This morning, another encounter with David Rowan, UK editor of the Wired magazine I have read avidly since 1995 – in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre.

Rowan gave a futuristic and open-minded pep talk to kick off the Creative & New Media Collaboration event.

His 10 takeaway rules for businesses in the present that also want to be in the future…

1. Expect disruption as the norm (keep evolving. you can’t not watch what the teenagers are doing).
2. Collaborate, don’t go it alone (Heathrow air-traffic-control is working with split-second coordination experts McLaren F1 to make its airport more efficient, so you’ll know exactly when your luggage is coming through and exactly when a place will take off).
3. Think service, not product.
4. Be useful, to engage us (KLM launched KLM Africa Club community site to enable customers to share their own travel tips).
5. Evangelise your brand loyalists.
6. Free works (riffing on his editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s thesis)
7. Don’t think locally, think globally.
8. Be cross-discipline (read widely, follow people from widely differing fields).
9. Think service (see: Zappos.com)
10. Don’t wait too long.

2002 – June

2002 – Aug

2003 – Feb

2003 – Apr

2003 – Jun

2004 – Mar

2005 – Feb

2005 – Feb

2006 – Nov

2006 – Nov

2007 -Jul

2010 – Jan

Better late than never? It’s been nearly three years since my last proper blog post here.

When I first turned robertandrews.co.uk in to an actual weblog in 2002 (about two years before the height of blog hype), it was because I had things to say, analysis to offer, news to share.

When I was freelancing for publishers like Wired News, Journalism.co.uk and E-consultancy in 2007, I was already writing plenty elsewhere, not here. I flipped the site to automagically feed to here the articles I was writing out there.

When I consolidated one of those clients, paidContent, in to my full-time gig, it became clear that all my writing existed just on that one site. As I had built it, robertandrews.co.uk required constant feeding, and I just didn’t have anything to give it – neither original posts that weren’t already being seen by a great audience elsewhere, nor links to aggregate from a variety of off-site sources.

So static information – not rolling, constant blog output – has become more important to me as a personal web destination – a blog, I have concluded, is not a good snapshot of a man.

If you visited this site at all in 2009 or late 2008 (and, I make no bones, there’s no great reason anyone would have done so with any regularity), you will have seen that I embraced static by simply scraping in my Google profile – just a single page that says who I am. Google has done some great work with its profile pages, it lists all your other website profiles and there’s a fantastic algorithm behind the scenes that identifies even the ones you don’t tell it, giving a more complete picture of your online identity by social graph. Plus, that big slab of static text is a great way to tell people who you are right off the bat.

So, for some time, my website has been a one-page Google profile with my WordPress-powered blog firmly in the background.

And yet – what if I ever do feel the urge to write something more… bloggy? Google profiles don’t have that feature. And what if I wanted to do so in more than 140 characters? Twitter can’t do that. So here is the latest incarnation of robertandrews.co.uk…

My Christmas 2009 project was to marry Google Profiles with WordPress. I had already seen how I could scrape over just the single page using Simple HTML Dom – but I needed also to offer additional WordPress functionality – blog posts, additional static pages etc.

So I created a new WordPress theme that deploys Simple HTML Dom, scraping in the relevant parts of my Google profile and replacing the necessary portions with WordPress code. It’s effectively WordPress, wearing a cloak of Google. So, unlike the standard Google profile, my site now includes extra tabs below the title – one for the blog, another including my lifestream (a chronologically-reverse aggregation of feeds from various of my web profiles and activities), and one for testimonials.

Technically, it was a matter of having WordPress pull over the Google profile, then replace elements of it with the necessary WordPress items at the required moments. If either that is gobbledygook to you or you notice this looks a lot like Google, then mission accomplished, I say. As someone who is completely bought in to the Google Apps universe, that clean, consistent look is exactly what I was going for; and there’s no reason you should know or care this is a WordPress-powered site.

One of the things I like about this new site is Google Profile’s list, I mentioned above, of links to one’s other, off-site online profiles; many of mine are there on the right-hand side. I don’t intend to replicate their content here – what has changed in the last two years alone on the web is that, whilst our blogs used to be the hubs for our online outpourings and identities, now so much of our online activity occurs off-site, on services like Twitter and Facebook. So robertandrews.co.uk is for 1) profile and 2) rare blog posts, but 3) if you want to reach me at other places, just click away via the right-hand side.

