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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In the UK there’s a thriving group of non-profit techies, (also known as Circuit Riders) who stay connected through a mailing list, that regularly keeps everyone engaged with helping each other, and supporting each other, through those trying times when you need someone to call upon, as well as those not so trying times, when you just want to let people know what’s happening, or sound out ideas.  That’s great for the virtual contact, but I’d always felt that there was something lacking in the face to face meetings and events that could also occur, and that I’d experienced during my time as a Non Profit Volunteer Techie in San Francisco during 2006 and 2007.

Working with a model that seems to work well, of meeting on the first tuesday of each month, Amy began the first of London’s Net Tuesdays this week, and by all accounts it was a roaring success!!  You can read a nice detailed account of the event at Amy’s Blog. I don’t think it would be fair to even begin to try and give a better summary than Amy’s already done.  Clearly a seasoned blogger, with a great writing style, she’s done an excellent job of reporting the output from our Bloggers Discussion Panel, which involved Type Pad, Moveable Type, Wordpress and Community Server being represented. One of the members of the Panel, Miko who wore the slightly more technical hat for TypePad, as well as representing Community Server, has written up an excellent summary of the key blogging platforms, and a great summary of some of the differences between them.  I thoroughly recommend if you’re starting out to read her summary, and use those to help inform your decisions about which blogging platform to use.

We then ended the panel, having answered some great questions about the features and functionality of the tools, and then started to come up with a list of considerations to take into account, before getting started.  The blogging “strategies and approaches” part of the conversation was designed to verse people a little in the thinking that goes into making a successful blog, and after brainstorming from the room, we crowdsourced the following 5 key points, of :

1. Setting Goals
2. Write with Passion and Knowledge
3. Practice writing blog posts for a few months
4. Use your community to come and comment
5. Integrate your blog with everything you do

The premise behind this conversation was that in order to be successful with your blogging, there’s some key pre-requisites that are needed.  Especially if you want your blog to be engaging and participative.  With that in mind, Miko shared her own take on starting blogging, and what you should do, to prepare to succeed.

Some Of My Own Thoughts on Blogging

I’m certainly in agreement that blogging doesn’t just happen, on it’s own, in isolation from the world.  I think often people look at a blog, and think “I can do that”. They might even assume that just by installing or getting a blog set up, that they too can start to reap the engagement and conversation that occurs in the blogosphere.  Unfortunately, it really isn’t all as simple as that.

Speaking, from my own experiences, and I wrote my first blog post in 2004, I can say with all certainty, that blogging for me has been something that evolves over time. I’ve undoubtedly been learning a lot about the medium of blogging along the way too, and that journey educates and inspires me to continue to always try out new things, and then some.I first started my blog, as an experiment, using Blogger.com, and started out thinking of it as a place to capture my thoughts and interesting things that I would come across on the internet.  You can even see at Blogger.com my original blogs, as they were until I left them, and integrated them all into my current Blog, which is now a self-hosted installation of WordPress, and where you might be reading this from.

Back when I first started blogging, I decided on some key areas of interest for me in my life, and thought I would use a blog to collect interesting websites that I found and bits of information that I thought were useful.  I considered my blog to be a place to store my thoughts, and as a record of my travels through the internet. I even started a few different blogs, because I thought that other people might be interested if I started collecting enough interesting websites, relating to a specific theme, or idea, or topic, and that in time, people would start finding my blog and commenting on it, and leaving their thoughts and ideas, if I were to capture the “best of” along the way.

You must remember that this is back in those days when del.icio.us and other social bookmarking websites hadn’t yet come out, and I was itching for a way to start collecting my bookmarks online, so I wouldn’t always have to use the same computer, but would always have access to the cool links that I found along my travels.  I also wanted to be able to share with friends, and family some of the cool stuff I would find online, and thought that naturally in time, a blog would be the perfect solution.

And to an extent, it did work, for a few months, and it certainly warmed me to the idea of blogging, but it didn’t really take off, in a big way. I still didn’t quite understand, back then of what I might be able to use the blogging for, and I definitely didn’t maintain the discipline of keeping my blog updated with all the interesting and wonderful things I discovered along the way.

