Manchester's Social Media Cafe starts kick-starts 2009

Another Social Media Cafe under our belt and they just keep getting better. Last night's #smc_mcr at The Northern proved to be the busiest and buzziest yet, with the Unconference Barcamp format proving to be a winner.

Some great presentations and discussions on a wide range of interesting topics. I even chipped in with one on how Social Media tools can help in the project world, which seemed to stimulate quite a lot of though-provoking conversation (Thanks all!!) The group which gathered around for that session discussed whether or not Social Media tools could be described as such if they are being used in a project environment for purposes other than just social interaction... a good point and an interesting debate in its own right.

I was also fascinated by David Bird's comments about his experience in using Twitter with teams in different geographies. In my slides I was suggesting that tools like Twitter might be the glue that energises and connects productive teams regardless of timezone or location. In fact, I have begun to see this work between joint teams in the UK and India. However, David suggested that, such is the 12-by-12-hour time-difference between the teams he's brought together between the UK and Australia, the chatter tends to naturally cluster into two groups which operate at strictly opposite times of day. So rather than Twitter creating and supporting a single multi-site team, the end result looked more like two loosely-coupled units with only limited interaction. A surprisingly counter-intuitive 'us-and-them'. SM Fail?

During the conversation I also suggested that the 'always on; always available' feel of tools like Twitter might actually be adding to the stress of the work-'place'. In the same way that when people discovered that mobile phones and email meant they could contact anyone 24/7, it also meant that they themselves were contactable 24/7 by employers, clients and team-mates. Will Twitter heighten this overload? Years ago, 'presenteeism' was often described as the person who was the first in the car-park and also the last to leave being seen as the most productive. Now that many of us work in scattered locations, are people tweeting 24/7 in order to prove just how productive and available they are? Fascinating stuff!

It wouldn't be #smc_mcr if there there were no lessons to be learned. The timetable didn't necessarily let attendees sit in on all the sessions which interested them... so maybe some sort of speed-dating mechanism next time, with sessions being repeated once or twice.

As for me, I had a list of things I needed to chat to people about, specifically about how we might build a conversation about the use of Social Media in the fight against Climate Change into #smc_mcr's plans. Just didn't get chance to connect with everyone on this subject last night.

Luckily, I did manage to further some conversations about how we might make the most of the underlying passion for music which runs through the group. The freshly minted #smc_mcr spin-off group might just enable us to give this exciting area some real air-time. On that note, last night's event was soundtracked by the group's very own last.fm radio station, the eclectic nature of which only goes to demonstrate the wide-ranging inputs and influences people are injecting into #smc_mcr.

Social Media Mavens: Get like Gladwell, Know Your Woofers from Your Tweeters!

Reading Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Blink' has got me thinking. I'm only on page 35, but already he's covered the topic of 'thin-slicing', i.e. by relying on first impressions, rather than always drilling down for more information, it's surprising how accurate our intuitions can be.

In this way, Gladwell cites how specialists can predict how robust a couple's marriage is by observing no more than 15 minutes of them in conversation on any topic. In another example, students correctly assess the effectiveness of a series of lecturers completely unknown to them on the basis of only two seconds of video. On their first glance, two experts on Greek statuary turn over 18 months of detailed and costly analysis validating the authenticity of a recently 'discovered' marble, exposing it as a fraud, purely based on instinct.

In short, it's probably not really worth reading pages 36-277 of Blink, as I already have that gut-feeling that it is a fascinating work. However, whilst I've been reading I've also been fidgeting with Twitter and listening to the new album from the School of Seven Bells on my iPhone. So what? Well, there is a connection...

I received a Tweet from WiReD (it's Listening Post blog) the other day which provided enough of a hook in it's 140-max characters to prompt me to click on the embedded TinyURL. This took me to an article about Musebin, a new service currently in private beta which cludges music reviews with Twitter by enabling contributors to submit reviews of albums in less than 140 characters. As I said, it's in beta, so it can still be a little flaky in its efforts to search for album-art within a quirky pop-up form, but by and large, submitting mini-reviews is a liberating little experience.

How is it possible to capture the essence of, say Genesis' 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway', Kraftwerk's 'Autobahn' or Christina Aguilera's latest 'Best Of' with only 140 characters to play with? Well, of course, the answer is 'easier than you might think'. The trick is to start with albums you know and love, I suppose. Once you've registered, Musebin allows multiple reviews of the same album and makes no judgements regarding whether or not the album was released in the last thirty years or the last thirty minutes

Other visitors are encouraged to give your reviews a Yay! or a Nay! based on whether they accurately capture the spirit of the recording. They can even leave a comment longer than the review itself if they wish!

The 140 character limit is no accident. Register your Twitter details and your reviews are automatically added to your Twitstream and those of your followers, who get to click on a TinyUrl to Musebin itself. (Whilst it's still in beta, this prompts followers to log-in or register which will unfortunately put a few people off for now). What's more, if as a Twitterer you decide to follow @musebin, your reviews, along with any others posted on the Musebin site will arrive as Tweets into your Twitstream, teasing and tempting you to check out something new, revisit something old, or log into Musebin to set the record(!) straight about Guns & Roses' Chinese Democracy by posting your own review.

