logorrhoea.net

I’ve recently enrolled on an Open University course: U101 Design Thinking.

‘Design Thinking’ is something of a buzz phrase at the moment, at least in my social and professional circles. Had I paid more attention to the course title, I may well have decided against enrolling, on the basis that I’m a contrary bugger and don’t want to be seen doing something that’s in vogue.¹ Fortunately, I made my decision to sign up from reading the course description. It’s something I’m interested in just out of personal interest but it also happens to be useful to me professionally, as well.

Now, last year I took two courses at what was supposed to be equivalent to first year degree level (it felt more like GCSE), following advice from the local OU support centre. Given that these courses were supposed to be about current uses of technology, I was appalled that I was sent a huge number of printed text books (most of which got sent to the recycling centre unopened). To be fair, PDFs were provided online but for some reason, when corrections to course material needed to be made, they sent an email out about it, and didn’t update the PDFs to reflect the correction. Absolute madness. The walled garden software (email, forums, IM) used by the OU was also terribly designed, as was the browser version of it. All in all, the impression given was ‘do as we say, not as we do’.

So when another big box from the OU arrived last week, I thought, “Oh, here’s another lot of stuff for me to recycle.” I finally got round to opening the box about ten days later, and was pleasantly surprised to find a t-shirt, masking tape, a ruler, some transfer paper, a pencil and other bits and pieces that had labels encouraging me to think about them as something more than a t-shirt, pencil, &c. No text book destined to remain unopened – just objects and a few words that made me think that the OU has really thought about this course thoroughly and applied, well, design thinking.

So with just a few items and a few words, the Open University has already got me infinitely more excited and positive about than I ever was about the courses I took last year. The fact that I’m bothering to take pictures of the course material and write this blog post is evidence of that. I hope the course lives up to the early promise.

1. The same kind of childish thinking that used to make me dislike some bands as soon as they started selling more than a few records. Now I hate bands who go mainstream on the more rational basis that they’re only selling more records because they started writing formulaic bland anthemic crap. Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Athlete, I’m looking at you hiding behind your admittedly impressive piles of cash. [↩]

It’s time to bring together the various blogs and online entities I have scattered around the web.

I won’t bore you with the reasons why, and why the blogs were created as separate entities anyway. I just wanted to let you know, partly because it may take a few days or weeks to sort out the design. Not that you care if you read this by RSS anyway.

Seems like Twitter’s really starting to hit the mainstream now¹ so in the absence of an established etiquette (no, not ‘twettiquette’ or ‘etwiquette’) I’m putting up my very personal reasons for not following you in the first place or not following you any more, even if you are kind enough to follow me on Twitter.

Reasons why I don’t follow you or have stopped following you on Twitter:

1. Your grammar or spelling is consistently poor.  (For example, not knowing when to use your/you’re or they’re/their/there, comma splicing (usually when using the word ‘however’), incorrect use of the possessive apostrophe.)  I don’t want to get into a discussion about whether it matters if your English is perfect when you’re online.  It’s just that I write and edit for a living, ergo correcting other people’s English is second nature to me, and it’s irritating for me if I find myself constantly mentally putting Word into ‘track changes’ mode.
2. Your tweet signal-to-noise ratio is low.  This is a difficult one, because what counts as signal to me depends on who you are.  If you’re a mate or even someone I’ve met just once, I’m going to put up with seemingly inane crap or personal rants because the personal connection makes it interesting to me.  If you’re a software house or service provider, I expect your tweets to give me something on top of what I could find out from my RSS subscriptions.  If all you’re doing is tweeting links to press releases or blog posts, then that is Not A Good Thing.
3. Your tweets mainly consist of links to your blog posts.  If you’re only using Twitter to publicise other online activity then a) I think you’re missing the potential of Twitter and b) it comes across as really needy or narcissistic.  Make your tweets interesting in themselves, and when you tweet the occasional link to your other work, I’ll be infinitely more inclined to click through.
4. You retweet unthinkingly. RT juter @logorrhoea I have a rule about overuse of re-tweets: it’s such lazy me-tooism.
5. You put up several tweets about the same subject within a short space of time.  If you need more than 140 characters, may I humbly suggest you write a blog post instead (but bear in mind no.3 and no. 6 of this list).
6. You’re using Twitter to broadcast, not to interact.  Unless your tweets are really interesting, if I get the feeling that you think Twitter’s just another broadcasting medium rather than an exciting way to interact with people, then I ain’t gonna follow you.
7. It’s not obvious why you’re following me.  If you start following me, it’s nice to know why, unless the reason’s obvious.  (If it’s obvious that you’re following me to plug your stuff, I definitely won’t be following back.)
8. You don’t/hardly tweet.  Even if you’re really new to Twitter, or are returning to an old account, it doesn’t do any harm to put up a couple of tweets to show signs of life so that I know that you’re not following me for voyeuristic reasons.
9. You don’t follow me.  If I follow you and you don’t follow me back, then I’m less inclined to keep following you (unless your tweet SNR is particularly high).  That’s ok, though, because I really don’t take it personally.  Equally, you shouldn’t take it personally if you follow me and I don’t follow you back.