I think back then, part of the challenge for me was that everytime I wanted to post something I would have to log into the blogging platform, and then create the entry, and couldn’t just use a plugin, or bookmarklet script or external blogging client to write to my blog.  Now after experimenting with a number of great tools, I’ve decided that I’m in love with ScribeFire, a plugin for Firefox, and since using it I’ve also started blogging a whole lot more too.  But I digress..So after a considerably non-productive use of blogging, with little real interest in keeping it alive for the sake of keeping it alive, and with this terrible feeling that no-one in the world was interested in what I was writing about, or posting about, I laid my blogging to rest.  Not consciously, but I just didn’t feel the need, or a desire to write about stuff as much.  I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired, or excited, and I guess I was going through my own challenges in life, understanding what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to engage with the world.

Then in the summer of 2005, I ended up travelling to Peru, in South America, and all of a sudden, I had something that I wanted to share with all my friends and family back home.  After a few attempts at writing out long emails, with details of what was happening, in response to people’s emails, I realised that most of the time I was writing pretty much the same set of details in response to people, and spending quite a bit of time repeating the same stories over and over to people, on a one to one basis.  Spurred on with the knowledge and experience of using Blogger.com, quite successfully in the past, I decided I would use that wonderful medium of “blogging”, to write about my travels.  Suffice it to say, it didn’t take long before I took great pleasure in sitting in internet cafes, writing up my notes of the day.  I even became really diligent in writing in my pocket diary, a summary of the days events, so that my time in the internet cafe would be spent just writing up what I’d already thought about and reflected upon, at the end of each day.  I thought that sharing my travels, and experience in that intimate manner would be a great way to keep everyone updated on what I was upto, and how my travels were going, and it meant that I wouldn’t have to write the same email to everyone that kept asking me how things are going, and what I had been upto.

It also started to fuel my desire to write, since I knew I had a captive audience.  I’d received so much support and encouragement from people as I’d left London, that I figured most of those people would probably enjoy reading about my travels, and my adventures.  I later discovered that my cousin had also been sharing my blog out to his fellow co-workers at work, and even though I never received much email, or saw any visibility of how many people visited my blog, and hardly anyone ever commented on it, I felt like it was being read, and I kept it updated, just so if nothing else, at least my family and friends would know how I was doing, and that I was ok.

Of course, once I left Peru, and returned to London, the blogging on that trip to Peru didn’t seem like a natural thing to continue, since I was back home, and things in London just didn’t seem as noteworthy, or as interesting and different as they did out there.  My only regret with my blogging back then, was that I didn’t take a digital camera with me, and take photos… Some of my travels were just so scenic and beautiful, and some of the people I met such loving souls, that I wish I had captured them all on camera.. But instead I got the joys of having fond memories that I shall keep with me instead :)

Again, the blogging had seemed like a great idea, it had become really useful, and productive for me, when I needed it to communicate, and now that I was done with that trip, it didn’t seem like I had anything left to write, and so I just let it fizzle away.  Back then, I didn’t really have any comments on my posts, and I didn’t really understand, if I had emailed all these people that knew me, why didn’t anyone comment on anything I wrote??  And so, by not having much engagement from the audience, I ended up leaving it as a record of my travels, and nothing more.

Uncovering Your Voice

I guess all along, the biggest challenge I had, when writing for my blog, was to get clear in my mind who I was writing for, and what it was that I wanted to communicate.  I would have moments of sharp clarity, and specific things that I thought were noteworthy, and then the enthusiasm would wear off, reality would set in, and I would come to the conclusion that actually I didn’t have anything significant or noteworthy to share with the world. (At least nothing that seemed to get the whole world clamouring at my doorstep, and wanting to comment on).

