So after Edinburgh (which I still need to blog at some point soon) 2 weeks ago and this weekends BBQ party for my new flatmate we're into a new busy work week. Things are crazy because my travel across London is futher hampered by the 3 day tube strike. Now some of you may say, but Ian your on a scooter. Well trust me I tried to get through the Blackwall tunnell today at 10am and it was packed. Every street I turned down was full of cars, so in the end I took a different route through old street and clerkenwell because angel was so hell-ish. it took 25mins just to get from Kings Cross to the A40 fly over because of the amount of traffic. And what is it with car drivers who block the way so not even cyclist get through the narrow gaps? Does it make them feel better or what? Sometimes I feel like raising my legs up and kicking off their side mirrors, or rolling up next to them and shouting get off your mobile phone!
Anyway, tomorrow I'm off to York for a conference titled Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 in which I'm talking at on Thursday afternoon. In the usual way, I'm tweaking slides to get the most impact for the different audience it will be.
Then on Friday I'm at D.Construct as one of the official sponsors of the conference, so make sure you come by and say hi at the backstage stand. Although I expect most of the time it will be used as a meeting point for interviews during the day. At night there is the d.construct party which is sponsored and run by BBC Backstage and Yahoo! We worked hard to get such a good venue and hopefully enough food to feed the very hungry conference going crowd. There will be free drinks via Yahoo of course. Its going to be a good night and a excellent end to the long day at d.construct, but for those who want to make it extra long the club will open till about 2:30am, so don't rush off back to London if you can help it.
I expect a lot of people to stay around because of course on the weekend is BarCampBrighton. I'm really excited because I'm hoping to chill out and go to sessions and not get involved in the arrangement at all. They also seem to have got it to a decent size of about 80 people and done the overnight. I'm getting a little tired of barcamp's which do one day or don't have sleep overs. I think its essential to the experience and yes I know how hard it can be to do sleepovers. But the thing is you just end up with a un-conferene which is cool but you miss the bonding part. Anyway, thankfully Brighton is a whole weekend, complete with sleepover.
After that weekend I'm going to need to take some time off to chill out, but otherwise I'm off again near the end of the month. This time I'm off to Boston for TTI Vanguard Wealth of Networks conference, thanks to work. No I won't be talking except to ask questions and maybe offer a slightly different view on things which come up. Have you seen the line up? Wow, this is type of thing I would pay for on IT Conversations. Not only is this a conference but they have lunches and dinners together so you get a full day of excellent mind filling conversation.
For the rest of the year, I got to take a couple of holidays one somewhere sunny (Stowe Boyd, suggested Portugal in October), although I may end up going to South of France. I've commited to going to Berlin in November for Web 2.0 open europe which looks good. I'm also helping out where possible with that event, Boagworld 100 and I expect we will run another Backstage Christmas Party (details are secret right now). The last thing to add is that I'm still trying for BarCampLondon3 and who knows what might happen…
I keep meaning to screenshot my dopplr map or using their new api apply a map to my blog. I did however make the brave move of making my calendar publicly available via Plaxo. Oh one last thing, did I say I won a competition recently?
