Meghan Asha on technology & the Traveling Geeks from JD Lasica on Vimeo.
I‘m back from my trip to London and Cambridge with the Traveling Geeks — I was the chief organizer of this second annual event — and I’m still going through withdrawal pains after all the amazing encounters we had.
One of the people I most enjoyed spending time with was the amazing Meghan Asha, founder of NonSociety.com, whom I interviewed last fall at a very loud TechCrunch 50. If there’s not a Meghan Asha fan club out there, I just may form one.
On Saturday afternoon, at the conclusion of the trip, I chatted with Meghan for 8 minutes as she sat on a lion statue outside the Fitzwilliam Museum. Topics included technology and women, privacy issues and highlights of the Geeks’ trip.
Watch the video in Flash on Vimeo (embedded above)
Watch the video in H.264 QuickTime on Ourmedia
Download the video at Archive.org
Three of the Seedcamp winners we met with six days ago today resonated for both Meghan and me: Huddle.net, Zemanta and Skimlinks. I’ll write about them in more detail tomorrow.
I’m going to borrow an idea by fellow Geek Tom Foremski and blog about the trip a week after each event. On July 5 we had a Meet the Geeks Tweetup at JuJu in London’s Chelsea district; kudos to Ted Shelton of the Conversation Group for organizing the event and a hat tip to all our sponsors, especially Intel for donating a Netbook and MID as raffle prizes. Soon I’ll post two Flip video interviews I did at the Tweetup, with Anatolie Papas of Symbian and Kate Arkless Gray of the BBC’s Save Our Sounds.
Reboot Britain
Last Monday about 800 people descended on the first Reboot Britain conference organized by Jess Tyrell and Steve Moore and underwritten by NESTA. (You can follow the rich tweet trail at #rebootbritain.) I gave a talk about social media and citizen media, and Jeff Saperstein, Craig Newmark, Meghan Asha and Sarah Lacy appeared on panels.
Howard Rheingold gave the closing keynote — we’ll post a video when it’s ready. For now, here are a few tidbits from Howard’s talk about essential 21st century literacies:
• He defined social capital as “knowing how to get things done without going through official channels.”
• Ernest Hemingway called it a crap meter or crap detector, but we need it now more than ever — we all need to distinguish between credible and untrustworthy sources of information on the Internet. He fears we may drown in the noise unless we have critical mass of people who have internalized some of this crap detection.
• Howard smartly tells his students to look at RSS readers and Twitter as a river to drink from, not an ocean to injest. “It’s not a queue. It’s a flow. Sample the flow. Don’t go back to read every RSS feed or Twitter tweet.”
• We need to put sensational media reports in perspective. In a population of 1 million users, 50,000 are likely to be molested by a parent, neighbor or relative — and only 6 by a stranger. The hysteria about online predators is BS.
• More Howard: “There is no back row in a circle. When I sat down in the circle [when teaching his classes at Cal and Stanford], it had a huge effect” on his students.
I also conducted a video interview with Howard on Saturday and will post that soon.
BT Tower
Last Monday night the Geeks were feted to an amazing dinner by JP Ragaswami, Managing Director of BT Design for BT Group, and the BT executive team at the BT Tower, 34 floors above downtown London. Here are some photos from the evening that I shot:
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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