felt the need to leave the service. I would love an alternative to help me keep a constant wave of consciousness of what friends are doing. The 140 character model is good. It’s a very efficient way of dealing with information. We’ve got many alternatives but none are conversational yet. I love the conversations and how you overhear so many things. I would pay for an alternative that has a far more stable track record. Give me that alternative. I’m disappointed not angry.  There’s a really good product there but it’s so badly implemented I’m losing interest in twitter.

SeesmicAIR and mobility

Last night at Four AM I got an alpha release of SeesmicAIR from Critter and I started to play with it. My initial response was good. It’s fast, intuitive and it doesn’t a browser. Today as I had lunch I went mobile with my laptop, relying on battery. Those who follow my blog know that I’m using a macbook pro and those that follow my tweets know that I was happy about something. Usually when i seesmic I go into the user interface and I get told that my battery will last about an hour and a half to an hour as I seesmic. Today though I had almost three hours of battery life whilst being able to keep an eye on seesmic. That’s because SeesmicAIR is running off Adobe and rather than use most of the CPU to work it’s running with far fewer resources. As a result I can lurk on seesmic without killing the battery or running a hot machine. I saw that both Loic Lemeur and Johann are on the Eurostar and I was able to comment on seesmic and keep an eye on reactions. Vinvin answered my question and it’s good. I love the fact that I don’t need to worry about battery life anymore. I’ve had time to prepare lunch, have lunch and then still have an hour and a half of battery life to write this post. I really enjoy having the ability to do this. It means that I can do something in the background. In brief SeesmicAIR is just as useful as I thought it would be.  It’s still a little buggy but that’s normal when dealing with Alpha.

Blog Wars at the Frontline Club in London

Blog Wars is a documentary taking a look at how bloggers influenced the political debate in the state of Connecticut. It’s 58 minutes long and covers some interesting points but that’s not what I’m going to write about. For me what was interesting was seeing who was present. For a start I didn’t expect for the venue to be full. I expected to see only a few people but that wasn’t the case. Most of them didn’t look like bloggers. Their phones weren’t out to tweet and their laptops weren’t in site. From the questions I think this assessment is correct. I’m going to use my twitter notes in order to bring out some of the points I thought could be of interest. My first comment was about people sounding passive rather than active about blogging. In other words they are looking at the process of blogging as readers rather than producers of content. This is interesting since the cost is low for blogging. One of those involved in the production of this documentary did tell me at the end of the session that he loved reading blogs but that it was far too time consuming for him to write anything. A second point that was made is that of deep linking. Someone in the crowd brought up the comment that whilst in Mainstream media all the information must be prepared in advanced and accurate with blogs we get a person’s opinion and due to the ability to link to those documents or sources it is up to the blog reader to look at issues in more depth should he desire this. Some attention was placed on the forged document about Bush’s record but not much of note was mentioned. A question about the difference between British and US blogging was brought up and it was brought up that US blogging is far more fun and exciting than that of England because of the debates. There was also a comment about how the tabloid press in England can already dissent against those in influential positions. As an aside to this attention was brought to how blogs are helping to chart Brown’s deciline from public favour. Some time was taken to see just how influential blogging can be and there was a feeling that had the Swift Boat story in the US been taken more seriously and had the issue of forged documentaries been followed up the impact would have been far greater. One of the problems with bloggers was that one woman doctored an image which meant a loss of credibility for one of the candidates. I was amused by one person’s comment about how blogging is live and instant when I’ve already seen the efforts made by twitter users during the New Hampshire and other primary votes in which Barak Obama got a clear lead. Anyone remember Obama girl… some blogs showed why he progressed in the polls. (Look these details up. This is simply a summary and commentary). The point is that Twitter may play an important role over the next few months so people should keep an eye on this new method of disseminating information. Overall the conversation was interesting and it felt good to have experience of the topic discussed. I’ll look forward to more of these events.

The Macbook Air

I really wanted a small device mid way between the ipod touch and the macbook but Apple have decided to come out with a thin rather than small device with five hours of battery life and a solid state drive. These are great features but the device is so incredibly limited that it’s not interesting for me. I’ve got a macbook pro and it’s a great machine for anyone that wants to do video editing. I’ve also got an ipod touch which is great for twittering and keeping up to date with current affairs. One of these devices is great for computing, the other is great for browsing. What I wanted is a small machine that’s easy to carry, along the lines of the powerbook but I’ll have to wait a little longer. The key limitations I see with this device are the need for an external optical drive, only one USB port and a phone jack. That’s great for business men who travel a lot but what about the rest of us. If you plug in the USB drive how are you going to plug in anything else. If you’re like me you charge your ipod and your phone from the laptop because it’s convenient. The price is also prohibitive. It’s a luxury product that doesn’t fill any new market niche. Let’s wait and see for new devices. I will drop by the apple store and play with it of course and give you a hands on review.

The Francofous Seesmic Skype call

Kmeron - Jan 1, 2008

was there, left at like 4am… great thing not planned, and as u said richard, loads of different topics, nice community idea, nice moment :) and yes ledretch, ur a francofou don’t worry ;)

A lot of things in the air yesterday night, we were pretty close and not so anonym, just us, alone in the night, just voice to voice. Funny. Thank you Richard to report this.