Tuesday evening, 27th of January, 2009, at the London Geek Dinners, in Hummus Bros in Covent Garden, a bunch of techies and geeks gathered, waiting expectantly to hear some inspiring words of wisdom, and learn from Jeff Pulver, headlined as “Technology Anthropologist; Entrepreneur; Early-Stage Seed Investor; speaker, Living in Social Media”..

Arriving at Hummus Bros a little after 7pm, I was glad to find that I had arrived earlier than the guest speaker.  Digging into a warm apple juice with cinnamon, some tabouleh, and some hummus and avocado, gave me a chance to catch up with some familiar faces, and enjoy a satisfying dinner, before Jeff’s arrival.  Apparently, he was coming, straight from the airport, and arrived a short while after I finished ;) Nice timing indeed!

After Jeff got a chance to get settled, and have some dinner, he gave us a short 20 minute speech, sharing some interesting insights, and giving us some of his thoughts around Social Media.

He related some of his childhood stories, of being a Ham radio operator, as a child, and how his persona as a shy child at school was a completely different identity to the person that he could be on the radio.  The two worlds, allowed him to experience being “himself” – without people being able to go on anything more than his voice, and what he talked about.  That liberating freedom, to hide behind the technology, back when Ham Radio’s were mainstream, hasn’t really changed too much, to this day.  That ability to be yourself, with technology dealing with the job of masking the real you, has really become something of an everyday reality.  In fact, so much so, that I remember turning up to an event, where I was sat right behind someone, who I had befriended virtually, but until that moment, didn’t even know who she was ;)  It’s crazy that you can hide yourself, so well, behind the technology, and if you’re just a little afraid, you don’t have to worry about being yourself, until you’re hidden.  Then you magically discover the courage to be yourself.  Scary, yet empowering at the same time :)

Jeff related a story of his high school reunion, which he attended, and went equipped with a video camera, to ask people what they remembered of him, and the first three folks he asked couldn’t even remember who he was, and then the fourth person he asked remembered him, saying something like – ah yes, you’re the one with a cool dad!  Jeff’s take, on that, after reviewing the videotape, after the reunion, was to remember, that it’s not about how you remember yourself to be, but about how others remembered you to be.  An interesting point, I think, we can often forget about.  When creating an impression, it’s not about what you do, or say, it’s about how the other perceives what you’ve said or done..

My final take, from Jeff Pulver’s talk that evening, was about how he would never want to have, on his public facebook identity, pictures of his children.  He discussed the way in which there were clear segments of groups of people, and the ways he related, and connected to them, meant that to different groups of people he wanted to share different things, or disclose different bits of information.  That challenge alone is enough to realise the shortcomings of our current tools of communication..  This point, was, more saliently touching upon an idea that I’ve been playing with for a few years now, and been refining, and synthesizing, through my own needs.. Having the ability to segment, and selectively email groups of people has been in my list of targets to accomplish for a long time now..

Imagine that you have personal pictures that you want to share with your family, pictures of your work colleagues, you want to share with your work friends, and pictures of you out on the town, with friends, that you want to share with just that group of friends.. Right now – there’s no easy or simple solution to that dilemma.. but rest assured, I’m working on it ;) – If you want to talk more about that challenge, hear about some of the innovative solutions that have been thought of already, or help develop the next generation of information filtering and distribution, then get in touch, or comment below, and let’s get the conversation rolling ;)

Jeff, ended by sharing his take on the future… He saw the future as being even more converged, even more connected, even more interconnectedness across our world… He also talked about how technology is making the world smaller, and mentioned a bit about how the ability to stay connected, to have an ambient awareness of everything your friends have been upto.  He described how his childrens generation stayed connected with their friends, even through the school holidays, and that they each know what the others have been upto, thanks to facebook, myspace, and similar platforms..

Imagine who you might still be friends with, or connected with now, if you’d had these tools at your disposal when you were younger??  Our children are growing up in the world, where it’s normal to have travelled to another country, have friends around the world, and stay connected through technology.

Food for thought eh?? Or Fodder for your dreams!!  Night all!

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So, I started 2009 taking a few days away from the computer, the internet, and taking some time for myself, to just start thinking about what the coming year has in store?  It’s not often, in our always, on, always connected world, that we can find the time to just step back, and think, and reflect, without having a hundred and one thoughts at the back of our minds, of all the things we need to do, or people we have to respond to, and so it was good to be able to just switch off, step back, and unplug, knowing that it would just be the jovial, merry partying, and festival spirit being carried by the internet across the world, at this time of year.

Traditionally, the Winter, is associated with retreating inwards and being introspective.  To people who manage to notice the seasons, and the changes in pace of life, and the change in nature, Winter is traditionally a time of hibernation, and deep slumber, a time when we look inwards, and re-focus our dreams, and aspirations.  It’s a time that naturally lends itself to staying indoors, and having some quiet time, given that it’s so cold out, and it’s nice to be snug indoors.

Personally I like to enter the New Year, with a clear purpose, and sense of what my priorities are for the coming year, as well as clearing the slate from the previous year, and letting go of what’s not been working so well, and coming to terms with those failures too.

So 2008 was a “huge” year, for me, in so many many ways.  I’ve grown tremendously in the last year – personally experiencing and living through an entire roller coaster of emotions at times.   I’ve had some incredible highs, and some unfortunate lows.  Some of those low’s unfortunately, are still on a downturn, and until I get some closure on them, they’ll possibly continue to keep going downhill..  There’s not too much I can say about the low’s just yet, not until some things become clearer, and I know exactly what’s happening.  But the highs, equally, have been a real joy and pleasure to experience, and perhaps everything in nature finds it’s way of balancing things out – making sure we never get too high, or too low, before we get to experience the opposite.  I will gladly reveal all, as they say, when the time is right, for now, suffice it to say, it’s been a very very tough time for me personally and as a consequence, professionally.

I started 2008, with a very clear aim and purpose – “to restore my health”.

I wanted to become physically fit, wanted to restore my body to a health and vitality which I posessed perhaps 10 years ago now, and I wanted to overcome a physical condition that I’ve been fighting for over 5 years now.  No, I’m not talking about my obesity, which is also a challenge, but I’m talking about my Lymphatic condition..

Since 2003, during my stay in South Korea as an English Teacher, I went and got ill, with a condition, that has meant that I’ve had to spend the last five years, experiencing a series of recurring fevers, pains in my leg, and an abnormal amount of swelling in my left leg, which has made it challenging at times, to even find a pair of trousers I could wear, without my leg becoming completely swollen, and painful.

