Stuff

I’m excited to say that I have been asked to write on Computer Weekly’s Social Enterprise blog. I’ll be covering all aspects of social technology in business, whether behind the firewall or out there in the world wild web: tools, techniques, interviews with the people who make all this stuff happen and anything else I can think of.

Now that might sound an awful lot like what I do here on Strange Attractor, but I think what will happen is that I’ll end up talking about the other bits of social media here. So there’ll be more of a media and journalism focus here, more of an enterprise focus there.

I hope you’ll join me over on The Social Enterprise. Here’s the RSS.

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It’s not often I toot my own horn, but I’m going to let myself do so on this occasion. I usually find self-congratulation quite difficult as I am haunted by the feeling that I Should Have Done More, but it is nice to occasionally have a little recognition from someone else. I’m thus quite chuffed to be listed at No. 50 in the Telegraph’s list of The 50 Most Influential Britons in Technology.

I’m on the list, apparently, because of Ada Lovelace Day – the international day of blogging about women in technology that I organised earlier this year. There are only five women in the Telegraph’s lower 25, listed yesterday. I can’t help thinking that’s slightly ironic, not to mention another indicator that we have long way to go before Ada Lovelace Day becomes unnecessary.

I can’t deny that it’s nice to be recognised. I remember feeling equally chuffed when, years ago, The Guardian added Strange Attractor to its list of essential blogs. We still sometimes even get traffic from that archival page! But I also think it would have been nice to have been recognised for some of the meatier work I’ve done, such as being a social media pioneer or founding the Open Rights Group.

Of course, lists are always subjective and there are plenty of “Eh?” moments with this one. Baroness Greenfield is someone I think is hideously misguided, not to mention often flat-out wrong and whilst she may be influential it is entirely the wrong sort of influence. The majority people included come from ter intarwebz, with only the aforementioned Greenfield (“scientist”), Tanya Byron and James Dyson working in other fields.

I hope that today’s second part includes more people from other areas of technology. Nanotech, biotech, electronic engineering, software, games – none of these areas are represented. I suppose it could be argued that influence these days relies on having a hefty presence on the web and that because this is a list of influencers the web is going to be over-represented.

There’s also the perennial argument of “Why do a list anyway? They’re just a waste of time.” That’s a view I often sympathise with, but I have to admit there are a lot of people on this list I’ve never heard of, just as I’m sure the vast majority of readers will not have heard of me. Wouldn’t it be nice if this list was titled Interesting People You Might Not Have Heard Of, because that would have been both more useful and more honest.

Still, I shall enjoy my little moment of pride in what I have achieved. … Right, done! Now to get on with Doing More!

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I’m not sure how long they’ve been there (Kev and I rely on the Corante team for blog tech development), but I’ve just noticed that Kev and I now have our own RSS feeds! So if you want to follow just one of us, or to have our feeds separate in your RSS reader, you now can:

• Subscribe to only Kevin’s posts
• Subscribe to only Suw’s posts

Also, I’m still not getting emails when people leave comments that need moderating, so apologies if your comments don’t get moderated straight away.

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