The Shed

…but for the mean time most of my blogging will be over on www.alongwalk.wordpress.com as I recount how good my walking holiday was.

Sid.

I don’t normally blog that often but thought I’d let you know I’m siging off for a couple of weeks.  Off to do the coast to coast.  You can follow me on Twitter if you like, I’ll be posting there regularly depending on network coverage!

Wish me luck, I’ll need it to make the 192 miles!

Sid.

I tend to keep an eye on the Core77 blog and Yanko Design just so that every now and then I can blow my mind.  I tend to “get” logical things pretty easily but art is a whole new ball game for me.

This morning an article on “The Third Space” popped into my RSS reader and it really made me think.  Not only is this installation beautiful but you’ve got to ask why?  Why would 52 design students spend 16,870 hours putting together 1.3 million zip ties to produce…

Picture by Martin.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about anything other than Twitter so what have I been up to?

Well, I headed to Latitude where the excitement all got a little too much…

Then I headed to a friends wedding that was awesome but where the heat was unbelievable…

Then as soon as our festival season had started it ended again with a trip to The Big Chill where I ate some nice food and drank some nice cider but didn’t drink as much as some people!

What did I learn during my adventures?  I still love festivals and the atmosphere around them.  The fact that our tent neighbours left a little carrot cake in our tent for helping them put up and then move their tent.  The fact that a set of friends felt safe enough to leave their single female friend asleep in a cider barn with just the note, “We’ve gone to the Rizla arena” on her lap.  The fact that me and the security guard had a laugh while he was confiscating my cans of Spitfire.  All those things combine to make certain festivals the best places to be.

I also found out that uploading mobile video sucks even with an N95 8Gb.  I can Twitter to my hearts content but I can’t upload little shorts.

I also found out sheep don’t mind when you dye them pink!

After all that excitement I’m now getting ready to go on our walk.  192 miles of the most beautiful countryside in England.  2 weeks of doing nothing but putting one foot in front of the other.  I just can’t wait.  Now that we’ve started sitting down with out OS maps and plotting our route it looks like a hell of a long way but it’s going to be fun.  Feel free to pop over and sponsor us.  Hopefully we won’t need the services of the charity we are donating to.

And then when I get back, well it’s nose to the grindstone.  I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do at work.  Some boring like rationalising over 20Tbs of siloed messy data that’s spread across 500 fileshares down into less than 7Tb of data spread across just 7 shares.  Some not so boring like process improvements that will get people out of Excel-tracker hell into lightweight project management using SharePoint. Then some that I really am excited about but that I’ll have to squeeze around my day job.  Of course those bits revolve around social software.

Then no doubt it will be Christmas and then New Year and then who knows.

good.

Well it’s about time I wrapped up this whole “Twitter is…” thing.  I still haven’t really got a good grip on what Twitter is and I think that’s because with a lot of these social tools there’s a very personal element to it that means the different tools mean different things to different people.  I mean, look up any definition of blogging and you’ll get the same old same old, “a weblog”, “self-publication of a series of articles”, etc etc.  What you won’t get is a good description or understanding of why people blog, why it matters so much too them and why they continue to do it.

Twitter is the same.  The definition is easy, it’s a micro-blogging tool.  It has the same draw as blogging but it’s quicker, more concise.  You’ve got 140 characters to say what you’re doing, that’s it.

Why I like it is easy.  For me Twitter is like the reflex arc of the worldwide web.  On Twitter you see things happen, you hear about things going on before most people have a chance to even consider them.  You react to them and then you have plenty of time to think about them a little more.

Without Twitter you lose that immediacy of connection.

i’m laid on my disappointingly deflated airbed at Latitude with a nice warm fuzzy feeling. I love coming to festivals. You can just forget the world exists. It’s like its just a little community of music lovers just here to enjoy themselves. When you come to a festival it’s easy to see the inner workings of social media in action, in real life. Self-policing, spontaneous group formation, etc etc. The best bit though, just enjoying it!

In a couple of hours I’m heading off to Latitude and hopefully having some fun in the sun.  More than likely the British weather will get hold of us and get us very wet but hey, I’m with friends, who cares!

So the only thing I’ll be taking is my Nokia N95.  That means I’ll have access to video, photo and text entry to the web.  In reality that means that while I’m there then I’ll only have access to Twitter.  In theory I could have access to all my video websites and to Flickr and upload stuff from my phone but 3G just doesn’t cut it really.  It’ll do it but probably only the once before I hit my fair use policy.

Come on mobile operators, catch up with the tech that’s on my phone…please!

(Asynchronous) Instant Messaging on masse (depending on the size of your network obviously)

As proved quite nicely by Loic Le Meur when he asked, “What would you do if you were CEO of Seesmic?”

God know how long it took him to sift through all the answers from Twitter and Seesmic (I see Seesmic as video Twitter) but he has started at least.

Social.

I always overlook the obvious but Twitter is Web2 so it does all of the things Web2 stuff does most of the time.

Everywhere.  The only place I’m without Twitter is on an aeroplane.  If I have my phone or my laptop then I have Twitter and many of it’s apps.

The closest I come to that internally is updating my MS Communicator status.