In Conversation With...

...Lloyd Davis.

Despite a string of cancelled trains I still managed to get into London in time today to call into the British Museum to have a conversation with Lloyd before heading on into the office. Why?Well I was keen to catch up with Lloyd after we both attended Huddersfield's first Social Media Surgery on Monday, but really it was prompted by the fact that he'd been busy letting people know that he was going to be facilitating real live conversations with all-comers throughout the day.

This is part of a project Lloyd's working on for the British Council and whilst it sounds a bit 'emperor's new clothes' it's worth asking yourself when the last time was that you embarked on a conversation with someone for the sole purpose of having a conversation.

As it was, we had good old chat, bouncing around a whole host of social-media-centric subjects.

We ticked off who we knew and who we didn't in the 'Twitterati' feature in the latest edition of WiReD. Lloyd reckons he won, but I reckon he cheated. We then debated whether the Twitterati really were the angel-funded start-up kids producing the tools or the end-users of the tools themselves. We sort of agreed around the latter, but didn't want to offend anyone.

We then discussed the 'elephant in the room', but as we were at the British Museum and not the Natural History, the 'elephant' was purely hypothetical.

This elephant was the secret untold story of how active social-technologists can afford to do what they do, hopping from train to train as they jet from one glamourous location to another... and Huddersfield.

We concluded that they were either fortunate enough to have jobs with sufficient scope and autonomy to enable them to justify all this activity within a roomy job description, or frittering away a lottery win whilst trying to stitch together enough odds and sods of paid work to put iPhones on the table.

By this time, my own day job was calling, so I bade farewell to Lloyd as he put out another call for his next conversation.

Until next time...