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London Twestival (#ldntwestival)
February 14th, 2009 at 01:34
Last night I went to the London Twestival – if you’re unfamiliar with it, it was basically a big party for people who work on and around the “Silicon Roundabout” and Nathan Barleys like myself to network, or in my case, come tantalisingly close from crossing the line of “stalking via twitter” into “stalking in real life”.
Of course, it was all an incestuous gathering of meeja types, PRs and techies, but it was all for charity, so everyone went home being able to live with themselves and sleep at night. And I had a great time.
All of the Twitter folks from the trendy start-ups were there, and there was even some old-media representation in the form of Rory Cellan-Jones, or Ruskin147 as we know him, from the BBC. I didn’t dare say hello though as I through a process of osmosis-like learning from the Twitter feed, I know about him to an almost stalker-like level. I know that he lives in… Ealing? I know he has a dog and a son who got into Oxford, I know he gets up early and goes for a run every morning, and I know his wife recently became a Dame. It’s almost like I’ve been going through his vitual bins.
I did however, talk to loads of excellent people, and saw many more whose “names” I knew according to the sticker they were wearing with their name on, but couldn’t place.
I had a chat with Gareth Mitchell from the BBC’s Digital Planet, and ridiculously, he recognised my face from my Twitter avatar. I said hello to the man doing all of the hard work on the Atheist Bus Campaign, who has been Twittering in the first-person as a personified bus for the past few weeks. Shell_uk was in a similar boat to me not knowing anyone there, as so to speak. Brilliantly, I got the chance to say hello to Annie Mole, who’s blog about the London Underground I’ve been reading for years – she was close to James Cridland, who I didn’t manage to pluck up the courage to speak to. I bumped into ParkyLondon, who produces a superb podcast for London nerds like myself, and just as I was leaving I traded business cards with Richjm.
Well, I say “traded business cards”. Frustratingly, the new business cards that I’ve ordered from ultra-trendy Shoreditch start-up Moo.com hadn’t arrived in time, meaning I had to resort to the “analogue business card”: my Twitter name scrawled on to a notepad I carry around for blog ideas (I genuinely do this). This slightly undermined the savvy-London-Hoxtonite-professional image I was trying to cultivate for myself.
One thing that was quite exciting was that it levelled the playing field a little and I was mingling with some stunningly important people in the industry. I got talking to a man who explained that his “job” was starting start-ups, and he’d started maybe 20 companies in his career, including things that I will have heard of – though he was hesitant to name them to someone like me. In retrospect I maybe should have asked him for some venture capital (or “VC” in industry-speak) for one of the most bizarre outcomes of the night: I seem to have accidentally founded a new .com start-up with Dave Hodgkinson, who ten minutes after mentioning an idea had already bought the domain name. It’s definitely a fast-moving industry. Whatever industry this is.
That was a problem I did encounter – I wanted people to take me seriously, and ideally, offer me money, a writing job and use of the company boat. So when asked what I did, or what my industry was, I made a point of emphasising that I was a post-graduate student – a metric cut above those tawdry undergraduates, before following up by claiming that I also “like to think of myself as a satirist”. This was secret code for “No one actually pays me to be a satirist but I’d like them to”. Even if they question my credentials I’ve got that plausible deniability – the “satire industry” doesn’t exist in any tangible way and there’s no satirists trade union, even though “we” do spend a lot time labouring in a pit of irony.
It was really excellent though – and to top things off, I discovered this afternoon that I’d won a years subscription to Spinvox in the raffle, thanks to @whatleydude.
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