Camping with 400 or so web geeks in tents, that’s how I spent my weekend. This was the second edition of Sweden Social Web Camp (SSWC), and it was much as I expected. Talented people, smart people, dreaming people, entrepreneurial people, people who talk more than they have to say, and people who talk too little. At SSWC, it’s important to know what to listen for.
I’ve been known to criticize the advertising business for being isolated and conservative. I still think that this is true, but it’s actually quite true of this clique as well. The community has been called an echo chamber because there is so much retweeting and reblogging that originality suffers. Why, for instance, didn’t we see almost any advertising people at this years event? Isn’t the social web relevant for the advertising industry? Is the advertising business not working to get this area of communication dialed? Hell yes they (we) are. Only, it seems to happen in parallel with “the social web community” rather than in concert. This is wasteful. For this coming year, I would like to call on everybody to really try to mix things up and hook up with “the other guys and gals”. Trust me, if we could get this to work it would be the mash up of the year.
Still, things on the island were not entirely unoriginal. One of the definite top original stories of this year was that of Morris Packer and his “Morris Motorcycles” project. It’s just an amazing story of a crowdsourced electrical motorcycle racing team and electrical motorcycle brand. We’ve only seen the beginning of this one, mark my words. It’s one of those stories that I just fell in love with from the moment I heard it, and I really can’t understand how I’ve managed to miss it before (I guess I’m just as isolated as anybody mentioned above). Morris is also an amazing public speaker, so book him if you get the chance.
Coming back to reality, I felt a mix of frustration and inspiration. Frustration that we have not come further, and inspiration that there are some extraordinary individuals out there like Morris or “The Dogvibes Dudes” (Sebastian Wallin & Co). True wizards.
This is just the explosive frustration-inspiration-mix of emotions I felt that time in the hospital bed and that I know will lead to good things. It gets me to do stuff and I guess that in some sense, this is exactly why I go to these things in the first place, to re-charge.
Plus, of course, to get out in the middle of the night with Crazy Dan to create flashlight art.
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