I’m quite aware that, should Google significantly update its profiles page HTML code, my site, which depends on that code, could break quite easily. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, as a non-coder, I’m proud to have accomplished this – I enjoyed getting my hands dirty again with the PHP language, which I find to be very therapeutic, perhaps because I have plenty of it to learn.

Don’t take this as an intention to start “blogging” and so on – I don’t really do that anymore. But I now have the option to write personal blog posts if I choose (let’s say, I have the urge to write a poem, or need a place to dump a rant about the state of public transport – anything longer than a tweet). Plus, I can now pad out my profile with those extra pages.

So, this post is just to place a flag in the soil of time, to indicate the moment at which I once again overhauled the architecture for the online expression of myself.

• Plaid Cymru loses Llanelli
• Valleys back in Labour hands
• Labour keep hold of Caerphilly
• It’s over

Japan’s meteorological agency chips in to confirm a 7.2 quake and warns of a “potentially destructive” 1-metre tsunami heading for the Philippines.

I’ve found what I think may be amongst the first grassroots/eyewitness accounts of the incident.

Ex-pat Dan in Taipei:

But I was just sitting here in my 12th floor room in the hotel in Taipei when the bed started swaying, the closet door was opening & closing and the drapes were dancing. It lasted about a minute.

MSN user:

I felt the earthquake!
I thought it was just downstairs partying … then I heard it on the news.
So this is the first time I actually felt it. Cool.

Sky added an eyewitness account to the same effect some 15 minutes later.

5 mins: Internet writers in the last 48 hours have also experienced several other earthquakes around the world….

• JTuck, Washington state, US
• Dumfries, Scotland

18 mins: BBC News 24 was still in a scheduled year-in-review programme when AP filed on this. John Sopel’s at the anchor desk now but isn’t mentioning the quake at all in the headlines; they’re not getting worked up yet. Sky’s anchor team has just been interrupted by a scheduled programme on gangland Britain.

22 mins: A new mini wave of bloggers in Taiwan gets to the computer to say “I was there”…

Keith:-

???? 7.2?

Laurie Beth, on her first day at work at a school:-

RUMBLE

for fucking ever. it was strong. the floor and walls and everything shook for what seemed like FOREVER.

then it was quiet. no problem. ok. and we start talking again and then…

RUMBLE much bigger feeling the second time, and longer.

32 mins: Somewhat surprised that news organisations haven’t yet tapped into the eyewitnesses. There’s little indication of damage or injury yet but, if it grows like the 2004 incident, the fact it’s the exact same day would surely give the story an extra something.

I took myself (and myself alone) to see a cracking little Canadian band called Broken Social Scene down at The Point. Actually, “little” isn’t the word – led by Kevin Drew, BSS is a glorious indie collective made up of around 18 musicians.

Trumpet and cornet players, multiple drummers, sparky guitars and Drew tinkling away on some ethereal electro-synth sounds between stints in front of the mic and on guitar (or, all at the same time).

They’re a cracking band. But you wouldn’t know it, because you haven’t heard of them (even one of my favourite podcasts, IndieFeed, played them only last month – though, to be fair to them, they were probably just issuing a reminder).

And that August night in deepest, darkest Cardiff, barely hours after having their tour bus broken into and gear stolen, they played for far too long – Drew, sharing spliff with audience members and the cornet player, whilst playing mid-song, wandering through the crowd that patiently persisted with this relaxed indulgence; it stopped being a show and it was just Broken Social Scene having fun.

But the other revelation of that night was the support band that was playing as I walked in. A similarly eclectic affair – overly stacked with musicians (six?) on keyboards, xylophones, male and female vocals overlapping in some gorgeous indie melee. And fun! My god, they were fun – young and vital and colourfully attired.

You haven’t heard of this band either. Because, like me, you no longer go to Cardiff University (you graduated six years ago). And you’re too old to be a MySpace regular. And you don’t wear jeans so tight that you don’t understand. So you haven’t yet discovered Los Campesinos! Regret that only briefly, because you may do rather soon.

They’re the Lego of good new music. Friends, thrown together – it’s not evident that either one of ‘em is Mozart to his or her particular craft; that’s okay, it’s spiky and beautiful and it works and it’s not too serious (lyrics: “it’s you, it’s me,’an it’s DANCING!”, “one blink for yes, two blinks for no, sweet dreams sweet cheeks we leave alone”, “trying to find the perfect match between pretentious and pop, some crappy artwork that took way, way too long to draw”, “we’re stupid but we’re happy”).

