To the United States, for the annual gathering of the British American Project.  Just in time for today’s big day, election day 2008!

When I turned my laptop on, four minutes minutes ago, it had twenty three hours and forty two minutes of battery left.  I checked again one minute ago and it had an hour and thirty three minutes left. What on earth is going on?  Either almost a day has passed in what seemed like a minute, or my computer awoke with a terrifying amount of energy, only to find it zappingly diminished moments later.

People have been quizzing me about where I get my energy from.  The only answer I can think of is that I just act like someone who has got lots of it.  After a while, whether or not I actually have got a great deal of energy on a particular day doesn’t even enter my mind.  Take now, for instance.  If I stopped to think about it, and dwelled for a while on the theme of exhaustion, I’d probably conclude that I’m pretty tired.  But life’s too short for that, so it’s easier to storm about as if I’m fully charged.   

Before I enter a second nauseating paragraph harping on about how I’m so full of beans, let me ask a different question; Why don’t I act as if I’m stunningly organised?  Or brilliantly early to meetings?  Or at paying my bills on time?  Because if energy boy here applied the same ‘act as if’ thinking to all of the above, perhaps the only additional charges I’d be experiencing would be to my own battery levels.

 

Listeners to this morning’s Today programme on the BBC, are told that “Blogging is Dead”.

“Says who?” wonders presenter John Humphrys. 

“Says Wired magazine“, replies Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s excellent technology correspondent.

“Well who wrote the Wired magazine article?” I hear you ask.

Step forward Paul Boutin, who, as the Wired piece reminds us, is a correspondent for the Silicon Valley gossip site, Valley Wag;  A blog.

One can understand why this BBC show in particular would scratch their heads at this new wave of online output.  Gossip, tittle tattle, the ups and downs of personal relationships.  These are the things which the Today programme does best. 

“I like to hear a man talk about himself because then I never hear anything, but good. Will Rogers 

Over on the excellent Cambridge Cluster blog, Philip has written about what I’m up to.  In it he says;

“With a quick search, I found three sites: Oli Barrett home page, The Daily Networker and Battlefront.  He seems to break the golden rule of the Internet by spreading himself around so Google does not know where to find him.”

It got me thinking about this (and another) Golden Rule, so I’m hoping you won’t mind if I share a few thoughts:

I have one main blog at www.DailyNetworker.co.uk. Each time I hit ‘publish’,it is automatically sent to the front page of my personal site and to my Battlefront mentor page (I suppose the reason for this is that ‘bios’ can be quite static and I like the idea that a new visitor can see what I’ve been writing about just a few days ago).

The only recent exception to this is where I have been blogging for Global Entrepreneurship Week, where I had to copy and paste the blogs back over to Daily Networker (I didn’t want to be blogging on Unleashing Ideas without sharing the benefit with my main blog readers, many of whom are friends.)

Also, each time I publish on Daily Networker, a ‘note’ is automatically created in Facebook.

So that might be why the three sites mentioned in the piece make it seem like I have three blogs – in fact it’s syndication on a mini scale to the other areas of my life!

In terms of breaking the internet’s golden rule (by spreading myself around)…that’s also got me thinking. One (possible?) positive is that, currently, the first thing Google returns is my personal site. I like this because it has a contact form on it, which brings in some amazing opportunities and interesting people. In the overall scheme, I think that Google makes it EASY to find me, not difficult (for better or worse!).

Finally, I wonder to what extent I also break one of work’s ‘golden rules’ by having more than one ‘job’, or having more than one source of income? Ignoring this rule eventually means that you have to have a presence in several places I suppose. Or does it?

Social media fascinates me – I’ve been experimenting with how to connect with more people in a smarter way (hence the syndication stuff, and a new column in Growing Business) – I also want to be easy for people to find if they need to, as I hope this will lead to being offered increasingly interesting opportunities as time goes by.

The truth is that I’m doing my best to experiment with all of this as I go along, and I’m sure that there are a million things I ought to be doing smarter and better.  All pointers gratefully received!

“The golden rule is that there are no golden rules” George Bernard Shaw

 

 

 

“Wrong information always shown by the media
Negative images is the main criteria
Infecting the young minds faster than bacteria
Kids wanna act like what they see in the cinema”

So rapped the Black Eyed Peas in their number one selling song, Where Is The Love? .

Negative images certainly weren’t the main criteria as I tuned into Jamie’s Ministry of Food this week on Channel 4.  As the credits rolled, it struck me just how much more effective this programme had been at communicating some simple messages about healthy eating than a series of government adverts on a billboard.  So if television can entertain, inform, educate and ultimately inspire us, then just imagine what the web can do.  Because, among so many other things, the web (and mobile phones) can connect us to each other.  So just imagine what would happen if a public service broadcaster seized this opportunity, today, in the UK.

Imagine no more, because from the Black Eyed Peas, we move on, to 4ip. (oh come on, you must have seen that coming). Launched last night and headed by Tom Loosemore, this new venture is “an innovation fund where Four will work with a range of partners, across the UK’s creative economy to stimulate public service digital media”.

Well that’s the ‘wonk speak’ anyway.  Luckily Tom, (who seems perfect for the role, with his background at OFCOM and the BBC), is also a seriously great communicator.  So, at last night’s launch event at C4 HQ on Horseferry Road, London, he moved on swiftly to the ‘plain English’ version;

“What we’re really about is finding, supporting, working with, developing,fantastically talented people; to take their wonderful ideas and turn them into digital media (websites, games, mobile services) that help improve the lives of people in Britain.   It’s about what can we do together, to support talent that will produce stuff that will make people’s lives better.”

Tom went on to highlight five particular areas of focus for 4ip (short for ‘4 Innovation for the Public’ fund);

1) Hidden Gems. “We want tools and services, content and code, which helps people uncover hidden gems. Stuff that’s already out there on the internet, that not enough people know about”

2) Digital Democracy.  “The bedrock of public services. Really the bottom line is  keeping our democracy healthy.  And there have to be new ways of keeping an eye on money and power, using this wonderful new medium known as the internet.”

3)  Amplifying Voices. “What are the ways we can amplify voices that media either couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t previously identify and give a voice to?  How can we really reach people that we couldn’t reach before and bring them to a wider audience –  bring their voices to the fore?”

4) Wise Crowds.  “How can we introduce people who know things to people who need to know those things?”

5) Tools to make trouble.   “One of the reasons I was so keen to come to Four (notice it’s Four not Channel Four) was their values – our values.  And key amongst those is ‘make trouble’.  Make trouble in the public interest would be the way I describe it.  And I’m very keen that 4IP finds ways of developing tools for the public good that cause trouble, in a good way, and crucially put them in the hands of people who need them most.”

And with that, and a push of a button on his mobile, 4ip was declared ‘open for business’!

The combination of Tom, Jon Gisby (Four’s head of New Media and Technology and former head of Yahoo! UK) and recent recruits like the excellent Ewan McIntosh is a strong indication that the ideas submitted to 4ip will be seen by a team who really DO get the potential of digital media meeting public services.  Coming from a brand with a reputation for making trouble, this is an exciting recipe where, for a change, the mission and the people fit together brilliantly. Almost like peas in a pod.