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My old secondary school was recently demolished and while that took a little time for me to digest I have to admit that its demise probably came as a relief to the locals. It never had the best reputation, but what I lost in terms of education did gain me a sense of eerie familiarity the first time I saw Battle Royale.

When I was a kid the only interaction we had with other schools was at the end of summer when kids in blue uniforms would try and kick the living crap out of anyone wearing a maroon uniform and vice versa.

For a pessimist like myself it was a wonderful surprise to stumble across this Classroom 2.0 project on Hoeben’s blog:

Initially, we asked students from all schools in India and London to exchange questions as audio files and then edit them in audacity or GarageBand to create a podcast. Here is an example of five Q&As:

“Well, families are quite important in England…”

The idea that kids in India and the UK can get together and build stuff like this is not only very cool, but perhaps the first steps in finding answers to some of the questions raised in Shift Happens:

As I’ve said before the emphasis for me with the above video is not on how we compete with developing countries, but how we can pool the enormous potential.

Collaboration 2.0 anyone?

Penny talks to Steve Lawson, a new media enthusiast & solo bass player, and the result is one of my favourite podcasts ever. Just jump straight in:

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Steve talks about the moving from performing other peoples music to writing and how he was lucky that he always had geek friends to draw on.

“Curiosity turned me into an early adopter without even knowing what an early adopter was…”

The audience took him along from step to step, from having a site, to playing solo gigs to releasing albums. I particular enjoy the way he pulls away the curtain from the wizard controlling the conventional way of approaching a career in music.

“The music was part of a narrative that i was in charge of… I’m looking at the world and I’m playing what I see… what social media allows me to do is to tell my story and invite other people to contribute to that”

This is brilliant stuff and not only great advise to any budding musicians, but to anyone wanting to strike out in their own field. And he even has a delivery room story

To paraphrase: the return is larger when you get the opportunity to tell your story. The conversation is where the longevity is…

Photo credit: Steve Lawson by Documentally (used with permission)

This time Penny talks to Janet Parkinson at the Tuttle Club. Through this conversation and the next one I began to see the importance of narrative in Social Media. Janet’s story is a brilliant one as she moves from disparaging feed back to setting up a brand new sector for her business. Great stuff!

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Podcast notes: Janet first became aware of the need to bring the audience in five years ago. Simply rebuilding a website resulted in double the page views ie. double the customers. Moving from a non tech position to a position of understanding not only the technology, but how it can be used.

Simply asking her audience for help, lead to a podcast which eventually lead to a podcasting magazine! The importance of global voices: by tapping into her love of language and people from around the world her work now had an international reach. This lead to a whole new arm of business.

That all this started because her original site resembled a Christmas tree is priceless

I figured it was time for something a little more interesting than just me posting away on here so it’s my great pleasure to add some sterling work by Penny Jackson. She’s started to interview some of the people who pop up regularly at the various networks here in London (and beyond) and while you may have heard these already at the Creative Coffee Club website Penny agreed to allow me to re-post them here. With her permission I’ve now archived her work on the Internet Archive and OurMedia as the first step in building a large collection of these Social Media Stories. In time I’ll also provide full transcripts and I’ve already been talking to Penny about how we can develop this line of work… so watch this space

When I was listening to these interviews a few nights ago I forgot my iTunes was still on random until the theme tune to Sesame Street kicked in as Penny signs off:

Come and play, everything’s A-OK / Friendly neighbors there, that’s where we meet…

How wonderfully apt. So here’s the first (of three I’m posting today) in which Penny talks to Euan Semple and Toby Moores:

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Podcast notes: The conversation takes in the tribal system through to the industrial revolution and now we’ve arrived at social media how there are fresh opportunities to find other like minded people. The way we are all traditionally educated (wrong = bad) and why it’s now easier to throw ideas around and let others test them. In short, we trust our network.

It’s pointed out that businesses are conversations already, but now we have to allow different voices in. The time for interruption is over - it’s time to listen. This leads to Penny asking a question that I hope we can come back to on the NON blog: Are we in the midst of a Social revolution?

There’s a great analogy of regular business practices (right up to Microsoft) being run along a trench warfare system and some great observations on why ‘experts’ are sometimes wary of jumping into the fray of a free flowing conversation. It also echos some of Bob Geldof’s Innovation Edge talk and why someone in a third world village with access to a mobile phone and a social network can be more powerful than someone behind a wall in the City.

I’d be amiss not to add a link to Sue Thomas as she’s mentioned in the conversation and has some wonderful things to say about all of this and much more on her own blog.

Thanks again to Penny (and Euan!) for putting up with my emails as I stumbled through this whole podcasting malarkey.

Or How YouTube got its groove back (for me anyway).

