On conversations with Cameron Marlow…

While BloggerCon has been ongoing in the States, I’ve spent most of the weekend attending mini events with the charming Cameron Marlow of Blogdex infamy. Cameron came over to the UK to talk at a conference at the Oxford Internet Institute and managed to squeeze in a few small gatherings before heading back to the States.

On Friday afternoon, I hosted a small event with Cameron at the BBC that Matt Jones had organised but was unfortunately unable to attend. Cameron talked about social networks, the similarities and differences between meme transmission and STD transmission across social networks (there are, intriguingly, many fewer types of STDs) and the relationship between link networks and the social networks that they sit upon. There were a fair number of UK-based BBC-based webloggers present (plus Cal who we sneaked in), but irritatingly none of them have talked about the event on their sites, so it’s been very difficult for me to gauge how useful or interesting they found it. The day was nicely capped by Cal, Cameron and I stuffing our faces at Pizza Hut, having a long discussion with a man at a neighbouring table about The Darkness (“Men what do rock, baby”) and then collapsing in front of Finding Nemo. I’m fairly sure I had an argument with someone important about Eastenders as well…

Yesterday – in a more dedicated weblogger-centric (and sporadically organised at the last-minute) dim sum session at the New World in Soho – we got Cameron together with some more bastions of the UK tech/weblogging scene, including Matt Webb, Cal Henderson, Phil Gyford, Paul Hammond and Neil McIntosh from Online Blog. After eating inhuman amounts of tiny tiny food and everyone tolerating another one of my long rants about Eastenders, we decamped to Apogee – a café off Leicester Square – for coffee, cake and constitutional cocktails.

Finally today, Cameron and I found ourselves on a lunchtime panel at the iSociety (written up by James Crabtree in considerable detail) on weblogs and the public sphere which I found very rewarding (although I’m not sure the same could be said of the people who were forced to listen to my ramblings). I think both Cameron and I were particularly interested in the various perceived inequalities and freedoms of webloggia (perhaps as an example of networked individualism), how those freedoms/inequalities might inter-relate with one another and what it meant to be an ethical builder of tools in that environment. I was also particularly delighted to see Perry de Havilland of Samizdata.net again, who – while I might not agree with his politics – always has an interesting contribution to make to these debates.

I’m almost certain that I’ve managed to capture only the most limited sense of the events and the issues discussed at them. Should any of the parties concerned with to use this space as a forum for subsequent discussion, they should feel free…