Projects

Having done the courses, read the books I decided to take the time to see what I could make out of the original Bodtracker idea that had long been itching for my full attention. I renamed it Bodder and got stuck in.  I wanted to find the flaws in the idea and kick myself well outside the comfort zone that academia affords.

On the basis that you learn by your mistakes and time is money I wanted my entrepreneurial education hard and fast.  I gave myself 6 months and learnt a lot about myself, other people and how things get going.  It clarified an awful lot for me and is really going to take a series of posts to do it any kind of justice.  Nudge me.

Once I’d pushed that as far as my bank would let me, I got back to regular work.  I soon got lucky with a cutting-edge project driven by infectious passion which aims to do something unique and valuable.  Trips to Lancaster, Paris and Helsinki convinced me this  stuff has massive potential.  Now the learning curve is levelling out I’m enjoying making major contributions to the development and direction of the project.

Local geekery

Next week Birmingham bloggers celebrate the first anniversary of their formation into an IRL social crowd organised via Facebook at the start of the year and groomed by Twitter following its second big push at SXSW in May. Highlights of the new-found connectivity included Pete’s eyebrows, the blogging bus driver, the coworking crawl and #twitpanto.  There’s certainly a whole bunch of other stuff I’ve missed but you can’t be everywhere, ambient intimacy or no.

All the other stuff

Reflections on Eggheads, the engaging number 33 and other personal non-geekiness to appear elsewhere.  Consider this a virtual clearing of the throat as I recklessly pledge to spout off more.   If nothing else, I want to chase niggling ideas out my head, nail the buggers and check I can still write something other than code.

home.html

I abused the computer science web server in 94 or 95 with multicoloured buttons and blinking text.   Along with my geeky friends I could see a future in which everyone had their own home page on Geocities.

Then Myspace came along and Facebook chased it up.  I was late for both.

e-mail

It was an introduction to Hotmail from a non-geeky friend in 1998 that weaned me off university e-mail accounts and onto webmail.  I later shelled out a couple of quid on eBay for a Gmail invite wanting to beat the inevitable rush.

Hotmail still trumps Gmail for numbers although ‘Facebook mail’ may ultimately bypass both.

web 2.0

From the Summer of 2004 I was tagging my photos in Flickr and bookmarks in del.icio.us.  Both were giving me stuff of real quality and motivating me to contribute.

I got the Blogger hoodie when they sold out to Google and paid off their paying users in 2003.  Five years later and most hardcore ‘bloggers’ are using WordPress (without switching to ‘pressers’).

Before Twitter had sprouted it vowels, I’d registered as the 3018th user.  A couple of years — and SXSW events — later and I am now able to follow a selection of the local digerati.  But most of my geeky friends are declining to tweet, or even blog.

Facebook is a one-stop shop mail, photos, videos, status, sharing are all made supremely simple whilst actually being technically sophisticated.  Yet my adoption of it is only marginal at best.

my point

If I search for “welcome to” in the subject line of my inbox I get 130 hits.  I’m a serial tinkerer.  An inveterate fiddler.  A compulsive invite-requester.  But I’m clearly not an early adopter.  Rather than being further down the road I’m actually off the beaten track. Instead of being ‘ahead of the curve’ I’m actually zipping off it at random tangents.

There’s a small swarm of us in Brum who wouldn’t be without Flickr, Gmail, Delicious, WordPress, Twitter et al.  We all get fantastic value out of these tools which connect, organise and inspire us to create.

Now, I don’t expect ordinary users to join us later on.  And I don’t find that a problem.  We adopt these apps whilst Facebook apps are adopting everyone else.  We are motivated differently.

So what does this mean for the ‘social web’?

In the bigger picture, still waiting the day when getting signed is not the defining moment of a band’s success…