These days I jump from one video platform to another and because it was Seesmic that first wooed me to the possibility of online video I’ve tended to ignore YouTube. I’ve just become convinced that this was a mistake. I did have a little alarm bell go off a while ago when I found out about this project to use a community to make a zombie movie. YouTube having a community was news to me. All I ever saw were a handful of good videos, a lot of mess and a truly anti-community inspired comment fueled torrent of badly spelled abuse. And yet here was Bryony tapping into her community on YouTube. I had to wait for Seesmic to come along and get in there early to find something similar.

One of several videos that I did first appreciate through YouTube was The Machine is Us/ing Us. I’ve been following Mike Wesch’s work since, as it taps into the reading I’ve been doing around Ken Robinson (I never bother linking directly to Ken Robinson’s website because ironically it’s hideous and a pain to use), Network of Networks of course, the Cool Curve and a small large stack of notes I’ve been making. Today I saw a new video go up on the Digital Ethnography website and it’s a keeper.

It’s not short though. In fact it’s almost an hour long, but trust me. If you only watch one thing today watch An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. Don’t be put off by the length or title. It’s important, funny and heart warming.

It covers the impact of YouTube and the importance of how we connect, the importance of Creative Commons and self generated organisation as the new model for a distribution network that we’ve created.

It also points out how all that money ($3.6 million) spent on Super Bowl ads was beaten by a guy in his basement in Kansas collaborating with another guy on the Ivory Coast for no money at all. This I think is key to what everyone involved in Web 2.0/New Media/Social Media is attempting to do. It’s not rocket science, it’s simply bringing the right people together at the right time regardless of geogrpahy and timezones, ignoring the traditional routes which usually hemorrhage money.

Mike defines media as the mediating of human relationships and that line alone made me happy to be working in this field. That he went on to talk about networked individualism and the importance of the invisible audience leading to context collapse was just gravy. This is really important observational work into a medium that is largely ignored, treated like traditional TV or just ripped off my marketeers.

Mike understands and more importantly manages to reveal the paradox that with online video everybody is watching at the same time that nobody is there, that the most private becomes the most public and how wonderful that can be. He also offers a very concise explanation of the ‘go die in a fire’ comment storms that put so many people off YouTube.

And despite the length and that this could have been a very traditional style TED conference video, Mike roped in his students and broke the talk up into endearing but important work culled from YouTube itself (and he even finds a way to allow his students some fun, extra credit and thanks).

I decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55 minute presentation. This is the result:

Crossposted

Here’s something to jot down in your diaries for October:

The aim of SocialMediaCamp London is to gather people from all walks of life, levels of expertise and industries together to meet in a social environment. There will be presentations, panels, brainstorms, experiments and mashups. There will be whatever you decide, because it’s our joint responsibility to make the most of this opportunity.

Sounds like fun. And I especially like this idea:

use the weekend as an opportunity to try something you’ve never done

Nothing like working a little to the left of your comfort zone to acquire new skills

For further details subscribe to the blog and be sure to follow Vero on Twitter.

Good thought provoking post by Chris Hambly on the problems of ganging together:

never before have we been able to seek out such vast extremes of ideology in one place. On the Internet there are no mechanical forces preventing us to segregate, we have no house to sell, we are free to indulge in our extremism…

This is an interesting choice of subject and one that’s obviously of equal importance to all the good stuff that we achieve by coming together. And yet the focus tends to favour the latter. Personally I prefer to talk up the better aspects of the world I work in than acknowledge some of the crap that goes on out there, but I’m beginning to think that this is naive at best and foolhardy at worst. I’d rather know about the negative and meet it head on than hope it will fade away only to come back and bite me later on.

Cyber bullying and stalking are probably the most obvious detrimental uses of new media, but just recently I’ve seen seem some really dark rallying of people and technology. That’s something I’m still deciding how to handle.

I haven’t spoke to Chris in detail about any of this, but via Twitter he did mention the importance of a Network of Networks. I’d like to think the setting up of this kind of event, one where many disparate groups come together in real life will lead to more walls tumbling down and more common ground discovered.

Or maybe just a badly choreographed Sharks vs Jets face off ala West Side Story Anchorman.

I’m still insanely optimistic in what can be achieved with Social Media and believe there are no limits to what we can accomplish on the Internet, but it’s important to recognise that for every feel good story contained in Here Comes Everybody there is probably something a little darker brewing on /b.

Also a lot of walled communities come into being through a kind of accidental evolution - often these walls are built as a byproduct of the group’s activity rather than with the purpose of directly keeping others out. I’ve personally been involved in groups in the past that grew at such a pace that it sometimes took a good hard look from the outside to see how quickly we’d fallen into cliques, inclusive language and preferential skill sets. All barriers to healthy growth.

