John

devoted

Devoted and disgruntled continues tomorrow, but I can't make the Monday sessions.

I'm sure I've been the right person at the right time for this and that the right people will be there tomorrow.

I've added some pix to my flickr from event - more than I usually do when I take a camera to something, but for this I'll hand over the main set to Improbable to use on the D&D ning.

Meantime, here's the slideshow of some of what was happening

devoted and disgruntled

Breakfast in Hackney this morning before heading to the York Hall for the first day of Devoted and Disgruntled organised as an Action Space by Improbable. I'd guess that between 160 and 200 people showed up to talk about the future of theatre, driven as a grass-roots generated agenda.

The way it works is that at the beginning there's a big wall of empty space where the agenda for the event is formed. Everyone is encourgaged to contribute ideas to the wall and they are assigned physical spaces to convene groups interested in the topic. Its a very 'in the now' process and has some simple guiding principles as well as the law of two feet - to move along if one session is no longer appropriate.

The workshop-based process works very well and we were soon all in groups talking about a huge variety of topics related to theatre; jobs; recession; funding; audiences; production; fun; politics; venues; fringe; performance types - I just scratch the surface.

There's a power to the confidence in having no initial agenda and the conviction that the right one will emerge. Judging by the motivated debate, it certainly seemed to, and the sessions were given longish time slots but many continued into the erstwhile coffee breaks.

Of course, outside of the more structured aspects, there was plenty of idea and card swapping; I suspect a whole series of new networks are being born during the weekend. I'll be back on Sunday and I know that whoever is there are the right people; whenever it starts is the right time and of course, we all make a difference.

East pole

Tonight's venue is across the way from the pole dancing club and Juicy Handbags.

Despite all mod cons, I'm seriously thinking about watching a few episodes of Black Books on my iPhone (no iPhone is complete without all 18 episodes)

black cab sessions

A bunch of the musicians I sometimes blog about have made it to the great heights of the black cab sessions and I thought a quick reminder would be useful. I see the sessions are mentioned in this week's Time Out too.

The process is simple enough. Get a band, hail a London black cab and ask the band to play in one take whilst on a journey - oh, introduced by the cab driver.

So top of this post its the Smoke Fairies.

...then Amanda Palmer playing Radiohead's Creep on Ukelele

...and to round it off, there would have to be something by Death Cab for Cutie (Geddit!)

There's another forty or more over at the black cab sessions site.

Social Media Jungle

As Mr Ross illustrates above, there's a sudden flurry of interest in 'Social Media Jungle' #smjces and Twitter.

The @rashbre twitter account has been running since February 2007 although in the early days it was like having the only telephone in the village.

Nowadays, it blends some news tickers and general chit chat amongst an entertaining group of people, although self discipline is required to avoid following off along every semi interesting story. I can see that my average posting rate is 1 or 2 posts a day over the last 2 years, but with some increase in recent months.

Because of its speed, there can be a fascination with breaking news stories although realistically a wait of a few hours can often bring a journalism based consolidation. A simple example was yesterday's Apple news. People followed the story in real time but as soon as it finished, Apple loaded their new pages with all of the content directly to their website.

I'm a great believer in 'wide time' (lots of things happening at once) but the compensating 'looking for the long waves' is need to detect any real patterns or stories.

We are also seeing a few of show-biz turning up in these streams now, with Stephen Fry as a fairly long term user and more recently Jonathan Ross (@wossy) appearing along with chit chat about whether his return to television (with Fry) will somehow feature the twitter idea.

Whether these facilities emerge as a sustainable snack-based form of connectedness remains to be seen; I know in my professional world its still relatively uncommon, although I hear that 'www' prefixes were also rare, once upon a time.

paparazzi enabled

T'internet ground to a halt for a while today whilst various services streamed updates from San Francisco about the new guitar and piano tuition available from GarageBand '09 and similar features.

One function that caught my eye is the new iPhoto software with face recognition technology.

Not just the little squares like those that appear in many compact cameras, but the addition of identification of the individual. Useful for family photo albums, and interesting when linked with the new place recognition and auto-uploads to facebook and flickr.

The uploaded pictures can be auto-tagged with who and where. It could bring a whole new dimension to the Facebookery of late night pub crawls and similar.

wheely silly

The icicles by the door this morning were an early sign of how frozen my fingers would be by the time I reached work.

Of course, typing on a keyboard is quite a challenge with iced fingers, but luckily I was testing one of those MacBook Wheels which have dispensed with tiresome keyboards completely.

The next version is also removing the display screen.

The absinthe arrived by airmail

a good day to change passwords

This morning's snow added a few minutes at the start of the day, but I was still one of the first to be in the office this morning. Like many, I'd kept an eye on emails despite diversions related to dodging the flurry of opportunistic scams telling me to click on "oh so funny links" to be routed to a phishing site.

I managed to resist the temptation; its surprising how difficult it is to make robot generated email from a friend or work colleague look realistic. I'm assuming that those people originating the emails had, however, been caught in some way. It sort of confirmed my suspicion that some of the people 'in' over the last two weeks have had some spare time on their hands.

I then noticed later in the day that one of (allegedly) Barack Obama's accounts was offering a $500 prize to fill in a questionnaire and that a member of a well-known US broadcasting network was claiming to be incapacitated through drugs. Britney Spears was also making some unusual claims.

Of course, these were all examples of accounts being hacked although its not clear if there is a link with the previous 'oh so funny' links which were designed to obtain passwords.

I'm sure this will be good material for the technology hating part of the press who can revel upon the misdemeanors, like the Daily Moan did yesterday with its Twitter stories about a few celebs. I notice that someone seems to have created a @dailymail_uk twitter account on the back of this.

Anyway, I've decided its a good day to change passwords as a simple precaution and I won't be using any of the usual suspects like password, 123456, secret, qwerty, abc123, letmein, monkey, charlie, myspace1, password1, arsenal, (first name) nor any of the ones in the common password list

How different this is from life in Settle, where the owner of a shop called 'Practically Everything' took Boxing Day as a vacation but left his shop open with an improvised honesty box made out of a plastic funnel and a length of piping. Next day he returned to an intact shop and £187 from customers who had needed batteries, bags and tinfoil.

The tinfoil will be useful to wrap the great British sandwich which is as tall as a phone box as I write this.

straight ahead

Already thinking about tomorrow as a full work day, with most people back. We've forsaken a 'kick-off' this year, so no grand trips to Vegas or Hawaii, although I do get to visit Bethnal Green next weekend.

Now the tree and decorations have been removed and the pine needles swept away, there's a surprising number of clear flat surfaces again.

I won't let the slight hint of organisation fool me though; there's bound to be plenty on offer to turn straight paths into chicanes and twists. For now, I shall spend ten minutes piling all the work related bags, gadgets and papers somewhere in kind of early preparation.

Doctor Who meets Star Trek

With all this talk about the 'new' Doctor Who, I'm pleased to have seen the Kelvington mashup of Doctor Who meets Star Trek, via Miss Cellania

sun beats rubber bands

i should find tiMe to unscrAmble all of The links beTween the variouS social software I've randoMly InsTalled tHroughout the last months.

Widgets send things to other widgets making messages appear in places where I'm not expecting them.

Alternatively I could go out for a walk in the sunshine.