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17 After the Event- Carrying the Conversation Forward

Byrichard

There are two key events I have been to since the beginning of summer. These are PodcampUK and the Twitter Meetup. Both of these events have been followed up by a continuing collaboration between participants.

The first event was the London twitter meetup. I went there knowing just two participants, Sizemore and Jess. Over the night I would end up with interviews with quite a few members of the London twitter community but nothing much would be done with this footage as a result of not having known that I would be doing these interviews.

It meant collaborating with Jess and getting an edit ready in the hope that GETV would use it. They didn’t so that was slightly dissapointing.

I met another individual. Nik Butler of Loudmouthman.com. Following on from a good conversation on the twitter meetup night we decided that we would collaborate on other projects. One of these is ongoing, Twittervox. Twittervox is a weekly roundup of the week’s twitter news in review. It’s had over 2600 views over that time with up to four live participants at once around the world ranging from the US to different parts of Europe.

That project has been featured by Operator 11 on a number of occasions which I would like to believe is testament to it’s good content.

Twittervox is also of note because it introduced me to Phil Campbell and his work. Since this was a few weeks before Podcamp UK it meant that I would know at least two members of the conference.

At Podcamp UK I got to meet quite a few of those who are part of the British podcasting landscape, from teachers to academics, broadcast professionals and hobbyists. This broad range of people would lead on to more projects.

There were some interesting conversations and presentations which brought me some new ways of seeing certain aspects of the podcasting stream of content creation. It would make me think of podcasting as the equivalent of Amateur sports in relation to it’s “threat to broadcasting.” Within a week I was sitting at the Frontline Club listening to Andrew Keen but that was written abo

I’m glad I met Documentally whilst at Podcamp because of possible future collaborations we may work on in the near future. As of yet nothing is set in stone but already I’ve met him a few times to work on three or four projects which you can find on his website and on a number of video sharing websites already.

From what I’ve described above what I’ve found is that the conversations from events are leading onto some interesting projects and that it’s been a good transition from the student life into the professional one. It’s been a great opportunity to meet some interesting people and through blogs, twitter and meetings in the real world the conversation is as healthy as ever. I feel I’ve gained from these events and their aftermath and look forward to participating to many more in the weeks and months to come.

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59 Twitter is Too Simple- Twitter is Just Right

Byrichard

Twitter is one of those things that’s really hard to explain due to it’s sheer simplicity. It’s a website that allows you to answer the “what are you doing question”. That is the initial phase. When you’re new to twitter you’ll be confused because you know no one therefore the codes and conventions are blurred. You may tweet once or twice a day and that’s enough. Over time you will look at what other people are doing and that’s when you move to phase two of twitter use.

When I first started using twitter I had no idea how to use it. i thought that it was a storm of 140 character postings that are completely unrelated. Some refer to it as microblogging but it’s not a blog. instead it’s a great tool for entrepreneur for two key reasons. The first is brevity. Anything you say must be summarised to 140 characters. As a result you’re efficient. The second factor is the interaction between twitter users.

If you take a look at my profile and my twitter block then you’ll see the ten most recent tweets in my public feed and what everyone within my circle are talking about. As a result of this you’re entering a communal environment. Out of those I’m following on twitter I know from ten to twenty of them, occasionaly meeting a few of them two or more times. As a result I know what they’re doing and they know what I’m doing as well.

Each one of us is in charge of a number of projects we find of interest. I’m a recent graduate therefore I tweet about one set of things. Loudmouthman and Documentally both tweet about other things that are related to their activities. Links help to get all of this information and work distributed to the right people. Most of those on twitter have at least one website and quite a few profiles on a variety of other websites. We’re embracing what’s called web 2.0 by many people.

It seems to be the tool of choice for entrepreneur to keep up to date with what everyone else is doing at the time. Just take a look and you’ll see this for yourself.

Twitter is a great tool for it’s brevity and it brings together a great number of content creators who are having a conversation across borders and timezones. It’s boundless in that it can be viewed from the mobile phone to the Itouch to the computer. It’s versatile and quick and I’m going to continue using it for many months to come.

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The Brogan hundred

Byrichard

Chris Brogan recently wrote a list of one hundred things he would like people to blog about and I would like to make my way through the list. It may take 100 days but it may take fewer. It depends on how busy I get and what interesting things are there to sidetrack me.

The first question is about Facebook and how we use it as individuals. In order to answer that question i must describe the four groups of friends I have on the website. The first group is made up of many friends I have met over the last three years. This includes university friends for the most part. Within this group of friends are many complex friendships with many overlaps between networks of friends and there is a true sense of community in the real world sense. We share photographs, videos, events and more.

There is a communal history which makes for some insider jokes. Groups such as “The curse of the N18” reflect how this network of friends has grown use to catching a nightbus home after a long night of fun in the centre of London. If you’ve ever taken the bus you’ll understand why the group gets such a name.

The second network of friends is made up of friends I’ve known for more than three year but may not have seen for a decade. These are the highschool friends from life in Switzerland. Almost every single one of these friends has been to study at University and completed that phase of life and is now moving into the professional life. They are spread globally although there are the occasional communal group meetings that occur where we all meetup. This group is part of the International community and they are not too hard to identify.

The third group of friends are those I know through other social networking websites. This group is about people whom I got to know through websites such as the Flipside back in the days when the Internet and World Wide Web were the realm of anonimity. Everyone had a nickname but through facebook that nickname has disappeared.

The last group is that of people I have met only briefly and know relatively little about. This is due to two reasons in particular. The first of these is that “we randomly facebooked each other” or simply that we met and chatted for a few minutes in real life without taking it any further so far.

What this means is that Facebook, for the most part, is a network of close friends that I have known for a number of hours in the real world. They are people I have shared adventures and travel with, good nights out and many boring/interesting lectures with. As a result of this keeping up to date with what they are doing allows me to see what we have achieved  as a group of friends. In brief I use Facebook almost exclusively to keep up to date with what real life friends are doing thus the reason for which I avoid adding “randoms”.