microsoft, munging and on being a mercurial iconoclastic professional geek.

• Home
• About
• General Melchett
• LOLs-n-Stuff
• Photos
• Shared News Items

Find Stuff

Meta

• Register
• Log in
• WordPress

About Me

Nick Hodge is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

-33.831416, 151.222526

MrCell+61.417.212181

Work:

1 Epping Road

North Ryde, NSW 2113

Australia

Stuff

• AU Web Thinkers

  • Cameron Reilly’s G’Day World
  • Des Walsh
  • Duncan Riley
  • Jo White
  • Kate Carruthers
  • Laurel Papworth
  • Mark Pesce
  • Mick Liubinskas
  • Stephen Collins
  • Steve Noble
  • Stilgherrian

• Ego Links

  • basketweaving for the mind
  • Last.fm Music List
  • Live Spaces sand-pit
  • My blip.tv Videos
  • My Youtubes
  • Nick’s Flickr Photos
  • RSS: Nick Hodge: The Complete Feed
  • Slides Shared to the World
  • The Geek Stories; on10.net
  • Twitter
  • Viddler videos

• Friends

  • Mark Szulc
  • Nick Hodge, Excel MVP

• Geek Gods

  • Gary Barber
  • Jed White
  • Lachlan Hardy
  • Myles Eftos
  • Paul Stovell
  • Tatham Oddie
  • Tim Lucas

• Microsoft Peeps

  • Andrew Coates
  • Andrew Parsons
  • Catherine Eibner
  • Frank Arrigo
  • Jeff Alexander
  • Jorke Odolphi
  • Michael Kordahi
  • Nic Fillingham
  • Paul Foster
  • Roger Lawrence
  • Shane Morris

Connecting to Make a Difference

By Nick Hodge | March 21, 2007

It has been three days of abso­lute pleas­ure in Adelaide.

Firstly, a big shout out and major thanks to Mike, Mandy, Jamie and Jemma Sey­fang for their hos­pit­al­ity and record­ing stu­dio (which doubled as my late night work area and sleep area) for three days.  Oh, and happy birth­day Jemma. Get­ting out of the hotel room shenanigans and liv­ing with real people made the dif­fer­ence on this trip.

It also gave Uncle Mike and I to dis­cuss the day’s events in depth, explore ideas and sug­gest dir­ec­tions. I must deeply thank Uncle Mike for his sug­ges­tions on improve­ments to “The Geek Stor­ies”. Hav­ing Australia’s premiere Social Net­work­ing thinker at your beck and call night and day, mak­ing you cups of tea, is a rare exper­i­ence.  The value is inmeasurable.

Secondly, a major thanks to my video sub­jects: Dave “Lifekludger” Wal­lace, Mike “Fang” Sey­fang, Kevin Richard­son, Glenn Butcher and Kingl­sey Fore­man. Unlike last Fri­day, I pur­posely spread the video cap­tur­ing over three days to ensure I was on the ball through all interviews.

Oh, and I rang Robert Scoble after he Twittered he was bored on his way south from Petaluma to his home. That’s Cali­for­nia.  Con­nec­tions and wir­ing brings us together in strange ways.

Con­nec­tions. This social net­work­ing thing is about con­nec­tions. Using them to pro­duce value greater than the sum of the parts. A com­mon theme emer­ging from all my inter­views is that either for life (Lifekludger), learn­ing (Kevin) or enter­tain­ment (Glenn) humans value con­nec­tions. Mak­ing them, and rein­for­cing linkages.

With Munge Brother, Uncle Tim Kleemann, we explored this from a busi­ness per­spect­ive. Tim owns Next­Byte, and ori­gin­ally hired me way back when I was a pimply kid in 1985. To Tim I owe grat­it­ude for the 21+ years in this crazy industry.

These human traits of want­ing con­nec­ted­ness extend to our kids, too. They have strong social net­works that extend into the digital world, and out­side of school in the home and on the pro­ver­bial bus — and the lines between school and home are becom­ing equally as blurred as work and home. Pres­ence via Mes­sen­ger; pub­li­city via MySpace and You­Tube. All around are con­nec­tions. Both vis­ible and invisible.

Uncle Mike is explor­ing some of the learn­ing aspects to these social net­works through his work with education.au; Dave exper­i­ences this every­day in his extraordin­ary life.

Ensur­ing Par­ents and Teach­ers under­stand the envir­on­ment of social net­work­ing in all its forms is the major chal­lenge for tech­no­logy com­pan­ies work­ing in this space: Microsoft, Google or whomever. I think the time is ripe for a major model change in the way edu­cat­ors think about online access, and the skills kids are going to need to sur­vive in a smal­ler, greater con­nec­ted and inform­a­tion rich world.

Return­ing to Immanuel to speak to Kevin, I learnt many things. I did not expect this as an old scholar. One learn­ing was that I owe Noel Volk and Greg Sharp a major thankyou. In my school years there was a con­cious effort to install com­puters into the school and use these as a part of edu­ca­tion. This effort lead me into this industry I now find myself. Money was siphoned off other pro­jects into this some 22 years ago. Like the Angle Park Com­puter Centre, Abefoyle Park pro­ject and oth­ers — the product of these efforts have not gone to waste. So thanks.

Inter­node is a con­nec­tion com­pany; the inter­view with Glenn and Kings­ley will air some­time next week. Aus­tralian gamers know Inter­node as the best gam­ing net­work, and ser­vice, around. You can feel their pas­sion for games; a pas­sion that extends from the MD of Inter­node, Simon Hackett.

I feel that get­ting people’s stor­ies told, and out there for all to see is import­ant. Geek Stor­ies or not, the con­nec­tion poten­tial is huge.

Send in your story, and let’s go make a difference.

Topics: observation, on10.net, personal, technology, thegeekstories | 3 Comments »