Reboot

You’ll have noticed, perhaps, that my blogging has been somewhat quiet of late. Which, as an advocate of the whole blogging thing, is sort of embarrassing. I’ve been pondering this and realised something quite important the other day. If you’ll excuse the descent into psychobabble for a moment, blogging, at least as I see it, is inherently personal in that it comes from a person. In order to do this effectively you have to have a reasonable grasp on your self, where you’re coming from, what you’re doing, where you think you’re going, and so on. In the last few months I haven’t had that grasp, particularly in relation to that which comes under the ASH-10 umbrella, and have spent a lot of time (and again with the hippy shit) finding the right path, or at least clearing away a hell of a lot of undergrowth so I can see the paths I might chose from.

At SXSWi I had something of a revelation but it wasn’t the sort of revelation where everything clicks into focus and you jump up and shout “W00T!” and tell the world about it. It was the sort of revelation that sees you sitting catatonic in a chair wondering what the hell it is you’re doing. I realised that while I am hugely, unhealthily interested in social media I am not, and have no desire to be, a “social media consultant” as it has become defined in the last year. And while these last 2 years or so have been fantastic on so many levels they really only comprise a chapter in my life and a relatively short one at that. I’ve often made a big deal of how what I do in social media is informed by 20 years or fanzine and blogging activity but I never really stopped to think about what that continuity really was.

In the last 36 hours of SXSWi I had my second revelation. Again it wasn’t a jump for joy one, which was actually a good thing. It was more a calm realisation of something fundamental and something that I’ve always known at heart. This isn’t about the tools. It’s about what you do with the tools. It’s not about what someone writes on a blog. It’s about the effect their writing has on the community that reads their blog. And it’s not about posting stuff to Twitter. It’s how communities using Twitter function (and I don’t think anyone’s really figured that one out yet).

In short, it’s about how social environments change when you give people the tools to do interesting things in them, and those tools don’t have to be pieces of software. They can be rules, objects, environmental stimulus, anything at all. What makes the software, ie “social media”, so interesting is it effects change cheaply, quickly and radically. Blogging is interesting because it reduces the cost of publishing to zero and enables instant worldwide distribution. Anyone can run a media outlet. We know this but I don’t think we fully understand it yet, nor have we really seen it in action. That’s still a few years off.

But while that stuff really interests me (and is why I’m dead happy to be involved with Jon Hickman’s Social Media MA starting this Autumn) it’s still just theory. What do I actually want to do?

In short, because I’ve waffled far more than I was intending to, I came back from Austin wanting to see 100 BarCamps, unconferences, meetups, coworking spaces and other related activities happen over the next 6 months. I picked the numbers out of thin air, to be honest, but 100 sounded big enough but still manageable. The seed of this was watching WXWM unfold and the fertilizer was finding people in Austin who were doing similar things in their cities, specifically those involved in the Refreshing Cities model and the American coworking movement in particular (but by no means exclusively) Indyhall. I should also mention Katz Kiely of b.tween who, on asking me at the Monday night BritBash how my SXSW was going said my response was the most unconvincing “okay” ever and, after chatting for a bit helped me see how I might develop this stuff sustainably.

So I came back a fortnight ago slightly bruised but with something resembling a focussed plan and have spent the days since refining it. I’m still not quite there yet but something rather weird has been happening and I think a planetary metaphor might help. Recently I’ve been kinda like the asteroid belt. Cumulatively there’s a lot of mass there but it’s spread out thinly and it’s hard for people to land spaceships on it. What’s happened now is I’ve become a planet which not only means you can land on me but that I’ve got gravity which is pulling the right people towards me. Without going into details I’ve gone from having a vague idea that I wanted to sort of return to my roots (which where 100% non-profit remember) and do grassroots stuff to having the financial support to not only do this stuff but do it properly.

Meanwhile I’m looking at my blogs and wondering what to do with them, this one in particular. An overhaul is needed, for sure, and those “what I offer” pages will have to change radically. But as for the blog I think I need to attend one of those blogging workshops I ran last year. Use it as a notebook. Record things that are interesting to me and interesting things that I do. Keep it short and sweet. Don’t worry about getting it right and don’t spend too long on it. In other words, stop writing appallingly long winded stuff like this bloody post. Which I’ll end now. Thank you for reading.