Think of Pavement, but younger. And as Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus once sang: “A voice coach taught me to sing, he couldn’t teach me to love”. Of the instruments noted in their liner notes, one of them is “clapping”, for god’s sake. It brings a smile to my cheeks and I want to kiss them. I want them to read this, and kiss me.

Now you’re talking. The following morning, I messaged Tom from the band on MySpace. He told me he they spent the rest of the evening playing Pavement covers with Drew – his hero – backstage. I don’t know Tom, but I’m so happy for him. Not as happy as he was for him.

Now here’s the rub. Los Campesinos! are a textbook example of how this stuff (this music, art, communications stuff; you know, the culture of everything) works now. As the band told Drowned In Sound last month, the only promo they did with the four-track EP they obviously had so much fun laying down probably in the likes of Cathays community centre was to stick it on MySpace. How’s that for punk?

It’s snowballed. Tens of thousands of MySpace plays; over 15,000 plays by users of Last.fm, me amongst them. The last few months have seen a session on BBC Radio 1′s One Music, another with Bethan and Huw, some glowing articles in the small print of the music press, a slot on MySpace’s best-music podcast, signed to a proper label and a mini-tour ’round England next Spring. Not bad for a bunch of guys that haven’t even graduated yet and had played barely 14 gigs to date. Heck, they’ve even prompted me to spend too long writing this post. And their lecturer has remixed them.

I urge you to check ‘em out. Los Campesinos! are not futuristic, they’re not even the future, they’re the way music happens now.

I don’t offer this up as another Arctic Monkeys case study. Because, unlike the Monkeys, who were always a bit bemused by the whole MySpace-creates-superband thing, Los Campesinos! have humbly admitted the way in which the new (not so new anymore) outlets have complemented their talents to yield pay-off.

I offer this up in part because, if and when Los Campesinos! ever do any more wonderful things than they have so far (and there’s no guarantee of that – today is all about young bands blazing on to the scene and disappearing as quickly), then I want to have it on record that I was there at the start. Thank-you

Following a disagreement between TechCrunch UK publisher Sam Sethi and conference organiser Loïc Lemeur of Six Apart, played out publicly through blog posts and follow-up comments, Michael Arrington, the US-based lead publisher of TechCrunch (a Le Web 3 partner), put TechCrunch UK on hiatus and parted company with Sethi.

Site editor Mike Butcher (also seen this weekend discussing Second Life on BBC News) has jacked it in, too, using an open letter to publicly put across his version of events. The letter has been Dugg and linked to from various places.

Difficult to know exactly what to say in these situations, except hope all concerned can have a good Christmas, which is where my attention is beginning to turn, and move on in the new year.

The wifi was barely there all day, making it quite difficult to file any copy or do any research. Also thin on the ground were bottles of water, or any kind of liquid actually – I’m parched, man; the Grimbergen went down a treat, boys. So we hope both l’internet and l’eau will be flowing more freely tomorrow.

There’s a joke going around – based on a comment overheard during drunken hotel shenanigans last night (though not mine) – that “someone’s going to walk out from that conference a millionaire”. The protagonists don’t know it’s a joke but, to those who have always known the web was about grassroots media production and connecting people, the hubris surrounding the Web 2.0 concept – around which much of the event centres and using which many startups are angling for the limelight – is at least mildly amusing.

I overheard one central European business owner, huddled together for a quickfire meeting with an individual presumed to be an investor, turn even a knock-back for his social networking idea into a “yeah, I’m totally with you on that”.

Technorati CEO Dave Sifry today spoke about some stats on the blogosphere he released a couple of months ago, and made a plea to French bloggers in the crowd to ask their hosts to ping Technorati.

Sifry acknowledges that the service’s stats on French blogging – known to be bigger than anywhere else in Europe – are greatly underrepresented. He didn’t have any stats on that when I asked for Vivre Les Blogs in 2004, if I recall, but the prevalence of the medium has clearly only grown.

So I’m trying to think about what have been the standout trends/developments online this year and how they’re going to bear fruit in the media space next year, and because my brain’s not working – in the best tradition of “my readers know more than I do” – I thought I’d throw it open and turn it into a question.

So what’s it been? YouTube? User-generated content? The migration of ad revenue from tradition sources? What’s going to cause the biggest shockwaves in 2007?

Answers on the back of a stuck-down comments form…