I’m deliberately leaving it at 9 reasons, lest anyone think I’ve contrived this blog post.  I’ve written this mainly so I could point people to it if they’re offended by me not following them.

The key point is, if I don’t follow you on Twitter it’s not personal.  Ok, it is personal in the sense that I specifically do not want to follow you, but that doesn’t mean that I think you’re a bad person or even a boring person. It just means that the things you tweet or the way you tweet isn’t my cup of tea.  I may absolutely love your company when we meet in person, though, so don’t let this come between us.  The list above isn’t aimed at any person in particular, so don’t flatter yourself or feed your paranoia that I’ve written something just about you.

1. or it might be that I just happen to read/listen to the old media that has an obsession with it, a bit like The Observer’s puzzling preoccupation with Second Life [↩]

Two thousand and nine
Time to revisit the blog
Tabula rasa

The sporadic updating of this blog can normally be put down to a lack of anything to say (not that it’s stopped me or other bloggers before). Things have rather changed recently, however. To put it indelicately, I’ve been tarting it around a bit (in a ‘making contacts’ sense), but it feels a million miles away from formal ‘networking’ because I’m not talking to people with the money motive in mind; I’m genuinely interested in the people I meet because they’re interesting and intelligent.

Twestival was what sparked it all off, I guess. For the first time in ages, I signed up for an event with the attitude of ‘why not?’ without thinking about whether I’d know anyone else there. As it turned out, it was a bit too rammed for me to chat properly with a lot of people but it had enough of a buzz about it to make me realise I was missing out on a lot of fun by not going to these types of events more often.

The sessions at smclondon08 were variable in usefulness (by far the best session happened to be the first one of the day for me: Tom Whitwell’s ‘How to write awesome headlines’ [slides available on slideshare.net]).  What I actually got out of it was confidence in myself in being able to chat to random people I’d never met before and converse intelligently about, well, stuff – and not just techie stuff.  It helped that smclondon08 was full of people with whom I have more in common than, say, my own school friends who have nothing to do with the tech industry.  That’s not to say that all I want to do is talk about the tech world but it just so happens that I’m interested in the same non-tech stuff as the kind of people I met at smclondon08.

The Tuttle Club (London Social Media Cafe)

Tuttle’s something I’d heard mentioned on Twitter for ages and never actually managed to attend.  For one thing, it used to be held in a pub, which made it a more difficult idea to sell to the work.  The relocation to the ICA suddenly turned Tuttle ‘legit’ for people like me who work in an old web 1.0 company.

The first Tuttle I attended actually turned into a bit of Londonist reunion, as I met up with Mike (@sizemore), Rob (@hinchcliffe), and Laura (@warriorgrrl)².

My second time at Tuttle in theory should’ve been more daunting, as I wasn’t really sure who else I’d know (apart from Mike) but I spent three hours there engrossed in such engaging conversations that I left feeling like I’d found a spiritual home.

There’s a real buzz at Tuttle and I really value the connections I’m making there because I feel my horizons expanding with every person I meet.  It’s something that’s seeing me through some particularly dark professional times right now.

I’m feeling completely energised and excited about the potential of the web again, and that’s all down to meeting great people with great ideas. It’s so refreshing to be with people whose first reaction to an idea is ‘How do we make it happen?’ instead of ‘How much does it cost and how much money can we make out of it?’ I’m not saying that money shouldn’t be a consideration at all, especially if you’re trying to make a living, but you need to make sure good ideas aren’t strangled at birth by corporate red tape.

1. to be even more precise, Vero, who was organising smclondon08, allowed me to take Dees’ place [↩]
2. I’d never actually met Laura in person before, despite having emailed years back when she started writing for Londonist [↩]