Monkeys with typewriters

Debbie Davies has designed these fab skirts which she was showing off at Tuttle today. 

Debbie's a kindred spirit because she shared a previous life in television, just like me. Unlike me, turns out she's also a dab hand with the sewing machine.

This skirt is a great example of the varied stuff that regular Tuttlers get up to. And I guess there's something interactive about it: nothing's more social than turning up at a party wearing your own conversation piece :)

The skirts are still "in beta" but will be available soon. Contact Debbie via Twitter if you'd like to pre-order. 

A sneak preview of TFL's new cycle fleet!

We walked past this flashy new docking station on St.Chad's Place, WC1, this morning, on the way to Tuttle. As we were checking out the computerised bollards, a group of guys from TFL turned up, "test-riding" some of the bikes.

The public bicycle sharing scheme goes live on 30 July.

How lovely.

Who can argue with anything that has "sharing" in the title?

The final session of day 2 of the Cloud Computing World Forum and these five have the fun task of drawing conclusions from it all.

They are (from left to right): David Terrar (chair), John Hall (Head of Strategy & Portfolio, Siemens), Simon Abrahams (Head of Product Marketing, Rackspace), Gowri Subramanian (CEO, Aspire Systems) and David Wilde (CIO, Westminster Council).

Things move in a very predictable manner. For example, when David asks if the IT dept should see the Cloud (which is, in this context, all about moving IT services off individual company servers and onto the 'Net) as an opportunity or a threat, the managers answer as follows:

David Wilde: IT dept shouldn’t see themselves as gatekeepers but as enablers.

Gowri: if they see IT as a way of adding value to the business, then they need to position themselves more on the business side than the technology side.

Simon: you can only be an innovator if you don’t have to go through a baroque approval process. They need to see this as the future.

John: IT departments have a role and a responsibility to drive forward cloud computing.

These guys are managers, they think in business-like, strategic ways. I keep wishing for Roy or Moss from The IT Crowd to jump up from the audience and say they don’t give a toss about the Cloud, unless adoption of it will have a direct impact on their job, in which case they want to avoid “enabling it” as much as possible.

But sadly Roy or Moss don’t go to these sort of conferences.

More’s the pity.

Bronin Bough from PepsiCo talks about how social media has transformed the way his company thinks (not only individuals). PepsiCo's new mission is to do more good in the world (yes, really)!

Bronin was speaking at Social Media Influence 2010. See the live blog report (over on iKnowHow) for details of his talk (plus the low-down on many other speakers at the conference).

The other presentation that inspired me at The Web and Beyond was by Josephine Green. Her proposal is simple: we are moving from an age dominated by pyramids to one made up of pancakes.

What psychological tricks can we use to modify behaviour?

Design consultant Stephen Anderson gave a great talk at The Web and Beyond in Amsterdam last Tuesday (1 June). The cards in the picture are from a deck he's developing to help companies with product development.

The project began as "a way to make sense of something complex: the numerous insights into human behaviour found in theories about game mechanics, the latest findings from neuroscience, best sellers explaining behavioural economics and many more sources!".

What's not to like? You can pre-order the full deck here.

Stephen's talk focused on feedback loops (the idea that, when you're instantly rewarded in some way for your action, you're likely to modify your behaviour in order to get more instant rewards). He used the example of email (how feedback loops might encourage people to respond to messages more quickly and efficiently, for example).

I'm looking forward to seeing how these insights might translate into helping with digital engagement at the RSA.

I’m at a social media round table at the offices of LABEL in Geneva. Representatives from The Global Fund, The US Mission to the UN, Red Cross and Nestle are here, as well as a sprinkling of us "consultants".

There was genuine excitement this morning as everyone helped launch and build an online campaign in real time. Unfortunately I got here a little late (flown in from Gatwick), and by the time I got in the entire round table was hard at work: blogging, tweeting and messaging about Born HIV Free, the new campaign from The Global Fund. Three people had even gone out into the streets of Geneva and made this film using a Flip camera and editing software.

It was great to talk about some of the ideas behind Monkeys with Typewriters with such a knowledgeable, engaged group. Michael Parmly from the US Mission suggested I read the book about the 1960s educational experiment, Summerhill. That’s definitely the most random recommendation I’ve had after a talk so far (but the book looks fab).

Now we’re listening to author and journalist Angela Connor talk about building online communities. She bemoaned the fact that people keep on churning out the same old examples (eg: Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation). As it happened, I’d used that in my talk so I had to defend it! There are so few real success stories out there, so few examples of best practice, that we have to use the ones there are.

Angela said we should be using more examples from small, local businesses, because they really “get” social media. Actually, that’s so true (and something I kind of alluded to in my presentation also – it’s so much easier when you’re small, to be fair). There was an article on small businesses using sm in The Economist a while back – watch this space – I’ll dig it out.

When I chose Monkeys with Typewriters as the name for my book on social media, I never dreamt that a few months later I’d be sitting in front of 400 people at Next10 debating the future of leadership with best-selling author (and monkey-baiter in Chief) Andrew Keen.

For those who don’t know, Andrew’s concern that “monkeys with typewriters…are authoring the future” was central to his 2007 classic, The Cult of The Amateur - and the main inspiration behind my book’s title.

Although Andrew’s argument has moved on (“the blogging debate’s no longer relevant”), he’s a skilled orator and debater. I was worried I was going to have to argue in detail about the theories of Schumpeter or Habermas. But strangely Andrew made it easy for me (I don’t know if on purpose or not) by keeping most of his attacks on a personal level (what I was wearing or why I’d read rather than ad-libbed my presentation): I could have got by without saying a thing.

Ola Ahlvarsson did a great job of chairing a tricky discussion, and big thanks for him for letting me have the last word: this is a time of untold opportunity and we need positivity not doom-saying if we’re going to evolve.

[[And thanks to Andrew for actually being quite nice to me off stage, even interviewing me for his Harvard Business School blog, and all that.]]