In the past 5 years, I’ve worked with traditional allopathic doctors, I’ve worked with healers from Mexico, with shamans from Peru, with acupuncturists, with homeopaths, and ayervedic physicians – but it seems that no-one was able to concretely deal with my illness, or I was unable to follow through with any medications, and courses of action that I was prescribed, given how much I’ve been travelling over the last 5 years.

End of 2007, I made the conscious choice to stay fixed in London, to not go gallivanting round the globe, and to do everything I could to get my leg healed, and get back into shape…  I continue on this journey, to this day, having now decided to go at this, from every possible angle I can.. I’m religiously following the advice of my allopathic doctor, and will be consulting with some of the other doctors and healers I’ve worked with before, to attack this ill health on all fronts.  But perhaps, my health is going to resolve itself in it’s own time, and I need to choose something more appropriate to focus on now??  I realised that perhaps part of the challenge is in not having something to get healthy for, I wouldn’t be as motivated.  Perhaps just being healthy wasn’t enough of a motivation, or didn’t support me enough in my goals?

Of course, I have other goals too – but they all took a back seat last year, whilst I put all of my time, attention and energy into getting healthy.   Result? I’m healthier now than I was this time last year.  (I’ve definitely lost more weight, and the swelling in my leg has reduced).  But I’m not there yet.. I’ve not reached the goal or target that I aspired to hit.  And to be completely honest, heading into 2009, with the same overriding focus, or theme just doesn’t appeal to me anymore..

The mission to get healthy, and recover completely is still there – but I don’t feel like 2009 feels like a year I need to devote to my health and wellbeing in the same way.  I’ve learnt heaps, in the last year, and if I just continue applying what I’ve learnt, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that I will eventually come out of this stronger, fitter, healthier, and more alive than I’ve ever been.  So if my primary focus for 2009 isn’t going to be my health anymore what is it going to be??  For the longest time, I just couldn’t understand which to choose..

I had my pick, narrowed down, to:
1) Personal Development – I could focus on learning new skills, learning new languages, studying something, etc..
2) Personal Relationships – Investing the time and attention this year, in getting closer with family, with friends, with colleagues, and with acquaintances.  Building my network deeper, and wider, and connecting with ever more people.
3) Get a career – Choose a career – and get laser focussed with it.  I’ve been drifting between projects and ideas, and volunteering, and helping people out for a number of years now, but I haven’t had that singularity of focus, on a single vision, or a single career path, that’s yielded the results I aimed for.  When I discovered recently that a friend of mine, who graduated in the same year as I did – is now a Vice President of the company he’s been working with.. I wonder where I would be today, had I just committed, and focussed on one thing already??  Conversely, if it weren’t for the variety and breadth of exposure I’ve had in life, I probably wouldn’t be the well travelled, well rounded, and lateral thinker that I am.  So there were pros and cons to my lifestyle choices.

Ironically, I’m drawn to getting a career.  I know – most people, seeing me living my life, travelling at a moments notice, the world at my fingertips, think that I have such a “great” life, and why would I ever want to give it up?? Well, I guess I’ve done all the travelling, seeing the world, and having adventures that I want to have for now.  Yes, the thought of living on a desert island, and enjoying warm weather, and a great laid back lifestyle is all good and all – but knowing that I could at any moment get myself a job as an English Teacher in Thailand, and be “living that life”, is just not appealing anymore.  I’ve been there, done that, got the T-Shirt, and bored of it already.

With that in mind, I’m making 2009, the year that I focus on my career, and my professional development, through working, and having a job.  It’s pretty easy to do the whole job thing, but for me, the real challenge is going to be in becoming the very best in my field.  I’ve often wanted the “regularity” that comes with having a nine to five, your life takes on a basic routine, and rhythm, that allows you a certain amount of freedom and flexibility that comes with the structure that a regular working day brings.  I’ve done many of those “exercises” where you imagine what you would do, if you had all the money in the world, and whilst in the past I might have dreamt of great worldly ambitions, and lofty goals, in truth, I don’t really want any of those things.  What I want is to “work”.  That kind of work that at the end of the day, you look back on it, and get a sense of satisfaction, knowing that you’ve done a days productive work.  It’s that feeling you get, after accomplishing something, knowing that you’ve completed something substantial, and completed something productive.

I haven’t yet, learnt to “monetise” my work, and my contributions, and perhaps it’s  a reflection of the fact that whilst my contributions are useful and of value, I still have some things to learn about business, and money.  My recent reading of The Richest Man in Babylon, has made me realise just how much I love and appreciate work, and how there’s some basic fundamental principles, of wealth, and abundance that I’ve been missing out on.  The most basic being – that if you don’t love your work, then you won’t be able to get really really good at something, and then be able to command a greater salary for being ever more proficient in your field, or area of expertise.

So, 2009, I’m going to focus all my energies on becoming excellent at faciliting online community.  Managing an online Community is challenging at the best of times, but comes easily and effortlessly to people who have mastered those skills, and know how to support their colleagues or constituents in generating content, and deriving value.  So with that in mind, this year, I’ll be focussing my time, attention,  and skills to both engaging more deeply online, and also to learning and developing the skillset, or toolset that’s required to be successful in facilitating online community :)  I look forward to seeing how accomplished I become in this field, by the end of 2009.  Wish me luck!!

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– What Does the New Year Hold in Store for the Web?

I decided I was going to take a stab at what’s going to be hot and what’s not, in 2009 with regards to the Web, the Internet, Social Media, Social Networking, etc. etc.

Most people, these days have heard of Social Networking giant Facebook.  What most people probably don’t realise, however, is that Facebook is not generating any real Value for money, for it’s advertisers.  As a once frequent customer of Facebook, I used to spend countless hours on Facebook, discovering old school friends, uncovering the past, and reconnecting up with those people, but now that that’s done, and we occasionally communicate with each other, it seems like all that fuss has just gone away..

Instead, it’s been taken over by Twitter – that provides more immediacy in the conversations, more instant engagement, and more real feedback, and sense of community…  It’s like blogging, in short form – but even Twitter has yet to monetise – and therein lies the challenge…

In 2009 – I predict we’re going to start to see a number of self-monetising startups.  Built on the back of services like Twitter, and Facebook, they will increase user engagement and provide a platform for real conversations to take place, that lead to tangible results.  Peer to peer marketing,  and WOM marketing, is going to slowly start creeping into the marketplace, replacing the traditional CPC and Keyword based advertising.

