Simon Hammond Blog

Having to cut back on my whimsical surfing lately has forced me to face a problem you may well share.

There is more online stuff that I would love to partake of than I could ever conceive of doing so.  Shared items from social networks, blogs and recommendation engines only swell this ‘fire hose’.  Declaring ‘bankruptcy’ on email/feeds by marking all as read only throws the baby out with the bathwater and should only be a last resort.

Therefore, given I only have a finite amount of time, I have to be prepared to selectively trim my sources.  If I don’t then I am handling important stuff with the regard as the fluff and sampling everything at random.  You can call this process prioritisation or just cutting out the crap.

My target is 1-2 hours a day.  In this time I’m aiming to respond to all email, read all essential blogs/subs and get the latest stories on the social feeds.  I’ll have to continuously refine my ‘diet’, dropping some things as I add others.   Maybe this comes naturally for some people but I expect a challenge in curbing my appetite.  I’ll post any lessons if I can fit them into my regime.

It may sound severe but the goal is more fun all round.  Other people will be happy since I’ll be more responsive and sociable.  I’ll be happy because I’ll have focussed my online attention on the stuff that’s important to me whilst consciously bounding my online activities to make time for talking, reading, visiting, drinking, thinking, snapping, writing, creating, listening, playing…

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Just doing my bit to highlight dumbass, blognorant dealings of a shady music festival, namely Surface Unsigned.  Check the backstory in you are interested.

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

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The map above shows the places in Brum that are ripe for informal coworking sessions, gleaned from the Cowork Brum Wiki. Look hard at those markers and you might see what Pete and I envisioned a few days ago: a coworking crawl!

So tomorrow (that’s Thursday 23 April) we’ll hit each place for an hour or two working out our trajectory as we go, starting with a breakfast place most likely. Anyone who wants to can drop in or out whenever. You can track us on Twitter, natch. A TWM travelcard might also be useful for keeping up.

I’ve never actually been to Jibbering Records so I’m looking forward to checking that one out. Any other places we should definitely hit?

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UPDATE: We hit Kitchen Garden Cafe, Jibbering Records and Rooty’s in the end. Excellent write-ups provided by Pete Ashton and Pete Lewis. Michael Voong and Stef Lewandowski also popped up. The day was tweeted with the #brumcoworking hashtag.

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Third time around and we had a dedicated space, courtesy of Rooty’s (strangely without a home page) in the Custard Factory. Badges were also out to help peeps connect names and handles to faces.

Whereas the first meet was more formal and the second more sociable, the third was a union of both: formal then social.

The formal part was a panel on the SXSWM trip which was of less interest to me, just because I’d already read the tweets and the blog posts, seen the videos and chatted to Stef about it. But for people who hadn’t heard about it, this was a good time to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

There was a lot of discussion about ‘evangelism’, ‘conversion’ and ’spreading the word’ about social media which struck me as odd language. It bordered on missionary zeal at time which I know some people found a little off-putting. One guy told me straight that his blogger girlfriend had been put off from coming by the ‘formal’ idea.

For me, the killer feature of the meets for me is just in getting a critical mass of creative web fans in a room. Add a little beer and conversational sparks fly, knowledge is exchanged and connections spring up. Some will want to explore the latest ideas and models in social media while many just want to arse about on the web. I measure the quality of the meets by the diversity of ideas, approaches and people that pop up. I’ll be worried if everyone starts singing from the same hymn book.

I’m not too worried right now. With the panel over, one discussion was replaced by a dozen interesting conversations, a sizeable portion of this later migrated over to the Rainbow. I talked to a cartoonist, a journalist and a couple of entrepreneurs among others. My only gripe was there were too many fascinating people to talk to and not enough time to get round. It felt rather like the Crystal Dome.

Other people seem to be as impatient as me about continuing these chats. More frequent mini-meets could be the way to go, or even a techie solution where people can spontaneously organise ‘coworking‘ sessions in cafes around Brum. I know people are actively working on this problem so maybe by Blogger Meet 4 we’ll have something on the go.

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