This Much I Knew
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This Much I Knew

Missives from the awkward birth of social media 2008-2009

About the Book

"Pete Ashton represents the gold standard in using a blog as a tool for thinking out loud" Chris Unitt

A collection of blog posts by Pete Ashton from around the time somebody coined the term "social media" and the world went a little crazy while we tried to figure out what, if anything, it all meant.

This book is mostly an excuse to play with Leanpub but it might be of interest to internet historians, fans of blogging and oh my god kill me now so I don't have to think of other potential markets for my textual ideavomit.

Regarding the development of this book, I have a rough plan:

  1. Prepare and upload the blog posts. (done!)
  2. Publish the first draft of the book. (done!)
  3. Tidy up the blog posts, editing bits that don't make sense offline. Remove unecessary links and so on. (working on it...)
  4. Add contextual footnotes.
  5. Write introductions to each section putting the posts into more context.

I plan to write a new book this summer which will effectively be a sequel to this, so you can consider this book a dry run.

About the Author

Pete Ashton
Pete Ashton

Artist, photographer, teacher, writer, other stuff. Everything you might want to know about me can be found at, or linked from, peteashton.com

Table of Contents

  1. Cast of Characters
  2. Introduction
  3. Before ASH-10
  4. Twitter, take four
  5. Fear of a UCG planet and the Hero Journo
  6. Twitter at Festivals
  7. Oh, Max…
  8. In which I try and explain Qik
  9. Co-working – lessons from Philly
  10. Disposable Social Media Tools
  11. Objects in Social Spaces
  12. A Blogging Academy?
  13. No, really, I’m grateful. It’s just…
  14. Five minute guide to blogging
  15. Blogmeet Instant Feedback
  16. May 2008
  17. Telling stories
  18. Lessons from zines
  19. Friday
  20. June 2008
  21. Explaining Metadata with Velcro Covered Balls
  22. Trust is the best tool
  23. Getting the naysayers on side is the answer. How is the question.
  24. July 2008
  25. Advice to a blogging artist
  26. Ambient Feed Reading
  27. August 2008
  28. A lesson in how not to approach bloggers
  29. Disposable Microblogs
  30. Flickr and YouTube, two lessons in community management
  31. Emergent Game - where art meets tech
  32. How many links should a blog post have if a blog post must have links?
  33. Notes on Why Emma Loves Flickr
  34. September 2008
  35. How could Shakespeare get Internet Social?
  36. October 2008
  37. Blog Fear and the Collapse of Context
  38. Questions Please
  39. Blog Action Day happened
  40. Two points about the alleged “death of blogging”
  41. The power of fun
  42. November 2008
  43. Stop seeing BBC online as a threat to your business model
  44. Google Blog Search is broken
  45. Short posts are where it’s at
  46. December 2008
  47. Creating Byproducts
  48. Topics for Public Speaking
  49. Social Media at the Victoria and Albert
  50. January 2009
  51. So what just happened?
  52. Could local blogs save local businesses?
  53. Don’t forget to share your story
  54. February 2009
  55. Collective Weather Mapping
  56. Birmingham an epitome of social media best practice. Crock or gospel?
  57. Data Pub
  58. Help me define Social Media
  59. Talking about Local
  60. March 2009
  61. Hacking the Government
  62. Social Media Strategy course for Arts Organisations
  63. Barcamps are (probably) easy
  64. Surgery for Voluntary Groups this Wednesday
  65. April 2009
  66. Reboot
  67. Birmingham BarCamp News
  68. Obama’s People
  69. May 2009
  70. A quick idea for Twitter use in large orgs
  71. Shift Time in Shrewsbury
  72. June 2009
  73. Blogging as Social Processing
  74. A Local Blogs Blog for Birmingham
  75. Towards a Theory of Yurtification
  76. How to re-tweet properly
  77. Digital Britain needs real Digital Literacy
  78. LocalGovCamp Roundup
  79. Be Vocal and the mashing of local data
  80. Conceiving FAILCamp
  81. July 2009
  82. Do we need to rethink Good-Cheap-Fast?
  83. Physician, heal thyself – Bookmarking with Delicious
  84. Surfing the web with blinkers on
  85. Echoworking
  86. Twittering at the Supersonic Festival
  87. Twitter at Supersonic – some early data
  88. supersonic
  89. How to do a Collective Memory
  90. August 2009
  91. Twitter at Supersonic – Final Report
  92. supersonic / @supersonicfest / supersonic festival
  93. September 2009
  94. Blogging for Artists, a talk
  95. Private in Public
  96. Somewhat amusingly, I fail at fail
  97. Connected doesn’t always mean digitally connected
  98. Sharing the booty
  99. October 2009
  100. Neill Cameron – accidental social media WIN
  101. Comments are not just for comments
  102. Social Media Surgery at Hello Digital
  103. The Arts Council West Midlands DCD fund – some notes
  104. November 2009
  105. Influence is weird
  106. Puppies and the gatekeepers of misery
  107. Death to Social Media
  108. Postscript
  109. Money where my mouth is
  110. So what do I do now?

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