I originally envisaged it would be a hive of activity, updated several times a day with multiple sections and editorial strands. Kind of a poor man’s Sunday Times.  The Observer, if you like.

I wanted to write about the digital world AND aviation.  With a section on running my own business, personal fitness, london and theatre.  Augmented by musings on DNS and hosting, film, politics and travel. All the essential topics for a daily “must read” site of global significance I’m sure you’ll agree.

But can a blog have a wide a focus as this? Is it wise in these days of niche community building and focused content strategies? Will anybody want to read it?  Is someone interested in DNS also interested in aviation safety? How can I maintain several blogs if I can’t even maintain one?

These thoughts dance through my head as I  head off to bed.

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Here is a picture of me on my bike.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this scheme changes the fabric of London.

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First up, purchase one of these little puppies from Argos.

Then this is what you put in it:
- 250g of Oats
- Banana
- Handfull of Blueberries
- Handful of Brazil Nuts
- Handful of Hazelnuts
- Handful of Pumpkin Seeds
- Spoon of smooth Peanut Butter
- One scoop of Protein Powder
- Tiny bit of Strawberry flavouring
- Ice
- Water

Then you hit the smoothie button and the magic happens. Delicious and nutritious!

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9

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Mark is doing well earning £80k a year in marketing. His flatmate and old Uni friend Tim isn’t adjusting quite so well to the bright lights and is unemployed and locked in an inward spiral of depression following the death of his nan. Leaving the flat or getting dressed would be a noteworthy achievement in Tim’s current world.

Across town Cassie is trying to use her fervent interest in women’s rights to nurture a career in political speech writing.  But, more pressingly, she needs to pay the rent. And her newly [via Gumtree] acquired flatmate Rose seems to have lots of excuses, lots of fanciful notions, but very little money.

Mark meets Rose in a pub and Rose brings Mark back. The play kicks off with the awkward conversation between Mark and Cassie the morning after.

The situations, which are presented with sparkling humour laced dialogue clearly resonate well with the mainly 20 something audience and the the play’s strength lies in using familiar experiences (like the awkward morning conversations with flat mate’s shags) as jump off points for exploring deeper themes, which in turn are also oddly familiar albeit somewhat exaggerated.  Maybe it’s just me, but I can see elements of all the characters in people I know in real life.

Ultimately, I see the play as being about loneliness.   Each of the characters is lonely  (some in a more obvious way than others) and is reacting to the paradoxical loneliness of city life in their own way.  In a city you may live on top of people in a shoebox flat, cram into the tube with the masses, share your bed with that nights conquest but still be emotionally cold and lonely with little emotional intimacy.  The play draws attention to that.  I also think it’s a play about Passion – or rather the search for it.  Each of the characters is looking for passion in their lives, be it personal or professional but is missing the mark when trying to find it.   People coming to a city to look for that certain “something” isn’t exactly new, but it’s nicely evoked here.

Great performances from the cast:  Geoffrey Streatfield could easily pass for a young Hugh Grant in terms of mannerisms and Alison O’Donnell particularly impressed. Given the limitations of the venue the staging and lighting were also very good.  I think the decision to keep the play moving and not have an interval was also a good one.

A few other reviews have noted that the play doesn’t draw all it’s themes together into a bite size conclusion.  But I think that’s missing the point.  Whilst the play does offer a conclusion of sorts for characters we’ve been watching for the past 90 minutes, by that point I think it’s got the audience thinking about their own situation and their own points of reference so much that the actual characters in the play become of less interest than the thoughts the play has opened up.

The Bush is a small (intimate!) venue and stage, and the setup for this play has the audience facing each other on opposite sides of the tiny performance area. This serves to enhance the comic moments (“oh yes we can all relate to this!” people seem to say as they chortle)  yet make the uncomfortable moments where you are witnessing a characters despair all the more uncomfortable as you catch the glance of the person opposite and share a brief moment of collectively not knowing where to look.

This was my second trip to the Bush Theatre having previously seen the excellent “2nd May 1997″ there a few months ago. If these two plays are indicative of the overall general quality of output from this venue then it seems my hops over to west London are going to become more frequent.

My verdict: 4 stars out of 5
Performance attended: Friday 2nd April @ 7.30pm

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What am I talking about? I’m talking about FourSquare. I’m talking Gowalla. Or maybe I’m alluding to Brightkite.  Oh but then sometimes when I’m in a particular mood I do like to give Whrrl an…. erm whirl.

And who can of missed all the endless tweets and status updates (including my very own) that proudly announce that so and so is at such and such.