Online/commercial advertising is also going to slowly start to change.  With metrics, and measures for ROI on social media, and community impact assessments starting to emerge, people will be able to directly see the difference in a pound spent, buying keywords, vs. a pound spent, thanking a vocal supporter of a brand/product.

With all this public display of conversations around brands, and products, consumers will start to get a real life line into the companies they consume from, and through concerted peer pressure, and publicly mocking, and naming and shaming those organisations with bad practices, and unsustainable models of business, there will start to be a greater shift towards companies publishing more openly and more transparently what they consume, produce, and re-sell.  Consumers will also more strongly advocate, and support companies, and examples of people doing things “right”, so the early adopters will get additional kudos, as well as experience significant positive gains, from being ahead of the curve.

Equally, this lifeline will allow companies to understand more accurately, what the clients are looking for, and prepare them to share useful information, about their work, or their services, or their products, which will then get translated into a sale.

One of the biggest changes that will come about during 2009, will be the rise of the educated, empowered consumer, who, armed with the right knowledge, connected to the right friends, can co-ordinate and organise mass rallies across the country, and internationally, whenever a wrong is enacted, or some organisation acts in a way that is inappropriate or uncalled for.

Video will see a downturn, whilst mobile micro blogging services will become even more mainstream, and start to be offered as integral to the package, as SMS, or Data.

Advances in micro-blogging will extend into the developing world, where more people with cell phone usage will be able to communicate using a hybrid blend of asynchronous communication, via a twitter like service, something akin to SMS, and a mobile handheld device.

We may also start to see more handheld devices, that act as “internet” gateways, providing access to services like Qik that let you stream audio, or video directly online, for all to see, and also permit the easy access to email, social networks, and status updates.

There will also be a clear convergence in the market place between online social networks, and messaging/email platforms, that will mean people will log on, in once place, and from there, they will be able access all their rich conversation streams.

Information will start to be referred to as flows, with different streams of information providing information about different topics, and subjects.  Individuals will start to be trusted as sources of reliable information, and their streams will be more publicly in demand, whilst people with polluted information streams will start to be more openly ignored, and blocked.

Managing information streams, and selectively filtering and distributing information flows, will become an art unto itself, and experts in various fields and different disciplines will generate these information flows, and start to publicly publish them.  As a consequence, not only will these experts be known for the quality of the work they produce, but also the quality of the information streams they generate.

Marketing, and advertising budgets will slowly start to be spent increasingly on cultivating communities around the customers, and people recommending products, and services, will start to see incomes being derived from referring, and recommending products and services, based on genuine experiences, and real authentic recommendations.

So in 2009, keep an eye out for services like SocialMedian who allow you to crowdsource your news from your peers.  Any service that can tap into your networks wisdom, and share with you the “best” wisdom as determined by the people you choose to associate with, will definitely be a time saver, and a crowd pleaser, in a world where increasingly information overload is the order of the day, watch out for more crowdsourcing tools rising to the fore in 09.

Also, watch out for services like Gist, and Xobni – who purport to save you time, in your inbox, and help you create context around, the chaos that is “email”, and messaging.  What they do, is start from your inbox, and help you find and organise, and sort the people you’re talking with, allowing you, to an extent to start to identify either other useful information about a person, or to start to help you find more of what a particular person you’ve spoken to has said.  I think these tools will have a limited shelf life, as they mature, since they aren’t necessarily tackling the problem of email in the most elegant of ways, but props to them for attempting to engage with such a behemoth of a challenge ;)

What will really start making a real impact in 2009, will be services that start helping you navigate your social graph, across social networks.  There’s potential in services like PeopleBrowsr who are looking to start bringing some of those information streams from different platforms, through a single service, and then tagging and grouping information streams, and republishing them..

But the real winners in 2009, in my eyes, are going to be the services that can help you effortlessly navigate your social graph, across any platform, and keep the information flowing, without relying on you having to set up the context of groups, and people you know in each platform.  A single login screen, that brings you all your content, in one place, and lets you see all the content from your friends in one place.

Friendfeed sort of works, in that in theory you can bring all your content into one place, but it’s interface, and usability leave a lot to be desired.

2009 is going to be the year of the “Social Browser” – helping us organise, filter, and co-ordinate our information streams, regardless of where they come from, or how they are generated.  When we want to know what people are upto – we’ll be able to find out.

So watch out 2009 – “Surfing the Web”, is soon going to become a thing of the past, and people will increasingly start to “Surf their Communities”..  Now let’s see how the year plays out..

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Heading home on the tube last week, looking over someone’s shoulder, I briefly caught a glimpse of an Evening Standard article talking about Twitter, and it possibly replacing Facebook.  It then went on to describe the authors failed experience of trying to use Twitter, and his rejection of it because he couldn’t get it to work.

It reminds me of my experience of when I first heard about Twitter, and what happened, when I first decided to take a look.  My first response was, I’m not going to tell everyone about my personal life, and chose then and there not to use twitter, and that it was for other people.. Heck, I didn’t even update my Facebook Status updates, why would I use a tool where I would just be updating my status all day?? It really didn’t make any sense, and I saw no reason to even begin to engage with this foolishness..

How little did I know..

Many months later, I happened to attend one of London’s Geek Dinners, where Moo were presenting, and happened to end the night, standing in a conversation with a group of people that were all friends. They shared their experiences of meeting people they had been in conversation with, over twitter, and the whole experience of having online friends, who they started to meet in real life.  It made me reminiscence of my youth, when watching TV, I would imagine what it would be like being a “geek” and having friends who knew me by my handle (my online nickname), and here I was meeting people in real life, who lived that dual personality.

So, spurred on by the thought of being able to at last have my online persona (of magitam) come to life, and knowing that there were people who I now knew, who I could connect with through Twitter, and start to stay connected with them, I started to use Twitter.. ..

That evening I left that event, with the contact details of those few friends I’d made, inspired by the conversation, and the idea of meeting people in person, who you already knew online.

Fast forward, 6 months, and I’m a firm advocate of Twitter… Not only do I believe it to be of great use, I think it’s invaluable, in sharing thoughts, disseminating information, and also to just gain a “loose” awareness of what friends, family, colleagues, associates, and your general twitter community are upto.

Whilst it might seem trivial to fill twitter with what you ate, or what you did, it’s strangely satisfying to be able to share what you’re doing with people who know you.  Equally it starts to become the start of “conversations” that allow you to find others that share similar ideas.. It lets you reach out and connect to more people.