I’d finally understood, that blogging is a very personal choice, and that if I chose to publicly share myself, I would always be able to do it on my terms, and didn’t have anyone to answer to but myself.  I think partly because back then I didn’t have a clear audience in mind, I used the blogging as a way of tracking my own thoughts, and adventures out into the world of the internet, but never leaving that comfort zone of writing into an empty vaccum where no-one seemed to be listening.

Now, almost four years on, a lot has changed.  My understanding of the internet, and it’s role in my life for one.  My ability to engage and connect with people for another.  And also how I’m using the internet, and what I’m seeing myself using it for are all changing too.  I think part of the online social networking phenomenon of seeing your network online, in platforms like facebook and linked in means that you slowly start to see your “community”.  Wheras in the past, the most visibility you would get is the emails you got and sent, and the IM chats.  The online social networks that have come into existence now, are slowly starting to make us all acutely aware of the fact that we now have “captive audiences”.  Be it we might use those captive audiences to chase, as werewolves, or to write on each others walls, but innately , we have people we are engaging with, and who are engaging back with us.

This is where blogging comes into play, and starts to become useful.

Whilst you can certainly send an email out to everyone you know, using bulk emailing platforms, once that email is sent, it’s gone.  There’s no permanency to that message or conversation.  It disappears into the ether, and you can only track the results, and await the response from people to know what people felt or experienced.  Whilst it makes it possible to communicate intimately, and personally, it detracts from the public presence that could be enriched by sharing the contents of those emails in public.  Especially if it’s non-sensitive information that goes towards establishing your brand, your credibility, your cause, your needs, or your experiences with others.  What people can’t see about you, people can’t know about you, and whilst email newsletters are great in principle, in practice, there needs to be something being added or updated to the blog, or the news section of your own website too, so that those people who don’t currently subscribe to the newsletter could also have the choice, based on the content.

Nowadays, I’ve come to understand a little more clearly my audiences, and my different voices when blogging.  I can’t say I understand or know them all clearly, but I do know that I have a number of different threads or streams of ideas flowing through this one blog.  I have very distinct and different communities of people that I’m communicating with through this blog.  (Albeit, those communities may only exist in my mind for now, but they are very real nonetheless).

I can see, as I re-read my own blog, and see the train of thought, and threads of conversation that I’m weaving together, that I have some very distinct and seperate groups of people that I’m talking to, or in conversation with.  And I think more importantly, I’m starting to understand how powerfully, I can start to engage in the conversation on the internet, through the blogosphere.

It never truly dawned on me, until the Net Tuesday event we had in London, but commenting on other people’s blogs has really started to make me realise and appreciate how important it is to give before you receive.  If I want people to comment on my blog posts, I have to go out there and comment on other people’s blog posts first.

If I want my blog to become successful, I have to make it more focussed, and targetted.  This is something I’ll write about properly another time, but for now, suffice it to say, that the internet is a big place, and the more targetted and focussed your writing is, the easier it will be for you to become an authority in a particular niche.  What that translates to, is that everytime someone googles something vaguely related to your topic or area of expertise, you’ll come up at the very top.  As long as you know what it is you’re passionate about, and what you genuinely know about, then chances are that you’ll eventually be able to become an established authority in that niche.  Until you get that focussed, your own thinking and writing will suffer, as well as the community engagement, and participation to your blog, your website, and your cause, or field of expertise.

Conversely, the more focussed, and targetted you are in everything that you do, the more you start to add real value for others.  You become capable of voicing the unvoiced, on clarifying assmumptions, on becoming an authoritative voice, and opinion.  You also become capable of synthesising and expanding upon the ideas and thoughts of other people, and actually further the conversation in the blogosphere.

But first, you must know who it is that you will be writing for?

Then what is it that you’re going to write that this audience is going to want to know about?

Once you can answer the above two questions, clearly, and you have people regularly asking you for, or your regularly telling people the same bits of information, then, and only then, will you be able to uncover your blogging voice, and start to contribute in a meaningful manner through your blog.  Until then, you’ll be finding your feet, through the possibilities of what you might be able to voice, and who you might be able to express your thoughts to.  That’s not a bad thing either, because until you start trying, you’ll never figure out your space, and most definitely not find the flow of your blogging voice.

