Meghan Asha on tech­nol­ogy & the Trav­el­ing Geeks from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

I’m back from my trip to Lon­don and Cam­bridge with the Trav­el­ing Geeks — I was the chief orga­nizer of this sec­ond annual event — and I’m still going through with­drawal pains after all the amaz­ing encoun­ters we had. 

One of the peo­ple I most enjoyed spend­ing time with was the amaz­ing Meghan Asha, founder of NonSociety.com, whom I inter­viewed last fall at a very loud TechCrunch 50. If there’s not a Meghan Asha fan club out there, I just may form one. 

On Sat­ur­day after­noon, at the con­clu­sion of the trip, I chat­ted with Meghan for 8 min­utes as she sat on a lion statue out­side the Fitzwilliam Museum. Top­ics included tech­nol­ogy and women, pri­vacy issues and high­lights of the Geeks’ trip. 

Watch the video in Flash on Vimeo (embed­ded above)
Watch the video in H.264 Quick­Time on Our­me­dia
Down­load the video at Archive.org

Three of the Seed­camp win­ners we met with six days ago today res­onated for both Meghan and me: Huddle.net, Zemanta and Skim­links. I’ll write about them in more detail tomorrow. 

I’m going to bor­row an idea by fel­low Geek Tom Forem­ski and blog about the trip a week after each event. On July 5 we had a Meet the Geeks Tweetup at JuJu in London’s Chelsea dis­trict; kudos to Ted Shel­ton of the Con­ver­sa­tion Group for orga­niz­ing the event and a hat tip to all our spon­sors, espe­cially Intel for donat­ing a Net­book and MID as raf­fle prizes. Soon I’ll post two Flip video inter­views I did at the Tweetup, with Ana­tolie Papas of Sym­bian and Kate Ark­less Gray of the BBC’s Save Our Sounds.

Reboot Britain

Last Mon­day about 800 peo­ple descended on the first Reboot Britain con­fer­ence orga­nized by Jess Tyrell and Steve Moore and under­writ­ten by NESTA. (You can fol­low the rich tweet trail at #rebootbri­tain.) I gave a talk about social media and cit­i­zen media, and Jeff Saper­stein, Craig New­mark, Meghan Asha and Sarah Lacy appeared on panels. 

Howard Rhein­gold gave the clos­ing keynote — we’ll post a video when it’s ready. For now, here are a few tid­bits from Howard’s talk about essen­tial 21st cen­tury literacies:

• He defined social cap­i­tal as “know­ing how to get things done with­out going through offi­cial channels.” 

• Ernest Hem­ing­way called it a crap meter or crap detec­tor, but we need it now more than ever — we all need to dis­tin­guish between cred­i­ble and untrust­wor­thy sources of infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net. He fears we may drown in the noise unless we have crit­i­cal mass of peo­ple who have inter­nal­ized some of this crap detection.

• Howard smartly tells his stu­dents to look at RSS read­ers and Twit­ter as a river to drink from, not an ocean to injest. “It’s not a queue. It’s a flow. Sam­ple the flow. Don’t go back to read every RSS feed or Twit­ter tweet.”

• We need to put sen­sa­tional media reports in per­spec­tive. In a pop­u­la­tion of 1 mil­lion users, 50,000 are likely to be molested by a par­ent, neigh­bor or rel­a­tive — and only 6 by a stranger. The hys­te­ria about online preda­tors is BS.

• More Howard: “There is no back row in a cir­cle. When I sat down in the cir­cle [when teach­ing his classes at Cal and Stan­ford], it had a huge effect” on his students.

I also con­ducted a video inter­view with Howard on Sat­ur­day and will post that soon.

BT Tower

Last Mon­day night the Geeks were feted to an amaz­ing din­ner by JP Ragaswami, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of BT Design for BT Group, and the BT exec­u­tive team at the BT Tower, 34 floors above down­town Lon­don. Here are some pho­tos from the evening that I shot:

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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