Journal

Favourite things: November

So, there are a couple of themes to this month’s review of my favourite things from the past month. One I’m thinking of as the ‘perils of conference speaking’, the second I’ll call ‘the wit and wisdom of Ms Whitney Hess’.

‘Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. – Eleanor Roosevelt’
via Johanna Kollmann

Danah Boyd’s mauling at Web 2.0 Expo in New York made a lot of headlines last month and the conference’s rather controversial use of Twitter as a ‘front channel’ really called into question the relationship between speaker and audience, but also the responsibility that conference organisers have to their speakers. That’s been covered more comprehensively elsewhere, not least by Danah herself, but it has all rather obscured what she was actually trying to say. So, it’s well worth having a read of Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media.

Like Danah’s self-analysis, Adam Greenfield’s own summation of his experience of, his words, falling apart in real time is brave and moving stuff. Watching the full talk on Vimeo, it’s easy to share his palpable sense of fear, but also to appreciate just why he’s so damn good. The words that tumble out after his ‘melt up’ are passionate, real and compelling. So glad I had the chance to see him in person at dConstruct earlier this year.

It was also at dConstruct that I also saw Robin Hunicke, and Danah Boyd’s more brutal experience came reminded me a little of watching the often hostile live reaction on Twitter to Hunicke’s talk at dConstruct. She didn’t play by what can seem like unspoken conference rules: she didn’t have a cool slidedeck, she didn’t show off polished presentation tricks, or present to her mates in the crowd (you know who you are) but she did have something important and relevant to say. dConstruct has, along with the podcasts, now published transcripts for all the talks and I’d recommend reading and listening to Robin Hunicke talk about what makes a game, the elusive secret of QWAN, and how you create memorable experience through the feedback you give your audience. It couldn’t be more relevant to what we do.

And so, to Ms Hess. I’m now only a couple of weeks away from making my move away from the comfort of a full time agency job and into freelance, so you’ll perhaps understand why it’s been occupying a lot of my time and energy of late.

I can’t stress enough how important it has been to me to have had both such fantastic unofficial mentors near me, but also to have the ability to share in and learn from the experience of others. Whitney Hess has done this as publicly – and inspirationally – as anyone and in a similar way to my own move: voluntarily giving up a full-time role and choosing to make the move into working independently.

‘I stepped out on my own because I knew that I wanted a different lifestyle; in my heart I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to fulfill my true calling while working for someone else in a traditional corporate environment.’
Whitney Hess in ‘Today is my 1 year anniversary of going solo’

Whitney is also positively evangelical on the importance and duty that we have as practitioners to talk about we do, to share that experience and promote not just ourselves but our discipline. Having shared the exact experience that Whitney has talked about, of attending a conference on her own, talking to no-one, dining alone and going away again, this really chimed with me.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s been talking recently about this too, having been called out by a commenter for being a ‘shameless self-promoter’. Jeffrey is, of course, right: we all need to be sharing our knowledge of what we love, because no-one else is going to do it for us.

November has been a great month for WordPress themes. I’m still toying with the idea of giving WordPress a go as my CMS for this site, but my devotion to Textpattern, and ok, yes, a little inertia too has prevented me from doing so. Yet. But both Basic Maths, by the brilliant Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole; and Information Architect’s iA³ are really, really tempting.

Lastly, Russell Davies’ blog is a thing of utter brilliance, funny and wise, demonstrated rather well by his November ‘ascent of man’ post on his (and our) relationship with music.

‘17-25 Nothing is more important in the world than [insert band] and only I and Paul Morley understand their significance. I don’t care that girls don’t like me.’
Russell Davies

It gets even better than this, and painfully true. You should read it.