Likemind Coffee morning in London

Reading Time: 3 minutesTwo 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.