Josh Russell

Connecting people has always been something I’ve done, mostly inadvertently, but more recently people have been asking me the typical questions..

“dude, do you know anyone from X who knows about Y?”

“I need a person to work on A, do you know anyone who lives near B?”

“I’ve got an idea that X would love, can you hook me up?”

“Are you friends with A? It’d be great to meet him lol”

You get the idea.

So I’m trying to be more.. in want of a better word.. calculating. I’m putting a lot more consideration into who I connect to who, how that reflects on me, and ultimately whether it will work out.

I’ve spent the last few years surrounding myself by better people. People better than me, mostly, but people that excel in what they do. These are the people that I recommend to others or that I want to work with myself. I’m careful when adding people to LinkedIn too. Considering what the consequences of giving access to my network are. I should trust these people before giving them direct contact, without me, to my valuable list of colleagues. Don’t be offended if I don’t add you, or don’t accept your invitation. It’s just that I’m trying to preserve the quality of contact, reducing the noise. This is what I’d want, so I’m giving this to them.

What this has made me think is that there (obviously) must be a better way for me to manage this. Maybe Highrise or something similar. I need social contacts, where each contact is not just an object in my list, but is controlled by them, including access controls that allows them to choose to be available to others in my network or not. Currently my LinkedIn list is both a list for my access *and* my contacts.

In conclusion, yes I probably know someone who can help you, and yes I’ll absolutely try and help you find them. But remember that this is a two way transaction that I’m in the middle of and I need to consider both sides. This is in no way a warning not to ask me, it’s more of a disclaimer :)

I’m soliciting open and public responses about my local bus service, and using Get Satisfaction this took me all of about 15 minutes to do.

I’m interested to see whether they will discover that they’re on the site without being prompted, and that people are trying to communicate with them there. Whether it will make any difference at all is of course the big question. It might not get used or it might just fill up with complaints and suggestions that go unheard.

Here are your action points:

1. if you live in Brighton and/or Hove go and read the comments or maybe even leave a suggestion or complaint
2. add your local public services to Get Satisfaction, or maybe your whole council or local authority and all it’s various parts, and open up discussion in a public space

Maybe we’ll turn alpha citizens into alpha geeks!

Up to the challenge?

Brian Suda and I (and many others!) seem to continually discuss what may be.

We’re geeks, obviously, but as Chris Messina quoted while at Reboot, “Alpha-geeks are becoming alpha-citizens.“, and thus we discuss all manner of subjects:

• technology
• sociology
• ecology
• business
• ethics
• psychology

The list goes on. But all these conversations eventually evaluate the past, and then try to work out how things may change. Sometimes for the worse, but hopefully for the better!

Finding inspiration from an article written 100 years ago in The Ladies Home Journal, predicting the year 2000, we decided to try and do what they did and predict the future, 1 year from now, then 10, and then 100 years to the year 2100!

You’re now invited to join us in these predictions, firstly online, and then at a short meet up just before the dConstruct conference in Brighton. When we meet, we’ll also discuss the predictions submitted online.

So go submit your predictions, and then join us on the day!

http://predictions.sudabot.com/ < -- This is the important bit!

We’ll meet on September the 4th in Brighton at 5.30pm (upcoming), location TBD.

P.s. don’t feel any pressure to be 100% accurate, this is supposed to be fun too :)

On Friday I had the honor of being the special guest on episode 17 of the Mobile Industry Review podcast.

Mobile Industry Review Video 17 from Ewan MacLeod on Vimeo.

It was great fun, we spent a few hours in Covent Garden putting it together, and generally being geeks in public. Which in this case was great fun :)

I got to talk about the start of the upcoming Brighton Tuttle Club (Social Media Cafe), and a little about the future of tracking offline to mobile conversions and location specific behavioral patterns. Something that I’m really interested in at the moment, and will happily talk about, come find me at the weekly Tuttle!