stevelawson.net

For quite a few years before all this social media stuff got properly conversational, this site was the home of a burgeoning forum. It was created in PHPBB and was home to many a wonderful discussion about all kinds of things, some of them directly related to what I was up to as a musician, [...]

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I have a friend who works in Marketing for Sungard - they’re a huge, multi-national, multi-billion dollar IT Services/financial information/Software company. Massive. Bigger than big.
What interesting for us musical types is their response to the financial crisis. A situation which, naturally, they took very seriously indeed, partly because they were deeply affected, but also because [...]

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[2:40] So, last minute decision, I’m at Media140; “London’s First Microblogging Event”. You can watch the livestream here.
Pat Kane up first - he’s theplayethic on twitter, a journo, thinker, lovely man and the singer in Hue And Cry.
[2:47] Pat: “I’m trying to show how quotidian the practice of journalism becomes in this new media space.“

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If you’re an avid watcher of my various online streams - be it Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed - you’ll have noticed over that last few days I’ve been talking about, and link to, BeyondBassCamp.com.
It’s a series of monthly masterclasses, inspired by the ones I give in California every January - for the last 4 or [...]

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Another thing I touched on in part II was the issue of ‘sidemen’ who have no sense of ownership of a project. This is a big problem when a large part of the cost of any particular gig is paying the musicians. If only one of you is doing the work to get an audience, [...]

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Today I went down to the protest outside the Bank Of England that coincided with the meeting of the G20 in London. It was a multi-angle protest, seeking to bring together the shared concerns of the environmental movement, anti-capitalists, the climate change brigade, the stop the war coalition and those who wanted to see a greater degree of culpability placed on the financial systems and institutions that presided over the current global economic collapse.

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One of the common mistakes made by people considering the ‘usefulness’ of social media is that value measurements are somehow detached from any acknowledgement of just how much of what human beings do is really screwed up.

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Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, I found out at about 12 o’clock today that Andrew Dubber, author of New Music Strategies, was in London for a conference. Andrew and I met at BrumTwestival, a Twitter-organised charity event, got on great, and so I tweeted him to see what he was up to. 30 mins later, we were having lunch together at the British Library. Such is the immediacy and flexibility of the twittering life

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It’s a while since I blogged anything about Twitter, so maybe it’s time for a response to a couple of the prevailing misconceptions about the micro-blogging service that has substantially improved my life over the last year.

There are three broad themes coming out in the Twitter critique:

• That it’s full of trivial rubbish
• That’s it’s reality TV without pictures
• That is for narcissists and fosters mental ill-health (WTF??)

To which I, not surprisingly, say ‘Bollocks’.

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This blog post was triggered by a twitter conversation with two lovely women that Lo and I finally met in person on our US jaunt, Annie Boccio and Tracy Apps - Annie and Tracy are both people we’ve been chatting to online, in both text and video formats, for months. We know loads about them, and have watched both their day to day normal stuff, and the special events, like their visits to podcamps/expos/etc.

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