all over the world

I'm increasingly convinced that what we'll know most about in a year or so is not brands and communications and that, but how to be a global small business. How to do distributed creativity and collaboration, that kind of thing.

The last post I did on this was inspired by Ryan Freitas's little gawker experiment, and this post, and our recent experiments, have been inspired by his splendid talk at Adaptive Path, available from IT conversations.

First thing, we've cut way back on regular email and started sending video to each other. It's dead easy to fire up iSight and email a video and they're just much more rewarding bits of stuff. They contain all the required factual info (or whatever) but also tons of useful rich context. Like how people might be feeling. How enthused they are. What time it is. The stuff you get when you share an office with someone but that you never pick up from text based stuff.

I would love an application that would extract these videos from our mails and build a single archive video with everything in the order it was made - so you get a sort of linear video version of the conversational thread.

I've also been experimenting with Twitter which is rather excellent. It gives you tiny real time glimpses into what people are up to. You can text your updates or do it via the web or IM and the updates come to you via SMS, IM or direct onto your blog. You can see the 'what am I doing' thing over on the left somewhere. At the moment it's only giving me an insight into the life of DanG which is slightly odd because I've never actually met him.

We're all also very excited by scrybe. We've signed up for the beta but not got invites yet. Seems like it's got a lot of stuff we might use.

Comments

[henry lambert]

Russell, you need your own developer to produce your ideas...

I like the fact that Scrybe can be printed and folds perfectly. Neat.

[Matt Jones]

Have you tried http://www.thinkature.com/ yet?

[russell]

ooh. ta. i'm having a play now. looks interesting

[Ryan]

This is marvelous - glad to hear you enjoyed the collaboration talk. I too would kill for an automated way to aggregate the videos we've been sending back and forth from Berlin... time to get cracking on a solution.

Thanks for the links and kind words.