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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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I was meant to be interviewing a serial entpreneur this evening, who happened to cancel, and so I ended up checking to see what was happening tonight, and picked up, out of the twitterverse, the BootLaw event.  Mainly cos Redditnation was going to be recorded there this evening, and I happened to pick that up in the twitters in my stream.. Glad I’m following @joshuamarch and @jstrides and picked up a few more people to follow along the way!!

So in brief, we learnt about Shareholders Agreements, and to love our Articles of Associataion!!

I met Matt Collins, and Ben Godfrey, two regulars of the tech scene I frequent.. I think I met them both at Social Media Camp, just a short while ago!

Also, met Sophie Cox, doing amazingly well! Sugested I make some time and follow up with interviews of all these awesome folks!  Everyone deserves to be mentioned.. More coming over the next week or so.. If I can keep up!!  Thoroughly recommend the next one, if you’re anywhere near it!!

Tags: web+2.0, bootlaw, tech+startup, legal

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Confused??  You might be!  Unless you’re a part of the Twitterverse, in which case, you probably enjoyed the Twestival twitter stream, if you weren’t at the Twestival in person!!

For the uninitiated, I haven’t become a Twit, and gone, Twitting mad! No! I’ve actually become a “Twitterer”.

Since signing up to Twitter.com I have started posting 140 character updates, from the web, and from my mobile via SMS, declaring to the world what I’m upto, and sharing my thoughts, in a stream of consciousness kind of way.

The basic question Twitter asks is “What are you doing?”, and typically the answers offer up an insight into what people are thinking or doing at that exact moment.

My initiation into the world of Twitter came at a London Geek Dinner with Moo, where I listened with interest, as @cahoots talked about how she was able to meet people in real life who she had discovered through Twitter, and gotten to know them from their interactions online. I started thinking, hmm…  I wonder if I could meet some more likeminded interesting people on this Twitter thing too??!!

So after that fateful evening in May, I joined Twitter, and started to watch my “Twitterverse” – my small universe of people that I knew on Twitter.

Slowly, as I watched that small group of people that I had met, and knew, I started to see them sending messages to each other, and to their friends… Curious, I started to read the profiles of some of these strangers, and see what their Twitter Streams looked like. Following the links, I slowly started to discover a whole bunch of interesting people, and started “following” them. (And no I wasn’t stalking them!! I was adding them to my list of people who’s Twitter streams I wanted to follow, and see what they were doing or thinking, or talking about).

Gradually I started to amass an ever growing list of people to follow.  It meant I started being privvy to ever more interesting tweets (status updates from people on Twitter), and somehow, I managed to be lucky enough to see the term “Twestival” pop-up in conversations happening in my twitter stream.

Being very much a real-time medium, with real people responding to each other, in real-time, I started to follow more and more of the people talking about the Harvest Twestival (a play on words of the English celebration of Harvest Festival!). Anyone who mentioned it to someone who I wasn’t following, led me to other people talking about the Twestival, and being the eager beaver that I am, I started adding those strangers to my list too…

I thought I should definitely watch this Twitter stream of people who are all in this conversation about this Twitter Event happening in London!!

So one thing led to another, and before I knew it, Twestival.com popped up on my radar, and the guest list was all filled up! Admittedly this was only a few days before the event… but it looked so awesome an event, especially when it was billed as having “the who’s who of the UK Twitter scene” all billed to be in attendance!!

I figured nothing ventured nothing gained, so RSVP’d for the event, in the off chance, that the night before there might be a few dropouts, and I might be able to get added to the waiting list!

Fortunately for me, the day of the event, I got Tweeted from one of the organisers, and got told that I was on the guest list, and checking the Twestival website, I scanned through the list of attendees, and saw myself @magitam listed, and felt really happy knowing that I’d be rubbing shoulders with some real interesting folks. Now I too, had become one of the “who’s who of the UK Twitter scene”!!!