What on earth does it all mean?  And…. what’s the point?

Using these location based services is oddly addictive. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been using FourSquare and every check in you perform gives you points, and sometimes badges.  These points and badges aren’t actually worth anything except status on the service, but it’s still fun to get them. Check into a location more times than anyone else and you become Mayor of that place. Which is kind of cool.

When I was at SXSW, everyone seemed to be using the service, and with that level of local usage it was interesting to see where people I knew were and the trending local locations.  I noticed that in the US, when you checked into some locations (eg a coffee shop) they would have an offer setup for FourSquare users – I’ve not seen this in the UK yet, but I’d be more inclined to check into  a place (particularly somewhere like a Cinema or a Bar) if I thought I might get a real time offer from that place.

Social integration is quite clunky at the moment – I can see who else has recently checked into a place, but if I wanted to contact that person it would be down to using the contact details they have provided on their FourSquare profile: there is no native chat or poke or anything like that included in the service.

I’m quite surprised how willing people are to share their location info. Sure, you have to actively publish a location (so you won’t accidentally publish that job interview you sneaked into during lunch at the rival agency) but sharing your location does have consequences.    Will your clients or employer mind you seem to spend an awful lot of time in the pub during the day?  Do you really want to publicise when you are in and out of your house (we’ve all seen pleaserobme.com) and do you really want everyone in the world to know your preferred kebab shop at 3am on a Sunday morning?  Things to muse on readers.

I’ve also been playing with Google Latitude on my Nexus One.  This takes the above to a whole new level and is frankly quite scary.  Add a friend to Google Latitude and if they also have a similarly enabled GPS device you can see their real time location overlaid on Google Maps.  Wow.  Great… right?   Hmm I’m not so sure.  Great until those little white lies (“Sure, I’m 2 minutes away” ) start to be verifiable via Latitude.  Great until one of your friends decides to do something clever with the API and plot how late you are into work most days and then tweet it.   As soon as people (ie marketers) work out how to contact you based on your passive location (ie locations you’ve not physically checked into, but have been noted at) the floodgates start to open.  Visit a hospital often, will you get “Hey it looks like you are dying! Check out our funeral plans for only $99″ type emails?  I guess time will tell.

I’m going to keep playing with these services for the next few weeks then make a decision as to whether to continue .  Part of me likes having an audit trail of my movements (Go to sleep? No! Let’s review my last year by movement!) but part of me loves and cherishes anonymity.

And I predict anonymity is going to be the next big thing. Really.  More on this soon.

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I was there to attend the Music, Film and Interactive portions of South by Southwest (SXSW for short, or – for those really in the know – simply “South by”).

What is SXSW? From Wikipedia:

South by Southwest (SXSW) is a set of interactive, film, and music festivals and conferences that take place every spring in Austin, Texas, United States. SXSW first began in 1987 and is centered on the downtown Austin Convention Center. Each of the three parts runs relatively independently, with different start and end dates.

The music event has grown from 700 registrants in 1987 to nearly 12,000 registrants. SXSW Film and SXSW Interactive events attract approximately 11,000 registrants to Austin every March.

I’d heard lots about SXSW from various people over the past few years, and since my interests span Music, Film and Interactive I didn’t need much persuading to go this year.

2 weeks is a long time to be away from the office, but I figured it would be time well spent if it enabled me to learn some new things and get inspired.

SXSW delivered. It was time well spent. I learnt lots of new things, thought about some current things in a different way and it inspired me lots and lots. It reminded me why I set up Acknowledgement in the first place and reinforced how privileged I am to work in one of the most exciting and fastest changing industries in the world.   Austin also provided an ideal change of scenery that enabled me to have some thinking time around the future direction of the business and indeed the industry as a whole.

SXSW is big. Too big in fact to cover in one blog post, so I’ll be making several posts over the coming weeks talking about different aspects of the festival, and what I found interesting or memorable. And what I think could be done better. Having lost my SXSW virginity there are also some performance tuning issues from my side I want to hone for SXSW 2011. I’ll be sharing those on this blog too.

I even took some video footage when I was out there, so I’ll edit some of that down and post so you can get a taste of the general setup and atmosphere.

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Stay tuned for blog posts about the USA, SXSW, Virtualisation, Nexus One vs Iphone, The BA Strike, some of London’s best new theatre shows, some really interesting digital production developments, giving up alcohol, plus the trials, tribulations and sheer joy of running your own business.  Oh, and protein shakes.

It all kicks off tomorrow. (book)mark my words.

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Really proud of Team Acknowledgement!

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