Silicon Envy

The early years of this century were marked for me by a thing I called "Silicon Envy". I was sat here in London, reading the exploits of excitable bloggers, mostly on the West Coast, mostly in northern California, just getting things done because they were in the right place. Clearly I was not getting things done because I was in the wrong place.

My life became much happier and I became much more productive when I saw this for what it was, realised that I was in the right place for me, and started to get things moving in my town with my people, regardless of whether anyone else in the world gave a damn.

I guess it started with blogging. When I got my first RSS reader, I subscribed to a few people I knew already, and then I saw them pointing to people they knew and liked, people who were doing smart stuff. And so I subscribed to them. And before I knew it, all of my news was from smart people doing productive stuff. I had no other context to understand what was going on and so I ascribed it to them all being somewhere else (mostly in fancy pants San Francisco or Silicon Valley). And they were all pulling themselves out of the post-dot-com, post-9/11 doldrums by doing what they could with each other.

These people formed the basis of my first experiences on Flickr. Now it wasn't just about reading their reports of what they'd done, but we could see them, together, geeking out about $latest_shiny_thing.

2005 was the year it started changing. I started my own podcast right at the beginning of the year. I went to the first Les Blogs (later Le Web) conference in Paris and conference-y sorts of things started kicking off in London. But it still wasn't quite what I wanted, it was all a bit corporate and media-focused.

When I saw the first barcamp being organised in front of me, in the blogs and Flickr of a handful of friends, I was bursting with FOMO and envy. That was exactly what I wanted to be able to do. Trouble was I didn't really know that many people in London who would get it. I'd been to a couple of blogging meet ups and hung out with the personal knowledge management crowd, but it didn't really feel like a scene yet.

How do you get that sort of thing going? Well baby steps. I didn't know it at that time, but I was taking baby steps towards being the kind of guy who organised events and got people together to do interesting things. First baby steps are go to lots of things, second baby steps are actually talk to people, third baby steps are make some offers of help.

Offering to help was what poured petrol on the flames and accelerated me towards being Mr Tuttle, but there were some ups and downs to come too.