Tomorrow I will be in Lausanne once more, this time to meet the people from Bloggy Friday. It’s Switzerland’s bloggers and social media types coming together for a chat and the traditional fondue (or so it’s been for the past few weeks) and an opportunity to hear about new projects. Last month it resulted in me hearing about minsh and going to a demonstration of what the website will provide for users of twitter.
This morning I spent three hours chatting to people in Australia, Sweden and France via both twitter and plurk and it felt great and the reason for this is that it was personal. We hear so much and read even more about the social media and the social web but there is one fundamental flaw and oxymoron in this vision. That is that there is an utter lack of the social aspect.
Liz Strauss wrote about the leaves and the trees and that got me thinking of the Social Media autumn. It’s the time of the year when everyone gets back to work after summer and they no longer have as much time to be sociable, whether online or offline and as the trees remains so the leaves are gone. Of course in this context the trees are the social networks and the leaves are the users.
In 1999 I decided that I would spend 21 days without touching a computer once. That’s because I was in Tanzania for a trip during which we helped to build schools for children in the area. I had decided to do that because so many spoke about the illness of spending too much time online, of internet addiction. I came back from that trip realising one thing. It’s a way of life, not an illness or an addiction.
richard - Oct 5, 2008
I asked a friend how to get the invite so I’m not sure how to do it but when I find out I’ll let you know.
Richard, you’ll have to tell me how to join Phreadz. It’s quite Mission:Impossible ! Do you have invites ? Am i not francofou enough? Too young to know how to fly?
right :) as long as they come back to Seesmic everything is fine!
The Francofous are part of the seesmic community and can be differentiated by their ability to speak french and their avatars. Originally formed around Seesmic and twitter they are now migrating to both plurk and phreadz, two services I have talked about in the past. What is nice about this community is that it’s a core of 20-30 early adopters who move and try new communities as a group rather than individuals.
richard - Sep 5, 2008
i always wake up early after a good night out. Enjoying the fresh air today :-). What time did you end up leaving last night?
It was lovely last night, I’m surprised your up and logging so early today though…you had quite a bit to drink ;-) Maybe Trafalgar Square has that effect on you!
Well it all ended in tears for me actually as I was locked out of the flat and was pretty stranded til my boyfriend actually woke up and let me in…about 2am.
The first tweetup I went to saw a crowd of no more than sixty people. The twestival had many more. Enough to fill the Doon club. So many new faces but not many new people to follow. It’s fun to see how big the London twitter community has become. The usual people were there, sizemore, loudmouthman, documentally, danacea weaverluke and a few new faces like digitalmaverick, amandita, Poppyd and a few more people.
A good video looking at the evolution towards the fourth screen
Today I met, Gael Métroz, a guy who decided to travel along the trail of Nicholas Bouvier shortly after his studies. It was an opportunity to try the seesmic style of interview at the City Club in Lausanne. The idea is simple. Those doing the interview have a laptop with a webcam and a good internet connection. They go to film an interview with the laptop and the audience themselves ask questions from the person appearing.