Some audio from SOMESSO

Couple of things:

• I added a c. 20 min audio commentary to my deck on Slideshare – hopefully it will make the slides a bit more meaningful!
• Here’s a snippet from Susan Kish’s summary of the day, where she mentions my talk:
  

SOMESSO summary

The nice folks from AudioBoo caught me for a quick interview after my presentation yesterday and you can hear the short summary of what I talked about on their site, or by playing the embedded audio here.

I was also interviewed on camera by Daniel and Eduardo Vidal (hope you feel better soon, Eduardo!)… and my whole presentation was recorded as well, so those should appear over the next couple of weeks.

Oddly I seemed to spend a lot of time discussing Poken after the talk! I guess my use of Poken as a prop at the start of the presentation raised a lot of interest. My mention of Home Camp and sustainability also generated some additional conversations. I also detected a lot of interest as to how IBM had achieved the cultural changes required to adapt to a social web (answer: I’d argue that openness has been in our corporate DNA for some time now), and also in how we put together our Social Computing Guidelines. Again, I would draw attention to one paragraph in the guidelines which I think sums up the approach and background:

In 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Internet—at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees’ Internet access. In 2005, the company made a strategic decision to embrace the blogosphere and to encourage IBMers to participate. We continue to advocate IBMers’ responsible involvement today in this rapidly growing space of relationship, learning and collaboration.

I thought the SOMESSO London event was just superb. A series of short (15-20 minute) presentations from some smart people who I was quite frankly honoured to be on the same bill as; and I really didn’t think that there was anything superfluous, it was just great content and information. The Emirates Stadium was a great venue, too… once I’d found my way into the conference centre in the morning, avoiding the queue of contestants lining up for X-Factor auditions! If my camera battery had lasted I would have posted a lot more to Flickr, but I’m afraid there are only a few shots up there.

Thanks to Arjen Strijker, Mary Harrington, Susan Kish and others for putting the day together. On the basis of yesterday’s conference, I highly recommend future events in the series, and would also encourage you to get involved in the SOMESSO community if you are at all interested in social media in the enterprise. I’m really looking forward to following up all of the new connections I made yesterday.

Finally, some links to some of the books I referenced in my talk or during the backchannel conversation:

• The Future of Management
• Grown Up Digital
• Me The Media
• The Whuffie Factor

Openness and Innovation in a Web 2.0 world

Today I have been speaking at the SOMESSO conference in London. I inherited the topic from my friend Luis Suarez… it was billed as “Knowledge management: Security, Intellectual Property and Privacy” but I spun it around a little to look at how exposing your company’s expertise and ideas to the web can actually improve innovation.

I’m completely indebted to Adam Christensen for his words (much retweeted today as something I’d said) about IBM’s approach to social computing, and for allowing me to reuse a couple of slides. I also loved Dion Hinchcliffe’s recent post 12 Rules for Bringing Social to your Business, and reused his graphic from there. I thought there were some fantastic synergies with the previous three talks during the morning, and was able to continue some of the threads whilst taking them in a slightly different direction.

For more background on IBM’s approach, I recommend taking a look at an interview with Jon Iwata in which he discusses the loss of control, but the value of social media.

Home Camp mark 2

The second Home Camp event takes place in London tomorrow. I won’t repeat all of the details here, as they are covered over on the Home Camp blog.

We have some wonderful sponsors – CurrentCost, Greenmonk, Onzo, Pachube, and ReactionGrid, with support from theattick who are going to be streaming the event for us as well.

There are some nice pre-event writeups on the Greenmonk and Redmonk blogs.

It’s a shame that due to unforeseen circumstances I’m no longer able to attend, but I’m looking forward to following remotely if I can, and otherwise catching all the content tagged ‘homecamp’ on Flickr, blogs, and Twitter.

The event is open to anyone, so if you are interested in home hacking automation and energy efficiency, you will definitely want to get involved.

Next speaking engagement – SOMESSO London

Thanks to Luis Suarez who made some key introductions, I’ve been asked to speak at the SOMESSO social media conference in London on May 15th. I’m in some lofty company with guys I hugely respect like Stowe Boyd, Ross Mayfield and Lee Bryant also on the bill (incidentally, Lee and I both spoke at the Corporate Blogging Summit in London in 2007 as well). Should be a good event.

