I have another blog now – it’s here.

Just a thought for my fellow Americans – how about cheering yourselves up with a national holiday?

This widget is uncomfortably-sized for the layout of this site, and it’s not appropriate for Blog of Funk so I thought I’d stick it here for a while, just to watch it like a goldfish bowl. I quite like some of the features on this Twitter-clone, but will that be enough to keep me going back there? The answer is probably Yes, as long as Twitter keeps on falling over, and I have idle moments!

If you want to join up, click here to be my friend, and then I get “karma”. Beware though; if you swear, you lose Karma.

It wasn’t like that in my school playground.

The more expensive conventions are not any better in terms of either learning or making connections. The cheaper ones are not any better at being friendly or creative.

The Social Media Myth is that the ‘organic’, small-scale, newer and less well-known kinds of gatherings are somehow more worthwhile than the organised, larger, older and more conventional conventions. Many times, the gatherings are organised around web technologies such as wikis, the geek’s version of MySpace groups, and Twitter, the geek’s preferred instant messenger.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve turned up at these meetings and been met with a hundred geeks armed with enough technology to ward off alien invaders – laptops, mobile phones, video recorders, and sundry special devices of all shapes and sizes. The meetings are all supposed to be about social networking but everyone is so busy scanning for available WiFi or attempting bluetooth connections, they fail to contact one another on a human level.

Rather than closing the gaps, the technology in these situations is serving as a prophylactic. Perfectly sane people experience disjointed communication, interactions which are cut into pieces by video blogging, live video streaming and all the rest of the paraphernalia usually experienced solo at their desktop. Underneath this frenzy of technical play, often remains a loneliness which characterises many of their lives and to which, post-gathering, they return, having been prevented from achieving the intimacy they so badly need by the technology they have replaced it with.

This situation is maintained by a kind of social group denial, which does not recognise the negative impact of technology, and refuses to see the shadow side of the behaviour. Personally, I find it depressing. I value and enjoy spontaneity and it disturbs me to see tools which are claimed to enhance creativity and connection actually produce the opposite effect. I’d like to see some gatherings where the technology was checked in at the door; I’d like these social media early adopters to put aside their crutches regain their social muscles while they still can.

I blame this man who found a superbly appropriate way of responding to “pron spam”. I also strongly recommend his work for those of you with a penchant for bite-sized, well-observed, well-written fiction.

Thrilled that we’ve raised about £75 English quid for BuskAid already – there’s a bidding war to be next week’s sponsor. Only 23 hours left…

I kept a pretty low profile, which suited me this time, and was pleased just to hang out, catch up with old friends, and make new friends.

This is a 54 minute camera phone movie, shot on my (now elderly) Sony Ericsson k800i, best served with a squeeze of lemon.

Check out the photos here.