This is exactly why I always try and follow as many people as possible on Twitter who live and work well outside of where I am, both geographically and career wise. I tend to learn a lot more from the people forging ahead outside my comfort zone.

Now I can’t foresee any of the networks so far mentioned on this blog in danger of going feral (unless the coffee runs out at Tuttle again) or being even slightly rude to outsiders, but I do stand by the idea that more integration across the boards is a good thing.

This very evening I’m looking forward to the Moo bash because it’s going to do (I hope) exactly what we’re hoping to achieve with a Network of Networks event later in the year. People from all over coming together through one common factor - in this case the oddly shaped business cards we’ve all taken to our social object orientated hearts. It will be interesting to see how many people mingle away from the groups they already know. Do come and say hello if you spot me. I’ll be the one trying to make new friends without resorting to a Daniel Day Lewis impression (or a single Moo card - I just ran out, doh!).

Chris also raises the issue of:

a serious lacking in critical skills within social media, a fundamental flaw in the system, cult-like blind faith is fucking dangerous, and there will be ferocious venomous spitting when opposing extremes come together

You only have to dip into Twitter during a Steve Jobs key note to see blind faith in action. Cory Doctorow just reviewed a book that I subsequently ordered myself that seems to address some of these issues. It’ll be interesting to see if a more inward focused criticism picks up any traction once we’ve finished having a pop at the easier targets of old media and PR while slapping each other on the back for being ‘rockstars’.

Chris also seems to have a post on bridges planned so do keep an eye out for that one too.

Photo credit: PANDILLAS DE NUEVA YORK by mueredecine (CC license)

I’ll be posting regularly on here from today, but it’s certainly not a one man show. At this stage I’m not even sure which direction the blog will lurch in, but I’m confident it will eventually spin off in as many directions as the individual networks we’re hoping to provide an umbrella for.

Things I want to do in the short term are:

• Get more people blogging here (that means you)
• Get some podcast and video posts up (just installed the relevant plug ins)
• Bring in content from the other networks (when and where applicable)
• Arrange a ‘common grounds’ coffee club meeting (so we can find some… er… common ground)
• Never use bullet points in a post again (ugh)

So if you want to get involved, meet up for a drink or have any opinion at all leave a comment (that would be nice) or drop me an email: mikesizemore@gmail.com

Cheers!

I finally started reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, but am already underlining parts that jump out at me. For example:

Collective action… is the hardest kind of group effort, as it requires a group of people to commit themselves to undertaking a particular effort together, and to do so in a way that makes the decision of the group binding on the individual members. All group structures create dilemmas, but these dilemmas are hardest when it comes to collective action, because the cohesion of the group becomes critical to its success.

So I guess we need some cohesion. Time to reach out to the initial networks I mentioned and see if we can find some common ground. We’re planning to run a Network of Networks event later in the year, unconference style, so it’s time to get this particular ball rolling. There was a quick discussion around this at CCC London last week and it seemed a good idea as a first step to get some of the names behind the networks together for some coffee and a conversation around where we can take this.

For some reason I was reminded of the brilliant opening to Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet:

On an April day in 1746 at the grand convent of the Carthusians in Paris, about 200 monks arranged themselves in a long, snaking line. Each monk held one end of a 25-foot iron wire in each hand, connecting him to his neighbour on either side. Together the monks and their connecting wires formed a line over a mile long.

Once the line was complete the Abbe John-Antoine Nollet, noted French scientist, took a primitive electrical battery and, without warning, connected it to the line of monks - giving all of a powerful electric shock.

Nollet did not go around zapping monks with static electricity for fun; his experiment had a serious scientific objective. Like many scientists of the time, he was measuring the properties of electricity to find out how far it could be transmitted along wires, and how fast it travelled. The simultaneous exclamations and contortions of a mile-long line of monks reveled that electricity could be transmitted over great distance; and as far as Nollet could tell, it covered that distance instantly.

That was a big deal.

We’ll be looking for our own big deal, but our first step will be a little less painful and revolve around tea and coffee rather then electrocuting the clergy.

If you’d like to get involved at this early age please drop me an email (mikesizemore @ gmail dot com) or leave a comment.

Photo credit: Tesla Coil by Kent, J (CC license)

Or what DT said:

Maybe we can organize some joint events and get the 4 or more groups connected. A discussion ensued about the power of connecting nodes - with Metcalfe’s law suggesting the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system, and Reed’s law suggesting that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. I think we agreed with the principles, but we’re not really sure that the maths works - but we do know a network of networks has got to be a good thing.

But we want to hear the bad things too. Is there a reason not to pool our resources for the common good? Do let us know…

Image credit: Virtual Blackboard by Carlo Nicara (CC License)

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