Most importantly, it gives you an extension of the “Office Water Cooler”.  The informal conversations that happen spontaneously in passing.. Those chance encounters where you can never foretell or predict what might be said, or what choice piece of information might be communicated!  It’s these “choice” encounters that make for really interesting, unplanned, unexpected, but potential synchronicities for me that make it all the more worthwhile.

Aside from the water cooler effect, Twitter also has become a solid bit of support, and community for me.. As much as it would be great to have a diverse, and varied group of friends, who had similar interests, and were a mixed and varied group, sometimes I just don’t have the physical time to spend with people interested in each of those different areas.  It’s now possible to have many of those interactions in my virtual world, which helps re-inforce my interests, and means that me in person conversations are already a step further along, than they would be otherwise..  It’s great to be able to know about what folks are upto, and be able to stay current, interested and engaged with many people, without having to be always calling them and asking them!

So now turning the tabkes for a second onto you the reader, I’d like to ask you to answer the following question: – Why do you use twitter?  What do you get out of it?

If you don’t yet use twitter, then why don’t you use twitter?

Do share your thoughts, and insights in the comments below, or write your own blog post about why you use twitter, and be sure to trackback to here, so I know about it :)

twitter, why twitter, community, twitterverse

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This morning, I’ve finally figured out why I so rarely get any real work done.. Because I’m always so busy trying to “fix things”!!

I guess it’s just part of the growing pains of technology, and getting your systems up and running.  Normally, whenever I start with a new computer, there’s some basics that I have to do to any machine, before I can be comfortable using it.  That includes installing some decent open source tools to be able to get my work done.  One of the reasons I prefer to use Open Source software as much as possible, is simply because I can then use it on any platform, and I don’t have to start learning a whole new interface… And with a zero cost to acquisition, the learning I put into installing and configuring the software repays itself, pretty quickly, once you’ve had to install and use the same piece of software on two or three computers… (if you’re reading this, and thinking two or three computers?? Just remember, being a techy, I’ve been using computers for ages, and as I’ve upgraded from an x386 to a 486, to Intel Pentium, to Macs, and Linux, and now am on pretty much everything (except Mac – gotta get myself a Mac again soon!!))

So anyways, Open Source software tends to be able to do the same job as closed source, but has the same interface on pretty much all the platforms, and usually, being open source, if a platform isn’t available, you can usually get the code, and make it work on your platform, if you want to.. I like having that freedom, and knowledge.. Not that I would necessarily do it, just yet – but one of these days, I’m going to get stuck in under the cover, and when I do, I want to make sure that I can contribute and give back to those who gave me so much benefit, and value early on when I started off using the tools to try to stay productive, and useful, with my work, using those tools..

So, for email, I’ve long been a firm advocate of Thunderbird.  Even on a Mac, back when I had the luxury of having one at my disposal, I used the default Mail App, and just had to get out of there, and get my dear lovely Thunderbird working on my desktop as quickly as humanly possible!!!! It’s just painful, when I think of the pain points, but not wanting to bash any software, and not remembering what the points of pain were, suffice it to say, it was something simple and easy enough for me to think, this really should be able to do this, and it couldn’t so I left behind the default Mail client.. (I’m sure Mac’s Mail app is constantly being updated and improved, but you just can’t beat open source for speed of deployment, and just getting the functionality faster, and sooner!!)

Anyways, I’ve used Thunderbird, for as long as I can remember – and the few times that I’ve “had” to use Outlook, or some MS equivalent, I just cringe, and long for the sanity that comes with the open source alternative..

Well, going back a few years, one feature that I thought would be really useful, would be to have a calendar, so enthusiastically I started using Google Calendar, excited that I could export my calendar, and publish it places – (I’m a techie who wants to know I can take my data with me and share it everywhere :)

So I figured, if I can export, and I can publish, I should be able to use it with a desktop client “somehow” – and the bane of being an early adopter is that you really don’t get to choose your apps, with just a point and click style approach – there’s usually some “coding” or integration that needs to happen, to make things work.  No problem – I’m a techie, I don’t have a problem with getting under the hood and making things work, after all that’s what I thrive on, the challenge of making systems do what they’re meant to, so that I can just get on with my life, without having to constantly tell everyone, or repeat stuff that should be easy to replicate, share or just make available.

But alas, the best Google Calendar could do, is let me import my external calendar, into my computer.  (Ok, as I’m writing this, I distinctly remember it being iCal format into iCal on a Mac – so I’m guessing this was quite a few years ago, pre-Lightning and Sunbird – the Mozilla Open Source counterparts for Calendaring).  There was no way that iCal would let me write something into this calendar that I could then sync with my online calendar.. Not that I was using multiple computers at the time (back then it was just a form of online backup in my mind)…

Eventually, with nothing really working quite right, I ended up just leaving it, and never really used calendaring at all, just because life wasn’t too complicated, or busy, and I didn’t need to see every little thing that I was working on, or keep track of, or be on time or as punctual back then…

Fast forward a few years, and a few countries later, and being back in London, and having discovered and now that I’m starting to regularly attend some interesting and cool events, conferences, networks, communities, and groups, I’m often and quite frequently asked about other events that I could suggest and recommend to others.. I guess being someone who’s quite interested in these things, I’m often discovering events through word of mouth, or just happen to know about the places to find things, like meetup.com or upcoming.org…

But I guess that’s not always the case.

So anyways, I was getting a touch annoyed, at just always finding events, or seeing events I wanted to add to my Google Calendar, and tired of Google Calendars lack of integration with Firefox, to be able to just clip an event, and tag it for my calendar, the way I can do for my bookmarks with Delicious, I thought I might be able to save some pain and hassle, by having at least a desktop based client that I can then later sync up with Google Calendar… And as I’m writing this I’m also getting an idea for something, which I’ll share in a second…

So anyways, I set up a bunch of calendars on my google account, which I’ve set up as public calendars…
If you happen to be interested in seeing them, before I’ve properly integrated them into this blog, you can check them out here for now:

For all events even vaguely Spiritual that might be of interest to me:
XML, iCal, HTML

For all Talks and Workshops in London, that might inspire, or engage people working in New Media, Technology, Social Change, Innovation, Culture, or just generally anything else that I think might be interesting to attend:
XML, iCal, HTML

For all Networking Events, Unconference Events, MiniBars, MiniCamps, basically any “unstructured” event, where there’s an opportunity to meet people, connect and network, that I’m generally interested in knowing about. These can be related to Technology, Social Media, Web 2.0, New Media, Startups, Entrepreneur Stuff, Innovative Stuff, pretty much anything that I think is cool, and suited to the general ConsciousComms Community (more about ConsciousComms in the near future):
XML, iCal, HTML

And I’ve only have set these up, because I have found a simpler way of capturing the “events” to add to the calendar, because the pain of trying to add events to Google Calendar was just too great a burden to make me even start taking the first step towards getting the events onto public calendars in the first place..