Alex Cornish with a string section

I went to a quite lovely gig last night – it was the third time I’ve seen my friend Alex Cornish playing live, but the first time I’ve seen him play with a string section, and in a church! The venue was St Giles-in-the-Fields church, which is just around the corner from Tottenham Court Road tube station in London – a cosy place for this kind of event.

There are a few short clips on my YouTube channel… not the best quality as it was dark, and only made with a digital compact camera (plus a few sound clips capture on the iPhone) rather than anything else, but a little iMovie 09 magic has helped here and there

It was all very civilised given the venue, and I was even able to get home at a reasonable hour. The new mix of Alex’s debut album Until the Traffic Stops is great, by the way – highly recommended. It is also worth checking his site for the downloads that he sometimes has available.

I’ve put a few photos up on Flickr as well, again bearing in mind the lighting conditions and my choice of camera for the evening… I noticed a couple of guys with DSLRs moving around the venue so hopefully there will be some much nicer shots available at some stage.
Update: here are some really good shots from the gig.

The inaugural HomeCamp

As I previously mentioned, on Saturday I went along to HomeCamp 08 in London, organised by Chris Dalby and Dale Lane, and sponsored by Current Cost and Redmonk.

I was pretty actively commenting from the event and taking part in the live uStream channel… others have written up some of their experiences and thoughts, so I don’t propose to say much here. My main contribution was to make a (shaky!) video of Andy Stanford-Clark’s talk towards the start of the morning – a half hour overview of his home automation projects. I’ve posted it on Viddler, and if you are interested you are very welcome to comment on it, embed it in your own sites, or add annotations on the video timeline.

The nice part about Viddler over, say, YouTube is that it let me post the whole thing as a single video rather than having to chop it up into 10 minute chunks. I’ll try to post some notes on how I went about producing the video at some stage soon.

Some very general comments on the day:

• Well-organised, well-run, great venue, nice to have wireless access – thanks to everyone involved in the logistics!
• A brilliant, exciting array of skills, talents and interests. It was kind of funny to realise just how many of the folks I knew of as we were doing introductions at the start, and great to find that it wasn’t only a bunch of IBM hackers – this movement is really building momentum.
• A lot of fun… I only wish my hacking skills were greater – but I’m looking forward to contributing and generating ideas in this community.

That’s it from me. Really looking forward to HomeCamp 09!

At Homecamp

I’m at Homecamp at Imperial College in London today – learning about home automation and energy monitoring. There’s an amazing group of people here. Follow the Twitter stream or watch it on uStream.

Photos I’m particularly happy with

Taken whilst in London for the Thames Festival a couple of weeks ago.

SOA in Vegas, Lotus in London

SOA / WebSphere at IMPACT

IBM’s customer SOA conference, IMPACT, is taking place in Las Vegas at the beginning of April. IMPACT is the evolution of the annual WebSphere events… actually my first trip to Vegas was back in 2001 when I was an IBM customer, attending the WebSphere conference.

There’s a blog listing some of the details, and you can find out more about the event and register on the IBM site. The event is also on Facebook.

Sadly I’m not expecting to be there myself, but it looks like the B-52s are performing and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is speaking, so I’d love to get along.

LotusSphere comes to you

Like me, you may have missed out on LotusSphere in Florida last month (are we spotting a pattern?). The “roadshow” version of the event is being held in London and Manchester at around the same time as IMPACT at the start of April. Check out the information on the IBM site. Worth going along if you want to learn more about IBM’s social software tools like Lotus Connections.

Alex Cornish at the Troubadour

This will be a first, I’ve not written a gig review before… bear with me…

Background

Somewhere around late summer last year I started listening to the Song by Toad podcast (aka the Toadcast). It’s a brilliant, weekly(ish) compilation of new music, or other random-but-strung-together-by-a-theme music, hosted by Matthew Young. Although Matthew is obviously far more informed and knowledgeable about music than I am – he actually goes to gigs and writes about music exclusively on his blog, whereas I write about anything that comes to hand – it seems as though we have a roughly similar taste and background… although I toyed around with metal and heavy rock in my later years at school, I was pretty much an indie kid at university and have been into a lot of guitar stuff ever since.

