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Why it's all Ollie Bray's fault.


This is a picture of a meal I ate on the advice of a total stranger. This situation is all Ollie Bray's fault. Let me explain.

After the SAGT annual conference on Saturday, I was on my own in Edinburgh. I was hungry. So I asked my Twitter network for recommendations. @digitalmaverick came up with The Advocate just off the Royal Mile. There, I enjoyed a very tasty pint of ale and Scottish Game and Blackberry Bangers and Mash. To me, this is a great way of using a social network.

So what's it got to do with Ollie? In 2006 I sat through his 50 Ideas in 50 minutes workshop at the SAGT conference. I was impressed by his energy and one of his ideas was to start reading blogs. So I did. This led me to starting this blog, which is now close to having 20,000 reads. In turn, this led me down the road of Twitter and all things innovation and madness.

Ok, so it's not all Ollie's fault. SLN, Alan Parkinson and Dan Raven-Ellison has lots to do with it also.

Today, I repeated the trick (I hope). I'll blog about that later.

So, cheers Ollie, Alan, Dan and all the other people out there. The recent flack Twitter has received is amusing. To be honest, I tend to ignore most of it. I write it off as the work of those who just don't get it, or just haven't used it. It amuses me because I am amazed that some of the most productive professional (and increasingly social) interactions I have started online. I meet and talk to MORE people face-to-face thanks to Twitter, not less. Don't worry, I always tell someone where I'm off to when I meet them ;-)

Didn't the Beatles and the Internet start as fads?

Comments

  1. A. The Beatles and Internet were never fads

    ReplyDelete
  2. That may be true, but they didn't start off as being widely accepted or adopted.

    ReplyDelete

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