It’s at this point, that I want to say a huge, huge, thank you to Jonny Reeves, a contributor to a blog called simply bfish.xaedalus.net for taking the time to write his excellent article on Integrating Google Calendar into Thunderbird using Lightning!!  Admittedly, I figured, that I should be able to just add Google Calendar to one of the Mozilla Calendar tools myself, and found the plugin for Gcal from the Mozilla extensions repository.  But if it weren’t for his article, I might have had to experiment with Thunderbird and Lightning, to make sure things worked, and then to figure out how to make it work.. If it weren’t for this well written and properly documented entry, I wouldn’t have been able to just make these tools just work, and get on with my work, so thank you Jonny!! I love that you’ve gone and done what I would have done, had I known it so long ago, and had the time to go through and document so clearly and simply what needs to be done… (It does make me wonder though how comes I didn’t use Google Cal integration with a desktop until now?!?)

I’m pretty sure that article alone will bring down the barrier to entry for so many competent technical users who might not have adopted the hybrid solution to get their systems working otherwise..  It’s nice when you see such clearly documented stuff, and having benefitted so greatly from it, I’ll be sure to remember to share things in as clear a manner as possible, in the near future around some of the things that I’m a bit of an expert on, and feel like there might be people who could be interested in having more help with..

For now, I just had to write this, to express my gratitude, and thanks to scribefire, I just had it pop up, and it let me start writing.. now I just need to catch up with all the other articles that I’ve been working on..

And as an afterthought… I’ll just share an idea that’s occurred to me.. based on the way delicious works – how about a product that lets you “clip” events, to a calendar??  Does anyone thing such an idea has legs?? If you could be at a web page, and just want to record the event, in a calendar format that you could easily share with others.. would you want to use something like that?? Obviously modelling the style of delicious, i.e. having plenty of tagging, networks, etc.. but having a uniquely “Farhan” spin to it.. if you’re interested drop me a note in the comments, or just let me know what you think of the idea through the blog’s comments… (and don’t worry, if you happen to post me your email address in your comment, I’ll make sure I don’t publish it..)

thunderbird, lightning, google calendar, desktop, london events

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Given that’s it’s a packed and intense two days during Chain Reaction 08, and that the WiFi connection is sporadic, and non-responsive at times, it means that the social reporting, and real time updates from the event are a little more challenging to get out.

For now – I’m going to just share my unabridged notes, from the sessions that I attended, to give you a “flavour” – and I use the term very very loosely, of what’s been happening at the event..

I’ll be sure to revise this posting to a more detailed write up, after the event, once I get a bit more time, but for now – I just want to share what’s come out of the sessions so far..

So to start off, after some excellent ice-breakers, and welcomes to the room, and after an inspiring keynote from Jeremy Gilley, we broke off into different rooms.

I really wanted to sit in on the Collaboration for Social Change session, which was chaired by Stephen Howard from Business In The Community.

Here’s my notes, taken,in realtime, as the session took place – and I hope they give you a glimpse into some of the conversations that were happening, please ask any questions, or share your insights in the comments below.. For now, I can only apologise for the roughness of these next few blogposts..

Collaborating for Social Change

Steve Howard chaired session.

IBM

Microfinance infrastructure

kuda India – 100,000 microfinancing clients

collaborating internally – created opensource software for managing micro-financing organisations, working with grameen bank

royalmail

coming years, business might step backwards

– key theme, asking staff what they want to do, having staff express what they wanted to do

– people love engaging with community, unlocks talent, people have more contact with customers

– in offices where people are engaged, and doing more volunteer work, other metrics and scores are better

– royal mail support barnardos – aligns with values of staff, and what matters to them

– questions from audience – hiten shah – partnership working is difficult and mostly fails, would like to know key elements for success and pitfalls for failure

– partnerships take longer than expected – require a few years to properly be able to work together

– IBM – moved from “big things” to helping staff take small local action -

– RoyalMail did the same, focus on what people want to do locally, not national large corporate led strategies

– remove barriers, to make it easier for people to engage and participate in the programs

– homeless project, involved providing work for homeless – over 16hrs work, meant homeless lost their free housing

being open, with frank dialogue, with staff, not trying to control process, but empowering staff

– boss from Big Issue, sharing social entrepreneur model – challenging corporates to invest CSR budget in Big Issue Invest

– outsourcing CSR spend – to organisations that are more effective, prove return on investment, and show profit

chainreactiion08 – commercial organisation with a social purpose – the Royal Mail

– do we have shared interests? Having different positions? Should work together, where there are common aims

people with money want to give their money in a way that provides visible returns, leads to direct results

– leadership development in the “Third Sector”, what do we need to prepare the next generation to work across the sectors

– IBM-programs exist where leadership can be developed, and second staff to government

– RoyalMail – most organisations have secondment programs, had staff leave to join organisations and programs

-companies starting to bring in an external person into corporate trainings, so they can benefit

– royalmail – business learns from the experience too. Hugely benefits staff to be exposed to the environment

– question – salesforce gives 1% of time, what do corporates do?

