One of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars, Michael Krigsman who writes the IT Project Failures blog for ZDNet, was in London for a few days last week. The EI group talks every day online, but we aren't often in the same city, so it's always good to make time to meet up physically to say hi when we can. We grabbed a coffee and chat at a Coffee Republic near Earls Court tube on Saturday. Michael's wife Elizabeth Shaw was there, and Michael invited one of his blogging friends Chris Dalby. By incredible coincidence I'd only been talking to Dennis Howlett about Chris and his company YellowPark the day before. Dennis has just moved his WordPress blog over to Chris's outfit for hosting, and was being very complimentary about the excellent support and help he got to make the process painless. I'd got Chris's details, but then suddenly, via a different route, I was meeting him face to face.
Of course we have plenty of blogging, Twitter and technology friends in common. During the conversation Chris mentioned the fact that Sam Sethi has surfaced on Twitter in the last few days - I'd seen that too, and Sam even responded to one of my emails on Friday. I haven't spoken much about being part of last year's blognation pantomime in the run up to Christmas, or about being one of Sam's several creditors. I told them some of the story, and Michael related some examples of similar business people he's dealt with in the past. I'm not going to say any more here other than it was an interesting learning experience, which had the excellent by-product of introducing me to some great bloggers and writers. That included, very briefly, just before his untimely death, Marc Orchant who seemed like a great guy. My condolences and best wishes to his wife and family.
Mike and Elizabeth talked about the Asuret products for evaluating IT projects. Chris told us about YellowPark, running the Live Meeting user group, and I learned that he used to rent office space to James Governor. We talked about the great benefits of home working, using Twitter to keep connected with your friends and colleagues, and then Chris did a bit of video blogging. He filmed us using his HTC touch, and uploaded the video straight away to Seesmic, using Shozu. Seesmic is Loic LeMuer's brainchild. It is a video site that makes it ridiculously easy for you to create and post a video, maybe using the webcam on your laptop. Whereas YouTube is all about hosting and sharing videos, Seesmic is all about using the medium to have conversations and video blogging. The current use ranges from some great commentary and interviews from Davos last week, to Seesmic users saying hi over their morning cup of coffee - kind of like a video twitter message. I'll be exploring how useful the service is over the coming weeks, so go take a look, expect more here, and this was Chris's record of our meeting.
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