Excited, and nervous, all at the same time, I couldn’t wait for the evening to come round.. but given that it was the month of Ramadan (muslim holy month of fasting), I thought I should probably go home, break my fast, and eat dinner, before heading to this event – seeing as I hadn’t eaten all day, and didn’t want to suffer as a result!!  Plus it gave me a chance to pick up the car, and if I happened to stay late, I wouldn’t have to spend an hour and a half getting back home in the early hours of the morning :) .

The Twestival itself, kicked off at about 6pm, and apparently the bar was free until 8pm – at which point, the tab laid on behind the bar, by the sponsors had been drunk dry.. or so I was told..

I arrived around 9pm, and by the sounds of it, the Twestival was in full swing!!  Walking down the stairs, at Doon, it was like descending into a noisy, chaotic, trading floor of a stock exchange.. all you could hear was the noise of so many conversations, all happening simultaneously.. Made me think of how the Twestival sounded just like Twitter would sound, if you had audio… All those people talking, and all that noise.. It was all brought to life… exciting and daunting at the same time…

I wasn’t sure what was happening, or what way to turn, so I went through the list of stickers, left on the unattended table at the entrance, found my tag @magitam, and proceeded to the bar, to order up a fruity non-alcoholic beverage of some sort, and try to see if I could spot any familiar or friendly faces…   Admittedly, before coming, I’d gone through the list of attendees on Twestival.com, and randomly selected some interesting sounding names to follow, just to get a flavour for who might be there, and so as to not be going as a complete and total stranger to the people at the event!!

Reaching the bar, nervous that I hadn’t seen anyone I even vaguely recognised, I started to wonder if I had made a really bad move, coming to an event packed with a room full of people who all seemed to know each other, and I felt like I was a total outsider to it all.. Admittedly I’d only been using Twitter for a few months, so perhaps I wasn’t an experienced enough Twitterer to know this “in” crowd.. I started to scan people’s name tags, looking for someone who might be just a little familiar…

Then whilst standing at the bar, I got to meet @alfie, who asked me to order his drink, at the same time as mine (he gave me the cash, he just wanted to save having to wait for the bartender to serve me and then him) …

Eventually, apple juice in hand, and having broken the ice with someone in the room, I started to feel a little more comfortable @ the Twestival…. As luck would have it, they just started to do the Prize Draw for the charity raffle at this point, so I didn’t get a chance to buy any tickets, but got to watch on as the draw for prizes took place. I could only make out some semblance of a mic’d MC, behind the throng of Twitterers, packing the joint, but apparently someone won a Nintendo Wii, whilst others got to win books, and iPod Nano’s amongst other prizes….

Somewhere behind the crowd, the raffle ended, and a live music performance began by @ihatemornings (aka Ben Walker) performing his YouTube hit ‘You’re No One If You’re Not On Twitter’, the crowd was so noisy and loud, I could barely hear a word; at least until someone grabbed the mic, and asked the audience to shuussshhh! – (does anyone know who that was??). I figured, if I couldn’t hear Ben, or see him, let me at least join in the fun, and started snapping away with the camera, over people’s heads, in the hopes of being able to catch a decent photo of the man behind the sea of Twitterers, sharing his song!

After that awesome live performance, I got a little more comfortable with the vibe in the bar, and started chatting to the folks around me… I met some really interesting folk, and took photos of people as I met them (yep, started thinking ahead, to my blog, and my flickr stream, and at the same time I wanted to capture some great photos to remember the event by!!), so first I met:

David Stone aka @builtbydave who’s name looked vaguely familiar, as I had recently started following him just a few weeks before, having discovered a bunch of Brighton geeks to follow, after the Brighton BarCamp.

Next was Nathan McDonald aka @deliciousmedia – a new name, and a new face :)

I remember next chatting with Adam Strawson (@adamstrawson) who like me, didn’t seem to recognise any familiar faces in the room, but suprisingly, unlike me, he had come all the way from Hastings!! (I hadn’t realised until then, just how far people might have trekked just to be a part of the Twestival!)