– ideas and hours are logged internally, and IBM supports financially accordingly

– how do we take this idea to the other employers, to smaller businesses? Value of community contribution

– video message from allan gillespie, from goldman sachs – video stopped working

– allan gillespie – talks about social action – microsoft, building foundation years ago, burdened on africa poverty issues

– power of immunity, and immunisation – most poor communities only 25-35% get vaccines – people dying from preventable diseases

– prevent children suffering from diseases, kids can be educated, mothers can support family

– millenium development goals, monterey, california, creation by UN – 2000

chainreacction08 – goal 5 – reduction in preventable child deaths

– MS, gates, invested 1.5 billion – uk, and other european govts stepped up and also added to funds

france spain, italy, south africa, sweden, norway – funding secured over many years

– promise of funding used to secure loans to be paid off, across the program

– problems like refrigeration of vaccines with solar refrigerators, motorbikes, resources to make vaccines available

– 10 years – estimated 500 million children will be vaccinated, at least 10, 20 million children saved from death

– gates, un, gleneagles, uk, bank of england, city of london – chain of ripple to make change

– join leadership, government, politics, for sustainable success

– prof david grayson – chair of csr @ Cranfield Business School

– proposal asking businesses to see if a sustainable model for a new immunisation program might work

– fortuitious accident, that proposal landed on desk of banker at goldman sachs, who was looking for csr programs to engage with

– council for social action – need new ways of making change, collaborating

-key characteristics in paper which highlight what works in collaboration-pdf on council of social action website

these will not always be the right approach, takes great deal of time and energy to make programs work

requires significant investment from govt, business, and third sector

must have shared purpose, build deep relationships over time, for commitment to succeed

need for a common vocabulary, between business, govt and 3^rd sector

need capacity to engage with whats on offer, and to properly commit to the cause

extend collaboration common to business to partner with other organisations, new forms off collaboration

capacity for organisations to work with different types of

launch of a consulation – what are the determining critical factors?

-can you share what you’ve seen work? Different scales, different size?

– have the critical success factors been correctly identified?

– have key requirements that will lead to this success been identified?

– looking forward to getting more feedback on these ideas.

invitation to connect with BASAC that’s developing program for supporting community co-operation and participation

suggestion to connect the dots, connecting people together who are already doing amazing things

– unlocking talent, business response, how do we create a web based talent map of what’s already there??

– how do we take this challenge and make it simpler and easier for businesses to connect and collaborate

– ibm evangelists will offer advice, suggestions, find and ask for advice

royal mail – move away from evangelising, and making local connection

– learn across sectors, ripe environment of people who know how to use social networks

– simple actions, why so complicated?

– worldeka, more information, more networks

– suggestion of many ideas, diversity in nature, thriving on diversity

– royal mail – overarching aim is to make it easier and more accessible for businesses to participate, and engage

– not targetted at single solutions, or one solution, but many different solutions, and many different responses

– suggestion that firms make visible a choice to work because of csr, and make that visible

– talk about issues, not necessarily business

– choosing partners based on common values

– building brand and reputation, recruiting the best staff

– IBM actions were based on the values expressed through their staff jams

– tangible evidence from Legal and general research showing companies that implemented these values to outperform

– procurement from ethical suppliers, royal mail, constantly asked about what they’re doing on sustainability and social action

– companies genuinely interested in working with like minded organisations

– grad recruitment – if you’re not talking about work life, environment, you dont’ stand a chance

requires big change in mindset from organisations in civil society, and preparedness to work across sectors in new challenging ways

jeffery sachs – us against a common problem – not us and them anymore

how do we prevent stifling of ideas, increase cross-fertilisation of ideas

subject is more important than ever – need is greater than ever – feels too big to deal with alone

– individually we can help, collaboratively we can help even more

– stephen howard – ceo – business in the community – what can we take away? What difference can I make?

– the urgency has never been greater..

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Today (Monday 17th November 2008) marked the inauguration of Chain Reaction 08, a two day conference in London which “will bring together social leaders, community activists, policy makers, business leaders, young people and people like you from around the globe to share learning and to generate new ideas for social change, locally, nationally and globally.”

Today also marches the launch of Global Entrepreneurship Week “the first worldwide celebration of enterprise, which aims to unleash young people’s enterprising ideas and address some of society’s biggest issues, from poverty reduction through to climate change.”

As the day ends in London, and all the delegates wind down, and finish up for the day, later, half way across the other side of the world, in San Francisco, there is another conversation about to begin, at The Global Summit where the question will be asked – “What will it take to build a sustainable future?”.  The Global Summit(TM) a world-wide partnership for a sustainable future, is laying the foundation for annual Summits across the globe. The Global Summit(TM) begins with a two-day symposium and culturally rich welcome reception. Outcomes include guiding principals for a sustainable world across six key social and economic sectors, a blue print for the world’s first global citizen voter platform and an online collaboration system that maximizes our collective impact. Learn more about this event by either reading this press release, or by visiting the website of the Empowerment works – the organisation responsible for putting on the event.

It seems like this week could truly mark the beginning of a significant changing tide in the world we live in today.. I’ll be personally attending Chain Reaction 08, where I’ll be socially reporting on the event, via twitter, and blogging, as best I can.  At the same time two dear friends, fellow facilitators of the Awakening the Dreamer Symposium, and former colleagues from The Pachamama Alliance where I volunteered for 9 months will be attending The Global Summit in San Francisco.  We’re planning to organise a conference call, after both events, to find out about each others experiences of what was shared, and to find out threads between the two events, that we might be able to start weaving together, between the two gatherings, half a world away from each other..

I don’t know about how much virtual engagement will occur at The Global Summit, but we’ll have plenty of resources to engage people online, coming out of the conference, so please do connect into the conversations in whatever way you feel would work best!!

Whilst clarifiying a few details for The Global Summit, I’ve discovered a few more relevant happenings this week..

This week the following related events are also happening, or did already happen:

Governor’s Global Climate Summit, Nov 18th and 19th, 2008, in Beverly Hills, California,
convened by Governor Schwarzenegger

The G-20 Global Economic Summit, on Nov 15th and 16th, 2008, in DC, organised by President Bush.
You can also read the Full G-20 Declaration.

The first pan-European Town Meeting on Climate Change, 15th Nov, 2008, simultaneously in Florence, (Italy), Cornellà de Llobregat (Barcelona, Spain) and Poitiers (France), in the context of the IDEAL-EU project, one of the ongoing Preparatory Actions on eParticipation funded by the European Commission.

So it’ll be interesting to see with all this flurry of activity, what long term sustainable social change could come out of these programs? and what actually ends up coming out of all these meetings…

If you’d like to engage with Chain Reaction 08 – we’re deliberately including an online social element to the community interactions, and so would like to extend the invitation to everyone to join in, participate, and collaborate.

You can start by tagging everything you generate with the official tag of chainreaction08 – so everytime you blog, tweet, post a photo on flickr, or just generally include anything that you would like to include in the conversation, be sure to include that tag (except if you’re replying to something that’s been said in twitter, in which case the fact you’re replying will mean that the earlier part of the conversation, as well as your response will appear in the results :)  This applies to all people who are at the event, and watching from their homes too :)

On twitter, to search for a keyword, you can use http://search.twitter.com and put in the keyword terms for Chain Reaction 08.

