I've just been booking my flights over to New York to join a really smart bunch of folks taking part in Stowe Boyd's Social Business Edge Conference on the 19th of April. He describes it thus:

Can't wait!

As I flit like a bee from one big organisational headquarters to another it occurs to me that such buildings add little benefit and restrict in the following ways:

You have to waste time, money and energy traveling to them.

They cost a lot of money to maintain.

You are subject to IT networks that are slower and more restricted than your own at home.

You have to pretend to be working even when you are not whereas elsewhere you can stare out of the window and think.

You are less in control of who interrupts you and why.

Their architecture is often depressing rather than uplifting.

Can you think of any more reasons?

The video of my keynote at last year's Reboot has gone up. To explain the start I decided that when Thomas announced me I wouldn't be on stage but sitting in the audience in an attempt to convey the discomfort people feel when things don't happen as they expect.

You can see the full series of Q&A's here

Over the next two months I am going to be delivering a series of workshops in London covering various aspects of the business use of social media. I have been running similar events for some time within organisations but this is the first opportunity, in conjunction with Online Information, to make them available to a wider audience. 

There are three workshops offering a comprehensive understanding of the impact the web on the workplace and the information needed to do something about it. 

24th February GETTING TO GRIPS WITH THE WIRED WORLD

10th March HOW TO MANAGE THE NETWORKED WORKFORCE

24th March STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE IN THE POST INDUSTRIAL AGE

If you are unable to make it yourself, or know of someone else who would benefit from any or all of these workshops, do please forward this link.

Stowe Boyd writes this morning of the issues of geolocation tools and privacy. I have been an early adopter of Brightkite, Foursquare, Twitter geotagging, Fire eagle and Google Latitude. The only ones I use now are Foursquare and Twitter and even then not all of the time. Like Stowe I often zoom out to city level rather than being specific about my location. I don't automatically post locations to Twitter to try avoid annoying people with too much noise and only do so when I think there might be a chance of meeting up with someone.

My experience so far has been 100% positive with many serendipitous meetings that I wouldn't have had without letting people know where I am.

I am always surprised when people write as if they were victims of technology rather than in control of it - I guess it is a bit like email!

I attended a funeral today. A very moving and nice tribute to a man who had a real zest for life and was very much loved by everyone who knew him. One of the readings was from 1 Corinthians 13 which I quote below.

As I listened I heard it in terms of some of the things that can seem to really matter in this brave new 2.0 world but which in fact maybe don't.

I often forget that I am one of the few folks out there promoting the use of social tools in business who has actually spent most of their working life in a corporate environment doing a line management job. I tend to underplay just how much I learned by doing annual appraisals for fifty staff (yes 50), or writing endless strategy papers for John Birt, or ploughing my way through the annual budgeting process. It is no place for the feint hearted and understandably resistant to the idea that "getting real" or "finding your voice" will make much of a difference.

But I also remember donning my collar and tie for the first time, starting to talk management bollocks, teetering on the brink and then pulling back. There are a lot of brave souls in organisations who know it can be different and to whom the lifeline of the word "social" is worth reaching out for.

Understanding where people are rather than getting frustrated at them for not being where you think they should be is something I should remember to do more often.

The guys from Lift have just posted up videos of last year's conference in Marseille

Euan Semple "Changing Innovation" (lift09 France EN) from Lift Conference on Vimeo.

I know I go on about how wonderful the web is but having just had a really, really nice evening with AKMA, having known him for nearly nine years but never having "met" I am yet again blown away by its power to connect people. The way we immediately felt at ease and the warmth in our friendship makes a mockery of those who say online is somehow secondary to face to face as a way of establishing relationships.

We covered everything from politics, to religion to, yes, sex and in a way that I just didn't want to stop. As I said to the two young ladies sitting at the table next to us who we asked to take this photo - they had been witness to what, certainly for me, was a magic moment.

I was interviewed by Abi yesterday in advance of speaking at Melcrum's Social Media Conference next month. You can hear the results below:

I have just started reading The Laws Of Disruption by Larry Downes, which already has the feeling of being a cracker, and in the opening chapter he discusses, amongst others, Metcalfe's Law. For those of you unfamiliar with this law it can be paraphrased as "the usefulness of a network is the square of the number of users connected to it"

This as why from the word go numbers matter. You can't afford to be choosy about who joins your networks or why - you just need bodies. In corporate settings don't get arsey about who should or shouldn't be using your social media tools or what they should or shouldn't use them for. You can't afford to care. You need numbers and you need them fast. Do ANYTHING it takes to get them or you will end up with a dead system on your hands.

I remember ages ago talking about blogging to an older friend who said "Oh yes blogging - isn't that just people expressing their opinions?"

But opinions are ideas and ideas change the world. Whether it is the ideas contained in The Bible or in Mein Kampf, ideas are what shapes and defines the world as we experience it. Every idea has to start somewhere. Every idea has to first be thought and then be expressed.

With a blog you have more reason to think. Having an outlet for your ideas makes you take them more seriously. Even if you never publish the posts, taking your ideas seriously and thinking harder about them is a good thing.

If you write a half decent blog post you will make someone else think. You may make them think you are wrong or you may make them think you are right but you will make them think.

My previous post about hard men seems to have made people think judging by the comments. Imagine if that blog post had been on a blog on an organisations intranet? Imagine if it had been written by someone with status and influence inside the organisation - or even by someone no one had heard of. It would have made someone else think and maybe, even in a very small way, change their behaviour.

The world only ends up the way it does because people have ideas and express them. What's so wrong with us all having a go?

Why should we all use our creative power and write or paint or play music, or whatever it tells us to do?

Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold, and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. Because the best way to know Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e, share it with others?

Brenda Ueland If You Want To Write 1938

Watching my kids as they get older I am reminded of my own childhood and how different your experience of the passage of time is when you are young from what it is as an adult.

Noodling away Saturdays, doing nothing in particular on the frequently grey, wet days of my home town they seemed to last forever. Lying in front of a coal fire watching Scottish football, or if I was really lucky Rallycross, on our black and white television felt as if it would never end.

I imagine this is how my kids experience their time now. What a shame mine is flashing past in the blink of an eye.

I have just been watching a diet programme on Channel 4 and was stunned at the misleading pseudo health information put on really unhealthy foodstuffs by household name companies. The people who do this have to know it is wrong and deceptive. They must sit in meetings discussing doing this. Not all of them can feel comfortable.

Following on from my last post about bullying attitudes in the workplace one of my aspirations for social media in business is that one day, when people get confident enough to say what they think, enough of them might just get the gumption together to stand up and say "guys this is wrong". Maybe then we could put a stop to this sort of crap.

Forgive the forthrightness of this post’s title but I was nudged into writing it by the coming together of a number of things:

A Skype IM chat about antler-clashing amongst social media mavens and how much “blokishness” there is.

A recollection of just how intimidated I used to get being around BBC executives and how deliberate this was on their part.

Reading the following in the wonderful If You Want To Write, by Brenda Ueland:

Social media relies on people having the temerity to say what they think and others having the decency to listen.

Forget Enterprise 2.0. The promise of social media will not become reality until you do something to reduce the power of the bullies.