[Tom and Adam Pictured above]

Adam then introduced me to the journalist Tom Phillips (@flashboy), a true Metrovian by his own admission, and Chris Applegate (@qwghlm) a Social Media, PR & Marketing guy.

Strangely, by some fluky coincidence, when I got home and started updating my twitter stream, with the string of people I had met at Twestival, I had somehow looked at the profiles for Tom and Chris, before leaving that evening… I guess their online name’s had drawn my attention, and by chance I got to meet them both in person!

[Chris Applegate (@qwghlm) and Nathan pictured]

My next impromptu conversation was with Matt Hagger(@matthagger) a serial entreprener, who is about to move out to San Francisco, thanks to the success of his Startup.

During our conversation, it was inspiring for me to meet someone who was a successful tech entrepreneur, and I’m looking forward to interviewing him, before he shoots off to the US, to learn more about his story, and perhaps pick up a few pointers along the way.

Matt also raised an interesting point, which I had never thought of before.. and that was of what my online handle of magitam said about me, Farhan Rehman?? He was prompting me to explain how magitam related to my real name, and after meeting a few people who had just popped their first name and last names together to create their online identity, for their twitter names, I started to wonder how much easier I could make it for others to remember me, by constantly putting my name out there, at every electronic interaction I have with people, instead of always using an anonymous online handle, to mask my identity??

It certainly got me thinking, and later that evening, I went ahead and registered the url for my full name, to start the process of creating an online presence shaped around the identity of “me”… I’ll write more about branding, and online identity in a future post, but suffice it to say, I agreed with Matt, that remembering magitam and associating that with Farhan Rehman might not necessarily be the best way of informing people of me.. Especially when it came to potential friends, and professional relationships in real life.. Would I want them to call me by my name, or by my online handle?? Still figuring that one out for now…

My next chat for the evening was with Ruben Nyborg(@rubennyborg), brother to Renate Nyborg(@renatenyborg), one of the event organisers.

I had seen Ruben standing on his own, not talking to too many people, and not being a part of any big crowds, having been acutely aware of the fact that I had only just been in the same position, when I had walked through the door, desperately looking for some familiar faces, earlier in the evening.

So I figured I’d go on over and introduce myself, and make another friend. Turns out, Ruben had only just arrived in London (he had only been here a few days).

He was just moving to London from Norway (it might have been Sweden??), and he was about to start university, as a student of music, if I remember correctly… Apparently music runs throughout his family, and so it was pretty much in his blood, and after working in IT for a few years, he was finally following his passion!

It turns out, Ruben didn’t even know that much about Twitter, but had only just signed up, a few days prior, to come to the event I guess.. Which was great, cos all of a sudden, I didn’t feel like I was a total newbie, or out of my depth at all!!

It also explained why he had been just hanging out, watching everyone, since he was totally new to the city, new to twitter, and all of a sudden was in the midst of it all!! Talk about being initiated into the London Twitter, Tech, and Startup Crowd!!!

Well, I can definitely relate to the challenges of moving to a new city, and having to set up life in a new home, whilst studying.. I guess it’s always nice to have some family close by until you start to get your bearings sorted, and I look forward to introducing Ruben to parts of London, helping him settle in, if there’s any way I can help..

After my chat with Ruben, I made friends with Matthew Ford(@mcf1986) who also introduced me to Ben Tattersall Smith(@bits500). Turns out they had both gone to York University together, and knew one of the organisers of the event, who had also studied with them.. I think it was Ed, someone?? Not sure on that one!! (hopefully someone will correct me, and I can update this accordingly!) Matt had recently been to a Google Event, and had his Google Pass with his name on it, whilst Ben worked to generate content for the New Media for the Sky 1 Channel!! Ironically, I applied to York, back in the day, and had I not chosen Warwick as my first choice, and put down York, I might have ended up there too :)

There were a few faces, at the Twestival, which I did recognise through the course of the evening. Most noticeably, was James Whatley (@whatleydude). Not least because his blog has a highly memorable photo of him drawn across the top banner, but also because I kept ending up at his blog, through one person or another pointing towards it, so I actually knew a bit about James, and his persona from his blog, and online presence!!

