Last Friday Steve Clayton organised the first Friends of Blue Monster coffee morning at the Caffé Nero on Jermyn Street and Piccadilly in London.  Steve is the CTO for Microsoft Partners in the UK.  If you don’t know the Blue Monster, it’s a viral marketing campaign which even has it’s own Wikipedia entry.  Steve was handing out Blue Monster stickers, and Hugh Macleod, the cartoon’s author and campaign’s co-creator, was there too.  I met a very smart group of people discussing a whole range of topics from social networking, web 2.0 to the next big thing in technology. 

Philip Greenwood and Jason Bates of Beaufortes were there, so some of the conversation was about project leadership, optimum team size and why 76% of projects fail.  I’ve hooked them up with my friends at AccountingWEB.  They were dropping in on their way to creating some material for an event they are running - the material being filming elevator pitches in elevators!  I met self appointed “Social Media Tart” Lloyd Davis - only the evening before I’d joined his Social Media Café group on Facebook (because 13 of my FB friends had done the same!) and so it was quite a coincidence to meet him so quickly in person, or should I say “in meatspace”?  Jas Dhaliwal was there, a web 2.0 blogger telling us about research he is doing for his masters degree on small businesses using social networking.  Bruce Lynn, Microsoft’s Server Business Group Director came along, as did Richard Hare, Ant Clay, Paul Walsh and some others I didn’t get to meet properly at the other end of the tables. 

We covered a whole range of topics from social networking and companies banning Facebook, to driving down the Grand Canyon.  One interesting conversation triggered by Bruce centred around how calendar systems like Outlook should link to the geography of where you are on a given day.  We spend so much time online, the technology should be helping us to meet our friends and contacts face to face e.g. I’m going to Glasgow today, are any of my friends here or at a meeting nearby?  At one stage we were talking about where technology should be heading next, and I threw in something suggested to me by JP Rangaswami, which is that with the mass of data we can now call upon, visualisation techniques to help us edit and make sense of it all are going to be really important.

The UK, and particularly London, has a thriving community of industry experts and technology evangelists who are prepared to meet and share their ideas.  I’d start watching the Facebook group and recommend you get to the next one of these.