"london" in Weblog

Etech is over and a great time was had by all. Our presentation was dogged by technical difficulties that meant I ended up using old slides but everyone seemed to enjoy it regardless. With hindsight I think Charles and I should have been more clear with our objectives: the talk wasn’t about collective intelligence per se but rather complexity and how that effects interface decisions… Still, I really enjoyed speaking and we had loads of interesting conversations off the back of it.

And that brings me on to the most important aspect of eTech - the conversations. I’ve never found that many sharp people gathered together in one place before. Every person I met seemed to have some combination of skills outside of the norm and brought unique perspectives to bear on every topic. Here are some examples:

I chatted with Timo from Nature about getting academia more involved in sharing knowledge and community building, something he’s been doing for a while and I’ve been talking about with my friend Chris at the EES.

Charles and I talked to a chap called Karl from the Rockefeller Institute about socio-political development, the evolution of civilisations, the long tail of micro-cultures and weak signal detection.

We spent an afternoon with Peter Biddle of Microsoft discussing how the internet is effecting our culture, about what it’s like to work for Bill Gates and where his genius is as a businessman, and how Peter’s managed to carve out a semi-autonomous organisation within Microsoft. That was followed swiftly by a chat about his ideas for reverse market applications and massive medieval battles.

Over another lunch we talked to a bunch of guys about fostering types of community through design, game- and party- dynamics, and how online behaviour is bleeding into the real world.

It was an inspiring and humbling few days. I’m not used to having people not just know what I’m talking about but have had similar conversations before and already have an opinion worked out. It’s not just eTech either. I went out for Matt Buddulph’s leaving San Francisco dinner and drinks with Paul Yahoo, Richard Moo, Blaine Twitter, Tom OpenStreetMap and various Flickr and Yahoo folk. Yet again I was amazed by the level of conversation and the passion for the field we’re in. The meandering conversation ended up on whether our online personas that post twitters for acquaintances to see and comment on strangers’ MySpace pages are bleeding into the real world and changing our personalities. Don’t get me wrong - there was plenty of non-geek chat but the fact that a conversation can take such a techno-philosophical turn says something about the culture out here.

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing that London has a vibrant scene for emerging ideas but after this week I’m starting to think that I was wrong. I’ve been quite involved in bits of the London scene for a couple of years and it’s got a very different character to SF. Technology is to San Francisco what celebrity is to Los Angeles or finance is to New York and the result is a culture whose aspirations and ambitions are in sync. In London we’ve got some of the best executors in the world but do we have the innovators too?

The London music scene seems to be on fire at the moment! I can’t remember a time when there were more gigs to go to… In the last 10 days I’ve seen:

• Crystal Castles
• Danny Rapscallion of The Rapscallions
• Cardboard Radio
• Rosemary
• A jam session at the Macbeth
• Miss Odd Kid
• Middleman
• Sportsday Megaphone
• Metronomy
• Scout Niblett
• Bonnie Prince Billy

One interesting thing I noticed while putting together this list is that it didn’t even occur to me to try and find the bands’ own websites… I went straight to MySpace. MySpace has become the de facto standard for music urls - no mean feat. A lot of things about MySpace annoy me but I can’t argue with how simple its made it for anyone and everyone to get themselves online.

Incidentally though - everyone should check out Metronomy. They’re absolutely ace!

On my busride home from the London Javascript Night I had time to think. The organised speakers were interesting but the beers afterwards were even better. It was an opportunity to get a little drunk and throw ideas around with the likes of Patrick Griffiths, Dan Webb, Dave Stone, Paul Hammond, Drew McLellan, Norm and our very own Javascript guru Dean Edwards. Name dropping at all? Well, yes actually, but only because it’s so good to see everyone hanging out together. Then there are the regular Pub Standards sessions that take place around the first Thursday of every month (with all the same people) and the planned and unplanned events happening around @media. It feels like all of a sudden we seem to have a very active London web community on the go.