twenty four hours previous i had just finished presenting my new presentation about social media to a small room of around ten people - we had three speakers and i felt the day went extremely well.

it's been quite the blur this week with two presentations, very different back to back with the NTU 3rd year students first and the nottingham business owners after.

the new users going out into the workplace and others looking at ways to communicate their existing businesses in a very managed social media way.

i put a lot of work into these two new presentations and they drained me a lot - the pay off thou is that i can start february with two presentations to do a voiceover with and stick up on the new website when i do the switch over.

this is a good thing. i'm also very keen to get the sponsoring project up, trying to raise an initial £400 to mobilise the .tv domains on the apple platform as a series of different word press applications that allows me the luxury of pushing updates across the whole network.

mildly frustrated that i have hit feb without transport and the ark but these things are sent to test me. at some point i have to sell a certain amount of my soul to the devil to get the funds or find the right people to invest in me to make it happen.

i've even decided about going to southby because of my passion to make this happen and that's well not like me. it would have been my fifth year in southby and it is always fantastic in some trippy way. not this year.

i'd have loved to have gone and taken a lovely micro thirds with a lovely low light lens and just wandered around bar to bar documenting but i have to keep my eyes on the prize.

my daughter turns five in may. five years, i cannot continue to be flippant about her unknown future if i was not here. i'm always aware of my mortality after visiting the town of phil campbell.

which reminds me, i should be working on that website. crap, i'm gonna be busy next week..

at first i thought it was just the structured way our train journey and route seemed effortless as we boared the eurostar and headed through the channel tunnel delivering us into europe.

i then thought it was the welcoming team at the other side having a focused tech crew pulling together the venue and equipment effortlessly, but it was not either - after all we have teams exactly the same in the uk.

maybe then, it was the brown bag of gifts in the hotel room with 3d glasses, chocolate bunny and a card detailing where the venues were for the next few days - nah, not that.. nice touch thou.

ok, i know it has to be the bandwidth then - a venue with 100 mbit screaming fast connectivity enclosed in a 364 room building that has an incredible history attached to it. well, that did start to perk my interest in the building i guess.

wait, i've got it. it was the moment on the tour of the building that segments of the story of the building and how it makes money and builds community and sells a shit ton of amazing beer in the process. well, yeah that was all good too.

but that was not why it left an impression on me so much that i took a part of it home with me. no, it was something more -- something that i needed to reflect on.

so it seems fitting as i'm heading at velocity towards birmingham that i start to think about travel, journeys and presence again. and of course it's in this moment that it hits me.

it left an impression because that structure was built on an openness of the people of ghent to put on a show, to expose the beauty of how they live and what they care about, that they embrace communication, stories and history with passion.

so.

i look back on nottingham and wonder how a city such as it can be twinned with ghent, where are the similarities and what have i learned as an outsider dropping in from a digital community tool provider?

it makes perfect sense why graduates and students leave places like nottingham after they have trained, the lure of the city life is not enough because the future planning of the digital city is restrained.

where as the city of ghent is heading full steam to make their city centre spot a digital hotbed building on existing library people traffic figures in 2015.

the frank and open nature of the management company regarding the venue was refreshing and a massive departure from the closed loop and seemingly stilted approach of the nottingham city council.

we have fibre in ducts around notts, some rented to bt and connectivity to do some amazing things but until the right money finds the right places nottingham is always going to stagnate in the startup culture stakes.

ghent however, well. that's a different story - i see an explosive of creativity, digital culture and historic storytelling as they transition into the digital frontier.

and i'm gonna be there to watch.

quicklink | virtual tenancy | @antenna_uk

I've been selected for the 'evolve' award.  ooooo.

this means that you will receive free membership of Antenna for a year plus you will receive 12 months FREE Virtual Tenancy instead of the original 6 months. Details can be found in the attached PDF. You are also invited to join a monthly Amplify Business Development Workshop for 12 months.

brillant! - to be honest i was wondering how i was going to pay for another year of membership and i know doubt it's not going to be the same awesome price of £25 a year again for this years membership what with inflation, us stock prices and the price of keeping 'wesleys' in business. quite chuffed that antenna did not forget about the 'amplify' project that they worked on at the start of the year before steve went on to pastures new.

i was looking forward to creating a space upstairs in the virtual tenancy area for those days when you need to change location away from fibrecamp, nestled here beneath the lace market house as a walk and a different space brings that about. good times. i know a few other people who are interested in virtual tenancy as well and it comes at a very interesting time in the progress of social media and the space, ideas and execute that will come about naturally over the next six months as the economy takes another bounce.

i'm very glad to have won something and i'm extremely interested in the business development workshops because i'm not really 'business' but have massive potential to do so as long as certain personal checkboxes are complete in my mind. having a virtual address at antenna is great too because it means i can get my car insurance, parcels and other stuff sent 'to the office' - also having access to meeting rooms is handy.

so, on that note, i'll let you know more once all my things are setup and running - it's nice to feel invested in. just wish there was a bit of a cash prize attached to it, boy do i need that at the moment! :)

good morning!

not sure how the image is going to scale but i'll give it a go anyway and swap the image out later if it's all over the place. it's been a crazy week.

if your reading this on the website you will see we are going through some new lightweight changes so that i support mobile devices better. hope you like it.

i'll be improving and rolling this theme out over the coming months for all of the projects and services that i'm working on - one of those meetups is this new friday morning social gather called 'refreshfriday'

the aim of refresh friday is to have a catchup social breakfast with local creatives and talk about their projects and catchup before 9am.

a logo is being worked on as we speak and the website should be up in the coming weeks using this theme style to keep things lightweight.

antenna can be found on beck street in nottingham and currently has a database of well over 1000 creative industry members.

an evening of live music, close up magic, dancers and a DJ. a great chance to let your hair down the night before the conference and meet web industry folks from all over the country. Antenna is an exclusive venue with a great bar. bargain at a fiver on the door to cover the cost of the act - I’d like to say a massive thank you to Jamie Huskisson for sponsoring the event – he’s the man to speak to if you need a Magento shop building!

i managed to quickly catch up with nick - one of the organizers of second wednesday to briefly discuss the evening and the power move of putting on a pre-warm up party before the main new adventures in web design kicked off the next day in the heart of nottingham.

the atmosphere was fantastic (i was pretty tired mind) for the evening and the perfect smattering of different styles of entertainment made the antenna space come alive.  it felt a little bit like a creative hockley 'jamcafe' with my space kind of affair.

i do hope second wednesday will put more of these kind of events on in the near future.