This story from the BBC’s Click has me more bemused than anything else.
From the story:
Graham Steele travelled from Australia to the Web 2.0 Expo in New York to find out about changing trends on the net.
His motivation was getting help to update the site he runs, itineraryshare.com, so it matches the new generation of websites in terms of design, applications and interactivity.
Why would you need to go all the way to New York to find out this information? Sure, Web 2.0 Expo is a pretty slick conference to attend and all the cool kids go, but really…
I can think of a good half-dozen people, not including me, that Graham Steele could have found to give him advice without travelling. Let’s see… Laurel Papworth, Trevor Cook, Lee Hopkins, Bronwen Clune, Michael Specht, Gavin Heaton, James Dellow, Chris Saad, Kate Carruthers… Need I go on?
Notionally, we’re all competitors, for a loose definition of the term “competition”, but we’re all also friends, at the very least professionally and often personally. I’m sure that in the spirit of Twitter Agency, cluetrain and eating our own dog food any of us would be happy to team up for work as well if a client wanted depth and diversity of opinion.
The Australian social media/social network/Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 strategic advice market is getting progressively richer and there are many good people to be found. The epicenter is certainly Sydney, but I think that’s a population issue more than anything else – there are people I can think of in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne as well as me in Canberra.
Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is having you on.
Hat tip to Laurel for tweeting the original story.