A comprehensive query, that includes all related variations can be found by visiting http://tinyurl.com/5pu375 – this will provide you with a complete list of all posts on twitter relating to the London Chain Reaction 08 event. (The RSS Feed for this query can be found here).

For photos, everyone’s been asked to post them on flickr, and to use the keyword tag of chainreaction08 to make sure that they are visible to everyone who is looking for images from the event.  If you’d like to see the latest photos that have been uploaded, just visit here.  If you happen to attend the Chain Reaction 08 event, and have pictures that you’d like to share with the other participants, then I’d like to invite you to create your very own free flickr account, and post the photos you’ve taken during the course of the two days onto flickr, making sure that you tag all your photos with “chainreaction08” (without the quotes, of course!)

You can also find relevant blog posts, that will help weave a connection between the participants of Chain Reaction 08.  Again, if you want to have your blog appear to other people, make sure that when you post your blog, you include the tag chainreaction08, so that other people can find it, when they are looking for related content..

Fortunately, Google has integrated it’s video search into a single interface, that comes from multiple sources, so you can also find all videos from the event, that are shared on youtube and google video using the chainreaction08 tag.

There is also content being video’d and streamed directly online, throughout the event courtesy of David Wilcox, and Qik…

Then, most importantly, we also have an active online community at http://chain-reaction.crowdvine.com/ so if you don’t happen to have been able to join the event, live, or want to join in from a distance, the online community will undoubtedly be a rich resource, that connects people together long after chain reaction 08 is over, and perhaps by chain reaction 09, there’ll be an international dimension occurring simultaneously at the same time.

If I happen to have missed any resources, please add them into the comments section below, and I’ll be sure to update this page, to properly reflect all the resources, and references relating to ChainReaction08, so that everyone can benefit from knowing where to find everything related and relevant to a matter dear to our hearts.

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I’m an avid reader of Steve Pavlina’s Blog, and an entry I was reading today, got me thinking.. I just had to post a response.

Steve Pavlina, for those of you who’ve never heard of him, is a Personal Development Innovater, who through his blog, and website is sharing his experiences with the world, with regards to his own personal growth and development.  He often experiments publicly, and shares the results in a very live, and timely manner.  At times, it’s almost as if you’re going through the trials with him, and living through the daily experiences that he shares.  His thoughts and insights are certainly truly eye opening, and I’m reminded whenever I read his blog, of just some of the wonderful qualities, that I pray one day I might posess.

He recently shared an interesting take on health.  Admittedly, it’s not the first time that I’ve heard the analogy.  In fact, my own personal inspiration towards living a healthy and active lifestyle is Jason “The Juicemaster” Vale, author of Slim 4 Life, and a man to who I owe a deep debt of gratitude, for introducing me to the juicing way of life.. Cheers Jason!

So as I was reading this blog entry, that talks about the cells detoxing, and about how diet can affect our thinking and our ability to experience peak mental and emotional states, and I wonder how consciously do I choose the food that I eat?? Do I sometimes choose to deliberately supress elevated states of heightened awareness, and deeper emotions??  I know at times I’m drawn to eating meat, partly because it makes me feel heavier, and denser, and less aware, and less conscious.  It has a numbing effect, perhaps a bit like alcohol might, for people who drink alcohol to drown their sorrows.

At other times, I’ll be drawn to carbohydrates, like breads, and rice, to give me a “heavy” filled feeling inside.  It’s almost as if it’s not enough to eat and be fed, I need to feel “full”.  But that “fullness” is sometimes something that isn’t necessarily a very empowering state.  I know that at times I’ll experience a craving, ravenous hunger, which will make me just want to continue eating, and then eventually, once I’m satisfied, I’ll have to just stop for a while and let my body digest.  Jason, talks about it as your body going comatose, whilst it deals with this influx of food, which if the body doesn’t shut down every other system, and deal with, you would end up dying.. An example being the typical Christmas post-lunch snooze, which is more a coma induced recovery period, where the body is frantically trying to process all this freshly eaten food, before it shuts the body down completely.

It might seem an intense, or extreme view to take, but having self-induced these over indulgent meals, where the body just doesn’t seem to be able to cope with the sheer quantity of food that I’m consuming, it naturally puts me in a spot, where I end up just slowing down, resting for a while, to let my body digest, and get back into being alive again a short while later.

Paradoxically, I’ve found that I can always get a comfortable “full” feeling, and not feel like I’m about to shut down completely, whenever I make sure I have lots of wholesome, fresh, raw fruits or veggies as a part of my meal (either as juice, or typically as salads).  Whenever I eat like this, then I end a meal feeling filled, but not on the verge of having to shut down, and I continue with my life.  Interestingly, my emotional and mental states seem to almost feed on these cravings, and the mood swings seem to play a key part in the emotional attachment to eating.

What I have found particularly interesting, is that when I’m working on something meaningless, and empty, the feeling inside is the same, and the desire to eat more occurs.  I used that partly to my advantage with my previous employer, where I would stock up on snacks of fruit, knowing that I would want to snack away whilst working, because of how unengaging the work was.  Equally I knew that by snacking on fruit, at least I would be positively contributing to my health, instead of allowing it to continue to deteriorate.

Conversely, whenever I complete something that’s really meaningfull, or feels like it’s a real accomplishment, I feel that same fullness inside, that I would sometimes experience with food.  The biggest difference being that when I eat something and feel full, I know I’ve been fed, on a very physical level.  When I write something, or complete some piece of work, and it’s “done”, I’m apparently still fed, since the sense of accomplishment, in writing or completing something mirrors that sense of being filled.  The difference is, that when I’m engaged with something that consumes me, all thoughts of food, and hunger become secondary, and I no longer engage with food on the same terms.  It’s almost like food becomes a distraction to my work, and I genuinely am not interested in eating anything, until I finish what I’m in the middle of doing.

Interestingly, I completed fasting for a whole month, during the Muslim month of Ramadan recently, and during Ramadan, as an observant Muslim, you don’t eat between sunrise and sunset.  What I found was that in the first few days, whilst I might notice the fasting and the hunger closer to the end of the day, by the end of the month, my body was completely adjusted to the new eating patterns, and didn’t even twinge a little, when seeing others eating food, or when the typical lunch time came around.

Now, a few months on, I’m starting to wonder.. is it because I know that I’m not going to eat, that perhaps I kept myself engaged in activities, that were sufficiently engaging, that I didn’t feel hungry??

