Observation

How comfortable are you behind the wheel? How many hours a week do you think you spend driving? The reason I ask these questions is that I often spend fourty minutes a day on the road and as a result I tend to watch everything that’s happening around me. That’s because car driving is about situational awareness. One of the things you’re taught about when driving is forward planning and anticipation. You look at the sides of the road and develop situation awareness. Where is that child looking. Is there a chance that ball is going to bounce in front of me. What’s behind that bend? You’re constantly analyising what’s around you. Recently as I drive on the motorway to and from work I watch how the cars are lined up. I know how many cars are behind me, how fast they’re going and more. I also know what’s going on in front of me. As a result I change from left to right lanes in a dynamic manner. I’m constantly looking at whether I’m going to be blocked or whether someone else is. In the morning I avoid the left lane. You see people driving just two meters from the car in front of them at over a hundred kilomters an hour. Occasionaly they come a cropper and i can’t help but laugh. It’s well deserved on the part of both parties. I did once have a jeep chasing me down the motorway and I could pull in to let it pass. It came right up to me and I slowed down. I wanted to give myself enough stopping distance. It annoyed the driver behind me but the important thing is that I was safe. If an emergency appeared I would be able to stop safely, and I’d bought the person behind of me a little more reaction. You see what a nice guy I am? The reason I speak about this is that in everything you do situational awareness is one of the best things to have. What are the things that can go wrong, what can I do to avoid them. Are there any tell tale signs? It’s like living in London. You know that the tube may be delayed by ten to fifteen minutes so you make sure to compensate for that. In some cases it means catching the train before the one you need to catch, just so that you arrive on time. If you’re like me you often arrive early. That’s not a problem. When you have a live video transmission t’s better to be half an hour early than 3 minutes late.

This video filmed with the HDR-SR12 in Geneva Switzerland at La Reserve wine bar. The event was organised via facebook.

The Co working space in Lausanne (ECLAU/FB) is an interesting idea for freelancers and those who have some work to do but do not want to work from home or a cafe. There are desks and couches, a meeting space and more from which individual work and team work can be done. I was there for an Apero last night and got to meet a few of the people. At the moment there are four people there using the space full time and another who go there occasionally. For those like me who go there very occasionaly we can drop by and work there if we so desire. It’s easy to get to from the motorway and apparently not too hard from the center of Lausanne. One of the members is a cat, apparently he loves to come in through one window, sleep on the couches and distract certain people before walking out through a window at the other side of the space. What’s interesting is that the participants of L’Eclau think of him as a sort of alarm clock. He’s there to remind them that they should take a little break from the work they were doing. I know quite a few people in Lausanne now so it might be an interesting place to meet some people when there are some collaborative efforts to be done.

I believe I’m living the social media lifestyle, that is that wherever I go I have both my mobile phone and my ipod touch. As a result I am never more than a hotspot away from the world wide web and it’s content. In Switzerland I’m online as I hike through the mountains taking pictures which I can then upload to flickr for you to enjoy. That’s also the reason I decided to start a new blog called The Social Media Lifestyle. The purpose of the new blog will be to explore the thoughts and conversations I have with non social media nuts and why they are not interested in being as active as we are. I have based my first serious post around a conversation in the TGV from Paris to Geneva and some overheard comments at a cinema in Switzerland. What I hope to achieve through this blog is to shift the conversation away from how advertisers can promote brands and products and instead promote the adoption of new social tools such as Facebook, twitter, seesmic, flickr and plurk to name but a few. We’ve got to find the best way to explain to our audience why and how the social media will improve, rather than degrade their lifestyle.

Liz Strauss wrote about the leaves and the trees and that got me thinking of the Social Media autumn. It’s the time of the year when everyone gets back to work after summer and they no longer have as much time to be sociable, whether online or offline and as the trees remains so the leaves are gone. Of course in this context the trees are the social networks and the leaves are the users. How many of these trees are deserted? Kosso was wondering whether people will keep using phreadz in the same way. Loic Lemeur was questioning how people would keep using Seesmic. At the same time we’re going into what will probably turn out to be a recession and we get repetitive news. One of those stories is about how Yahoo is getting rid of ten percent of it’s work force. That’s hardly new. They’ve had a few purges recently. That’s what you get for being one of the top three companies in search (or has it changed since then?). One person recently wrote that the advantage of the recession is that it gives you an opportunity to get rid of those that are not as productive as they should be. It’s an opportunity to streamline the company and find new ways of being more productive. You see that’s the advantage of silence, of time apart, of a little time to think. It’s the time when those in the social media, but it applies everywhere. How long will the recession last. Which networks will remain and who will stay. Why will they stay and what collaborations will thrive. Now is the time to see which ideas have the most potential. How will the social media look covered in snow?

richard - Oct 5, 2008

I asked a friend how to get the invite so I’m not sure how to do it but when I find out I’ll let you know.

Richard, you’ll have to tell me how to join Phreadz. It’s quite Mission:Impossible ! Do you have invites ? Am i not francofou enough? Too young to know how to fly?

The Francofous are part of the seesmic community and can be differentiated by their ability to speak french and their avatars. Originally formed around Seesmic and twitter they are now migrating to both plurk and phreadz, two services I have talked about in the past. What is nice about this community is that it’s a core of 20-30 early adopters who move and try new communities as a group rather than individuals. What this means is that whereas in previous years we would jump from one community to another, start without knowing anyone and over weeks and months get to know people here we have a core of people moving with the times. Of course I speak about the Francofous this way but they’re not the only ones. Many of my English and international social media friends are doing the same thing, moving from one fesh community to another to see what the strengths and weaknesses are. They’re also testing out the sites, seeing what works and what doesn’t. They’re illustrating how many of you will use these sites once the barriers to entry have come down. There’s another factor that’s important to take into consideration. Those who are early adopters are used to using twenty to thirty sites several times a day from google reader to plurk, to seesmic, to phreadz to gmail to flickr, youtube, dailymotion, vimeo and many more. At the same time most of my university friends are happy with facebook and gmail. They’re lucky, everything they want can be found in one place ;-). How far are these communities from the mass of mid to late adopters? Quite a few months to a year ahead of the pack.

Some video of a shuttle Launch as seen from an Air Canada flight. Turn off sound, it’s better without.

mousewords - Jun 5, 2008

Cool! Looks like it was fun! :-)

Hey, of course, was fun being at the events. Glad you liked them.

Because every day is not the same this one has been quite normal. At eleven in the morning I found out that the motherboard for the macbook pro needed replacing and this should be accomplished by Tuesday. In second the day of work was a good one so I was energetic enough to drop by the caribana for a second night, meeting a few friends. It was also an opportunity to do some live streaming of concerts by Alanis Morisette, Stereophonics and last but not least (so far at the festival) Manic Street preachers. Here is a collection of the streams. If you tolerate this your children will be next Something to do with Autumn You all know this one: Your love is not enough. Stereophonics, Dakota Stereophonics, crowd having fun. Alanis Morisette, broke but happy