Brilliant little synchronicities emerge. I'd waivered over the new School of Seven Bells album in the iTunes store for a few days, figuring that it was my kind of thing, but still hanging back from clicking that all-too-worn Buy Album button. Then a couple of hours later, this Tweet appeared and I needed no more encouragement:

Via @jasonvo: Ethereal. Quirky. Beautifully musical dissonance and head bobbing beats make this dream pop... http://musebin.com/schoolof33N

Working together, Twitter and Musebin provided me with a little nudge in 140 characters, but maybe I'd have got round to buying the SVIIB album sooner or later. I don't know. However, this tripped my train of thought onto one of the questions that I hate the most. 'Where on earth do you find out about these bands?' It drives me nuts! Why I'm not sure. Certainly, there is an childish element within me that prefers bands at that sweet spot just before they hit the charts or make it big. Somehow, after that happens they're not mine any more. I'm not like that with everyone you understand. I certainly don't just like things because they're obscure. Indeed, I'm happy that a lot of the stuff that is somewhat obscure stays that way. Similarly, bands that I 'collected' as my own personal 'property' in their formative years, might still get a visit from me today (my foray to Geneva to see REM [#remgeneva] a couple of months back being a good example). On the whole though, I haven't got a really good answer to the question 'Where on earth do you find out about these bands?' I just do.

I suppose it's a mix of purposeful and subliminal multi-channel overload, but I can't put my finger on it. All I do know, and this brings us back to Malcolm Gladwell in a couple of ways, is that I'm not not to bad at judging books (and CDs) from their covers. I suppose I have a diverse range of interests, but I don't often bring home or download a dud, even if it's something I haven't heard or even heard of before, from deep down in The Long Tail somewhere.

I'm so used to it, I can buy at a 'Blink' and get it right most of the time. What's more, the compelling stickiness of powerful Social Media tools such as Twitter, when combined with Musebin, combined with, I suppose, 'knowing what I like' could maybe transform me into a Maven and a Connector (two of the stars of Gladwell's The Tipping Point) at the same time. Hardly Paul Revere, and I certainly couldn't lay claim to assuming the role of the third of The Tipping Point's stars 'The Salesman', but maybe I'll think about that one tomorrow

By the way, Musebin's a Brooklyn based startup and currently looking for an Intern to help with the office admin along with some of the beta-testing and bug-fixing. How did they advertise for the role? On Twitter of course. Want to apply? Apply @musebin. Your resume/CV must be no more than 140 characters long. Good luck!

Their life's work in 140 characters or less!

I'm loving Musebin which accelerates the drive towards the Twitterisation of everything by creating a platform for creating, sharing and rating albums in 140 characters or less. It's a great discipline for focusing your critical faculties as you try to describe the latest Xtina Best Of or the earliest eurohippy noodlings of Kraftwerk before they discovered Stylophones.

It swipes your reviews straight into your Twitterfeed too.

Musebin is still in beta... ask them for an invite.

All Tomorrow's Parties

The world population explosion, driving up demand for food, clashes with the West's desire to reduce its dependency on the world's major oil producers by growing biofuels. Biofuels seemed to be a brilliant response to declining fossil fuel energy reserves, but are they just adding to the chaos? So it seems according to a leaked World Bank Report which estimates that the drive to biofuels has driven up world food prices by a massive 75%.

Doh! Gotta think of something else! In our rush to address the multiple interlinked crises we are beginning to face by seizing the latest innovation, we usually find it is too good to be true. It's usually only as we alter our behaviour and begin to relax that the true implications of the gear shift become clear. Biofuels is one example, carbon offsetting is another as people and organisations continue to burn through fuel whilst outsourcing their conscience to some corporate-accounting jiggery-pokery.

Still, it's hard. I even felt myself exhale calmly, at last week's New Scientist event, as Ray Hammond hinted that artificial intelligence may soon come to our rescue by solving all of the problems that currently reside in homo sapiens' 'too hard' box. It might, but we can't stop trying to solve our problems in the meantime just because we think that the world's greatest agony aunt might be a few technological iterations away. We are continually challenged with seeking out, adopting and quite often rejecting new technologies, tools, techniques and behaviours as we try to keep the plates spinning until the 'singularity' event, when our computers' intelligence eclipses our own, occurs.

As markets transform themselves in the face of technical, cultural and commercial changes, will their new identities pass the green test? Take the music industry for example. Always one for predicting its own untimely demise, it is in fact a multi-billion dollar industry which has proved itself more than adept at coping with the demise of vinyl, the rise and fall of the CD, the spectre of Napster and the rise of legimate and illegitimate downloads. Its current response is to shift its emphasis away from making the bulk of its money on the music itself and diverting its attention to the huge revenues which can be generated from mammoth tours and festivals, with all of the merchandising and spin-off activities that come with them.

So whilst we all take a greener route to accessing our media, through downloading music or video, those savings get trounced as the entertainment industry ramps up its spend on ever more expensive energy-sapping tours, events and festivals which, the the UK, US and Europe, fill up almost every weekend from Easter to autumn. No doubt there's some convenient carbon offsetting going on... so that's OK.

Festivals. I'm rarely drawn to them. I usually skim across the vast line-ups sprawling over multiple stages and several days and circle those acts I'd like to see. I generally come up with less than a handful... enough to fill a couple of hours really. However, this week saw the line-up revealed for September's "All Tomorrow's Parties" festival. Unusually, I found that I was circling more acts than I was striking out. I'd love to go, but even if I could afford it, how could I justify flying to New York's Catskill Mountains for the weekend.

Where will we look for experiences to rival the live gig/festival experience? Probably to technology again as the avatars we create in our Second Lives become more closely integrated with our most closely-felt perceptions and experiences. In the meantime, I suppose that I'll just have to wait for another opportunity to see Bob Mould, Dinosaur Jr, Tortoise and Mogwai on the same bill. What are the odds?

UPDATE:

Here's a useful perspective on this stuff from today's Sunday Times.