Is hunger really a physical hunger anymore?? With the amount of processed foods we eat these days, and with a real availability of food whenever, and wherever we want it, do we really know when our bodies are truly hungry anymore??  Is part of our conditioned “hunger” response to do with some of the suggested artificial sugar highs, some of the false hungers caused by eating too much refined sugar, or white refined carbs??  What would we naturally feel hungry for, if we didn’t have chemicals, and mental conditioning to influence our natural hunger patterns?

I’m sure in time I might get to the bottom of these questions myself.  For now, I’m just going to observe Steve Pavlina’s experiment living on nothing but raw juice for 92 days, and pay more attention to the food I’m eating, and the emotional highs and low’s I’m going through.

Though it really does make me wonder.. are we as a planet, plagued by diseases like obesity, because we’re so caught up in the physical world, and have so conditioned our bodies to respond to food, as a satiating source of hunger, that we mask up and hide the true hungers of our minds need to be expressive? Of our emotions needs to be felt? and of our individual, personal need to contribute in a valuable and meaningful way??  Share your thoughts and insights in the comments below..

Now that I’ve fed my soul, time to go nourish my body, with some food ;)

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I’m going to be part of the team advocating WordPress tonight, as a blogging platform of choice,  and pulled together some brief notes on what makes WordPress so great.

Would love to hear your thoughts, on why you prefer WordPress over other blogging platforms, and also, a link to your WP blog, would be appreciated.

If you happen to also think WP isn’t so hot, or doesn’t meet your needs I’d love to hear why??

My rough notes so far (mainly from wordpress.org and wordpress.com):

wordpress founded in 2003
largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world
Open Source
Requirements:
* PHP version 4.3 or greater
* MySQL version 4.0 or greater
(The mod_rewrite Apache module)

http://wordpress.com/stats/
4,581,919 blogs on wordpress.com

9.8 million WordPress publishers:
4.2 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus
5.6 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.

3,249 plugins – 14,532,117 downloads
601 themes – 1,232,704 downloads
1,906 ideas, 51,228 votes

In September 2008, an impressive 236 million people visited one or more WordPress.com blogs, and they viewed close to a billion pages on those blogs:

Almost everything on WordPress.com is free, and things that are currently free will remain free in the future, but we do offer paid a la carte upgrades for things like CSS editing and custom domains. How do we pay for everything? WordPress.com is run by Automattic which currently makes money from the aforementioned upgrades, blog services, Akismet anti-spam technology, and hosting partnerships.

WordPress Links
WordPress Pages

Full standards compliance — We have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today’s browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less.

No rebuilding — when changing templates
Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.

Easy Importing — We currently have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine are under way.

XML-RPC interface — WordPress currently supports an extended version of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. You can even use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.

Multiple authors

Spam protection

Comments

Cross-blog communication tools— WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards,

Bookmarklets — Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort.

Ping away — WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines.

Workflow — You can have types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page.

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So, the US presidential elections are a hot topic, no doubt.. It seems I couldn’t avoid them, thanks to my colleage at work, who streamed the debates, and news from the US elections, into the office, each and every day!! Thanks Greg :)  As much as I wanted nothing better than to ignore it, like anything, over time, it got the better of me, and I started to get interested..

Well, there’s not long to go, and as the debates and campaigns are coming to a close, with people already pre-voting in parts of the US, and voting queues taking hours at a time, you can tell that this clearly is an election like no other.. With the webosphere, blogosphere, and twittersphere alive with people actively watching and reporting on this election, the chances of there being a “fix” like there was in Bush vs. Clinton, is getting slimmer and slimmer.. let’s hope these elections represent people’s voting properly, and accurately.  Not that I believe in the democratic process leading to much, but heck, it’s got my interest, and so I’m going to blog about it, and share some of the “emergent” results, I’ve seen from the web 2.0 world of the internet so far.. It’ll be interesting to see how these metrics weigh up once the actual results come out.

Most of the inspiration to uncover these stats below came from reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, a book that talks about how diverse groups, which represent some key criterion, of individual self interest and diversity, amongst other things, are capable of accurately predicting outcomes.

So with that in mind, lets see what the Web and the Internet have to say about the current US elections, and let’s see after the elections how the figures and ratios match up..

This all started when for some strange reason, I googled Obama, noticed the total number of entries listed, and thought, I wonder how many pages on the internet exist for McCain?

Well the results were interesting to say the least [just to contextualise, these facts were collected on the 1st of November, 2008, from 16:40 GMT]

Entries on Google.com (I initially used Google.co.uk, but found the US numbers to be a little higher, so possibly more accurate?):

Obama = about 202,000,000 results
McCain = about 144,000,000 results

From Google News:

Obama = 472,359 results
McCain = 425,271 results

From Google Blogs:

Obama = 13,610,226 results
McCain = 7,984,667 results

From Yahoo.com:

Obama = about 1,430,000,000
McCain = about 1,130,000,000

From Live.com:

Obama = 528,000 results
Barack = 894,000 results
McCain = 3,750,000 results
Mc Cain = 6,690,000 results

From Alexa.com, when comparing the traffic Ranking of barackobama.com and johnmccain.com (the official websites of each candidate), note that the smaller the number, the better:

barackobama.com = 753
johnmccain.com = 2,580

Then on TwitVote, a mock opinion poll for Election2008.

Obama = 4247 votes
McCain = 908 votes

(note, that since twitvote is available to the entire twitter community, this may not represent the views of the american people as accurately, this is also being updated in real time, by people in twitter, so the figures will have no doubt have changed dramatically by the time this is published).

Also, on 7-election.com, where voters can vote, based on their choice of cup, when ordering coffee, in 7-eleven’s across the US, we can see:

Obama = 60%
McCain = 40%

From the CNN Election Tracker Poll of Polls:

Obama = 50%
McCain = 43%

and also the CNN Electoral Map Calculator, where the crowd gets to predict the results:

Obama = 291
McCain = 160

Finally, Technorati.com, a blog aggregator predicts:

Obama = 675,621 results
McCain = 494,815 results

If you can find any other examples of crowdsourcing the election results before they happen, do add them to the comments below, and I’ll edit and update the page accordingly.  For now, it looks like Obama is clearly in the lead, across all the media, except, oddly enough, Live.com.. Perhaps that’s a reflection of either the information Live.com relies upon as being inaccurate, or the users there, being of a different demographic.  I’d hate to think there was any intentional fixing going on..

Please do share your thoughts, and insights, in the comments below.. Thanks!

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