It was a real honour to meet him in person :)

He also, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be the life and soul of the party, when it came to him being on the dance floor, and strutting his stuff!! Just think of the “cool” “hip” dancer, who always goes out on the dance floor first, and stays till the end, and that was Mr Whatley, at the Twestival!! Of course, first place, for getting noticed on the dance floor has to go to the “lady dancing in the box“.

The other recognisable face of the night was Joshua March(@joshuamarch), who organises the London Facebook Developers Garage Events. I recognised him from his Facebook profile picture, having msg’d him a few times. Didn’t get a chance to grab a close up photo of Joshua, but I briefly said hi, before leaving for the night!

And the night would not have been complete without our awesome Bartenders in Kilts, that just kept the drinks flowing the whole night long!!

So, thoroughly networked out, I called it a night, with the place starting to empty, and the last remaining handful of people left, I reluctantly withdrew for the evening, and with one last photo, was on my merry way!

The Harvest Twestival, on all accounts was a huge roaring success, and I’m sure the organisers appreciated all the tweets praising, and thanking them for a job well done! Now, it just remains to be seen what will be organised for the Christmas Party!!

Already, there’s talk of a Christmas Twestival, so be sure to keep a lookout, in your twitterverse, for mention of the next London based Twitter event! If it was anything like this one, you most definitely will not want want to miss it!!

For the rest of the pics, check out my Twestival flickr stream.

Tags: twestival, twitter, meetup, london, 2008, social, harvest+twestival

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OpenTech 2008
“an informal, low cost one-day conference on technology, society and low-carbon living, featuring Open Source ways of working and technologies that anyone can have a go at.”

MediaCampLondon
An un-conference digging on advertising, blogging, web-dev, branding, new and social media for anyone wishing to get involved
It’s an UnConference with a strong educational flavour for advertisers, agencies, bloggers, podcasts, recruiters, webTV, and new media professionals & amateurs for one day to share, explore, challenge, and grow our abilities in new media. Learn about audio and video podcasting, blogging, web marketing, photography, email campaigns, Second Life, Twitter, and all kinds of other new and social media tools. Whether you’re a veteran or interested in getting started, MediaCamp is for YOU.

BarCampBankLondon
London has always been home to come of the greatest innovations in the financial services arena, so its about time we had a BarCampBank here!!

We will bring together technologists and industry insiders for a day of networking and discussion of the impact of emerging technologies on the financial space.

So if you are an innovator, a disruptor or a professional of the banking and finance industry, if you are excited by or just curious about all the innovations that the new technologies could bring to the banking and finance world, if you want to present a project, confront your ideas or just echo lively debates with your own experience, then you should definitely consider joining us on BarCampBankLondon

and to kick the weekend off – Friday afternoon is:

Open Source Show ‘n’ Tell
hosted by Osmosoft, the Open Source Innovation arm of BT.

Anyone can give a talk so long as there’s an open source angle, and we usually go for drinks afterwards, so please feel free to get in touch if you’d like to come along!

So much choice.. what to choose.. what to choose.. Unfortunately, I won’t be going to any of these events.. but can’t wait to see what people have to say about them.. will be watching out for any news on twitter, and through the blogosphere of how the events went.. I’m sure they will all be equally good!

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Well, I guess the good news is, I’ve found a new form of dating that might provide the answer.. and no, before you all start thinking that perhaps, I’m being unfaithful, it’s not that kind of dating!! No, SeedCamp Tech-Dating is for potential Entrepreneurs/Business Minded individuals with ideas, techies, and Graphics Designers/UI designers to come together, and work the floor, in a sort of speed-dating kinda manner, pitching your idea, your needs, and searching for the right partners to come together with, and create a founding team with, that you can apply to SeedCamp with…

I think the idea’s legendary, and can’t wait to see who else comes along.. in the meantime, to help promote the event, I’ll be sure to spread the word across my networks, and see who might come crawling out of the woodworks, to come and join in…

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