One of the first artists I discovered via the Toadcast was Alex Cornish, who was featured in Toadcast #5. I think I downloaded a track straight after listening to the podcast, and bought Alex’s album immediately after it was released on iTunes… in fact I remember exchanging emails with Alex at the time, I was travelling and wanted to get the album on download whereas he we encouraging me to get the CD, which to be honest I should have done. I’ve been following his MySpace ever since. Loved the album and had been hoping to catch him live, so when I saw he was going to be in London playing as part of Curious Generation at the Troubadour, I jumped at the chance to go along.

The venue

We’ve established that I’m not a regular gig-goer, and I’d never been to the Troubadour before. The website describes the venue as “the last 50s coffee house in Earls Court”, which sounded promising from the start. Basically it’s a coffee house / bar / restaurant upstairs with a small cellar for live music and poetry reading underneath. I stumbled in down the wrong staircase behind one of the bands, with the result that I arrived before the doors officially opened and was assumed to be part of someone’s entourage – kind of weird but I don’t think they minded my honest mistake too much. For reference, the way in to the cellar is right at the back of the coffee house! The cellar is an intimate venue – I don’t think there could have been more than a hundred or so people, and the music filled the space pretty nicely. I’d definitely go to other sets at the Troubadour in future.

Alex Cornish

The overall sound of Alex’s album is a bit low-key and acoustic (which, in case you hadn’t guessed, I like). The difference here was that I’d not heard the tracks performed with a full band before, and I have to say that some of them were transformed. For example, one of my least-favourite tracks on the album is “Scotland the Brave”, but having heard it performed live my opinion has changed completely. In fact every track was superb. I was grinning like a mad thing throughout most of the set, and carried on grinning afterwards. It was an excellent gig. If you have a chance to see him on his current tour, I suggest you take it. Apparently the next gig in London is sold out already.

Chatting to Alex afterwards, it sounds like the next album is coming along well and that there is going to be a bigger sound now that he has the band together. We got a preview of one of the tracks, “Look Out” (prompting much excitement from my section of the audience since Alex’s friends have heard it before), and frankly I’m looking forward to hearing more.

Snippets of Alex Cornish

I’m told that Alex is “a talented footballer and an incredibly nice guy”. Well I can’t validate his footballing skills, but I do agree that he’s a tremendous guy. As a sidenote, it’s a bit of a weird experience when you and the artist recognise each other from MySpace! Very cool though. And it’s strange what can happen when you hand out Moo cards and take notes in a Moleskine notebook – apparently people think you’re “the press” or “a proper journalist”. Hardly, but thanks

Apologies for the poor-quality pictures, I wish I’d taken the DSLR rather than a compact.

Joker’s Daughter; Rosie and the Goldbug

It would be utterly unfair not to mention the other bands who were on on Tuesday night, since I enjoyed them too.

Joker’s Daughter kicked off proceedings. They were an acoustic pair who played some really beautiful, haunting folksy tunes. The venue was still sufficiently quiet to make them stand out, too – I think later in the evening as it got busier, they might have struggled to make an impact. I need to check them out in more detail, as I really liked the music.

Snippets of Joker’s Daughter

The third band of the evening, Rosie and the Goldbug, were seriously entertaining. I can’t quite figure out their influences… at times the sound was Tori Amos (“Soldier Boy”), at times nearly Blondie, and the look (glittering minidress and peacock feather) was reminiscent of Moloko. Some fantastic banter in between the tracks, and a lot of energy. Thundering bass and piano, and the lead singer kept demanding “more vocals” from the engineer! Another band I’ll be exploring some more.

Snippets of Rosie and the Goldbug

I wasn’t able to stay for the last artist, Ryan Scott, so I can’t comment. If anyone who was there has anything to add, please let me know what I missed!

The company

Met some fantastic folks, most of whom knew Alex already. I hope I didn’t come across as some kind of MySpace stalker

…

Now, if you want so read what a proper music blogger thinks about Alex Cornish, instead of the inane and under-informed ramblings of a random enthusiastic fan, go and read Matthew’s review of Monday’s gig in Edinburgh. You’ll also find a few samples of Alex’s music there, and on his MySpace page. And once you’ve done that, go get his album Until the Traffic Stops, from iTunes or Amazon or your vendor of choice (eMusic have his singles, but not the album). Do it!

Excellent gig

This is a bit of a placeholder / early warning for a blog post I intend to write, but don’t have time for right now – I’m going to write up the gig I went to last night at the Troubadour club in London. For now, check out Alex Cornish on MySpace

More to follow later! And great to meet the folks who were there.