With all the twitter-ado going on these weeks I haven’t really cared much after this blog.
Well I have updated it to wordpress 2.2, which is quite something (thanks DreamHost, I <3 one-click instals ;) ).
As a nice side-effect, the layout (that also could use some love) is working again (maybe you noticed trouble with commenting from not-logged in sessions).
Enough with silly techie-details, let’s review briefly what’s going on in this finally warmer London.
Last friday I went to a dinner in fitzrovia with Stowe Boyd, Steph, Suw and some other usual suspects of the social media scene. Paolo and Monica made it too, and I was really impressed by the effort. Had a lovely mortgage-centric chat with Paolo too.
Oh and Headshift was strongly represented, with no less than a headcount of three (Lee and Lars were there too).
Sadly I had to leave soon, just to realize how much I love this people: forget about social networking, business and rumor-gathering (even if that’s obviously that’s also part of no the game)… but no matter what’s the context or topic, they can quench my thirst for challenging and witty thoughts.
Anyway, after this early appearance at the aforementioned dinner, we headed to the Kinetica museum in Spitalfields, where I joined Dave for the launch party of Sound Waves exhibition (check his review on the Londonist!)
I’ll add to that only that it was pretty cool, I enjoyed myself a lot playing with the installation, all sound and somehow interaction centric; you can check a few pictures here (sorry about the quality… I don’t have a proper camera these days).
The girl you can see in the latest picture is Olga. I met her at the first BarCampLondon, where she presented Artstrem, see here for my previous post on the subject. Now she’s launching the mobile version of the service… and was at the Kinetica to demo it. I was so happy: It’s cool to follow a friend’s project from presentation stage to live on a mobile phone near you!
Coworking in London? meeting (well, better to say beer conversation: it was just me and Matthew) was great: we shared a few ideas/perspective on the CoWorking concept, and drafted what sounds like a plan to bootstrap a coworking space in London. Not that I need a place to work, but I’d love to know there’s a creative nest somewhere in town where I can go and find flow or inspiration a few days a month, or maybe even set-up some workshop and events.
The Next Steps on this plan for conquering the shared workplace are:
. writing down a few personas of potential coworkers and stick them in the wiki
. go and visit existing similar experiences in London
. set up a Jelly day sometime soon (Leisa, are you up for this one?)
I would be also interested in exploring a bit on the matter of sustainability of such activities and thus Green Coworking (Francesca, maybe worth having a chat?)
And, of course, the VSS Bzaar I is almost ready to host SecondLife based coworking experiments, among other stuff…
Well, as you see being silent doesn’t mean being idle ;)
…this was my new home? Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrh!
Seriously speaking: anybody has information about pros and cons of livinig afloat? It seems there is a book out there, and some quick info can be found here but I was really looking forward to some live experience…
Published 1 year and 10 monthes ago
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Intense week indeed.
While the rItaliaCamp meme spreads through the blogosphere, with associated attempted vandalism on the wiki but also all sort of exciting contribution (thank you all), I can’t really say that life in London hasn’t been exciting as well.
Coworking London
Wednesday at the Market Porter we had this first Coworking in London meeting: there were three of us (me, Lars and Simon), who in-between beers shared perspectives and experiences about if/how to setup a coworking space in London.
The Hub appears to be so far the main (but not only) coworking-style experience by the Thames; the space is very trendy (again, have a look at the gallery) and the prices are more or less aligned with the average/high U.S. experiences (if you apply the usual $1 = £1 rule of thumb).
A practice that’s pretty unique of London though is using clubs intead of offices: by subscribing to two/three clubs located strategically around town you can always count upon a convenient space where to meet clients or retire to work a bit.
We also discussed how a coworking space could work and resorted for example that probably finding a company that shares some of its desks with freelancers wouldn’t be that good, neither for the company (that wouldn’t feel totally “free” in its own space) nor for the freelancers, who would probably suffer from the psychological pressure of this sort of us vs. them. One possible solution we came up with is properly separating the “official enterprise space” from the “coworking space” and allowing people from the company to roam freely in the coworking space but on a temporary basis (i.e. not having a permanent desk there).
As for where a coworking space could born in London, a few areas are: Southwark /London Bridge, Angel, Camden. Generally speaking, must be central, lively, not too formal, well connected.
Finally we discussed what to do next. Following a suggestion that Chris gave us last week, we explored the idea of starting a jelly tradition in London just to test the response. Also, we resorted to go to the Minibar4 and evangelize the coworking there…
Minibar4
I arrived at the minibar at the Corbet Place (cool venue, by the way) pretty late, and most of the presentation were already gone.
Luckily, I managed to make it in time for the TrustedPlaces presentation, that I was quite looking forward to. Obviously in the five minutes allowed to the speakers they couldn’t really tell anything that I didn’t already know, but at least I got some “face to face” impressions and a mental note to get in touch with the guys soon. We didn’t have the coworking speech, and I lost Simon in the crowd pretty soon, but managed to spend most of the night in nice conversation with Francesca, Rob and Lars.
At some point Rob went in a cool effort of Drupal advocacy, that was kindly appeciated. Made a mental note to invest some time in drupal tinkering, especially as it seems it could become a central tool in the rItaliaCamp.
Also on the geeky side, we shared some considerations about Stikipad, which is a lovely piece of codeservice. The only problem is I still can’t easily accept to outsource my wiki…
Published 1 year and 10 monthes ago
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Following that flawless 2.0 human radar that is Rik, I’m now trying Trusted Places, a new rounded-cornered web community site focusing on places (very London centric for the moment).
I’m jotting down these notes as I’m approaching the site, and the first impression I have is that the sign-up process makes use of some clever tricks: for example when it comes to inviting your friends over (often difficult since it clashes with people sense of privacy and etiquette) they provide a “real life story” explaining in a simple comic strip how fantastic and rewarding is to spread the word. Then the wizard takes you to a page that is a game about pinpointing your tastes: you’re given a list of food types (from African to English to Italian and so on) where you can declare wether if you like it or not.
From the interface point of view, there is an interesting use of the buttons here: the more you click on the positive or negative button, the more you go in that direction, on a scale from can’t stand it to love it!. A global “food score” chart is always available on the sidebar too.
Same concept applies then to Music, People, Places, Drinks, Cities. Very cool concept in all, the problem being that no explanation is given beyond the picture, so it can be difficult to differentiate the various genres especially if you come from abroad.
The rest of the site is the usual ajaxy website. And still little buggy (was not able to change my picture at first for instance). Nice forms, I wonder if they will turn out usable.
The application itself is a glorified google maps mashup, where you can review places and search for suggestion. I’ll probably post more as I’ll find out how addictive it is. So far the featured review was ironically a sushi place I’ve been on sunday night, so I was amused and quickly typed in my own review… we’ll see.
Oh one last thing: I totally love the idea of using tag clouds above London skyline as a banner…
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