Archive for 'Events'
Join us – TweetUp at London’s JuJu on July 5
The Geeks will be attending a TweetUp on Sunday, July 5th at London’s JuJu on King’s Road. Half priced tickets end on June 26th, so if you’re in London or know someone who is, please let them know. You can register early here. Sponsors include The Conversation Group and NESTA.org.
TweetUp planned for 5th July in London with The Conversation Group
This photo, taken at the Samovar Tea Lounge in San Francisco, is of JD Lasica and Susan Bratton, two of the Traveling Geeks headed to London this July. We are meeting with Ted Shelton (front) and Chris Thomas (back) of The Conversation Group.
Ted is spearheading a TweetUp for the Traveling Geeks, the Conversation Group and social media Twitterers in the UK.
Mark your calendar and DM @SusanBratton if you’d like to be notified of the time and location for this TweetUp (likely at 5 pm on 5 July 2009).
Traveling Geeks kickoff meeting
Here are two great shots of some of our traveling geeks including JD Lasica, Jeff Saperstein, Robert Scoble, Jim “Sky” Schuyler and myself, Susan Bratton.
In San Francisco the other day we were planning our day and night events, trying to figure out how we can meet as many companies, entrepreneurs and UK companies in the social media, open source, consumer technology and media world as possible in our all too short trip.
TED Talk: How Twitter users shaped Twitter
Click on headline link to visit matthewbuckland.com for full article
Global Blog Buzz for We Blog the World Tour
Ayelet of Blonde 2.0 in Israel writes about the We Blog the World blogging tour in South Africa, as does a well known Kenyan blogger, Stormhoek and Biz Community.
Cradle of Mankind's Grave Lessons
Friday afternoon’s stop on the South African endless bus/plane tour was in the area humbly named “The Cradle of Mankind.” Sterkfontein Caves in Gauteng’s fossilized remains are to paleontologists as Hollywood is to the paparazzi — a seemingly endless supply of somewhat human-looking beings to be examined from every angle.
The caves, are rich in hominid fossils (more than 700) because of a confluence of “lucky” circumstances. “People” and animals either recently or about to be dead were washed or fell into a series of deep holes. Then, limestone leaked into the holes, and fossilized the remains of the day for millennia, according to researcher Dominic Stratford who led our tour through the dark and dusty caves. He believes that the abundance of human and animal bones may come from the tendency of leopards to store their kills in trees that might have hung over the hole.
One of the most famous finds at Sterkfontein is Little Foot, a pre-human whose skeleton was nearly completely (97 percent) found.
Stratford regaled us with an interesting theory of how eating more meat may have helped us to walk erect. According to Stratford, hominids began switching from eating nuts and wild grasses to eating more protein, including other hominids who may have been killed by prey or by each other. This may have also been because of a gene mutation that caused smaller jaws. Stratford says chewing protein such as meat requires smaller jaw muscles that stretch to the base of the skull, so there’s more room for a larger brain. Larger brains helped with developing tools that moved us gradually out of the stone age. So take that granola-lovers, if it weren’t for munching on recently departed cousins, we might still be knuckledraggers!
Anthropology and paleontology were never presented in a way this interesting when I was in school.
3.8Km underground – My experience in the deepest mine in the world
3.8km is a long way whether you look at it vertically, horizontally or any other way you can think of. Now think of going down. Deep down in the pit of the Earth.
TauTona is AngloGold Ashanti’s Mine near Carletonville in Johannesburg. Let me be straight with you here, it’s deep and you don’t really […]
Project Runway
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The passengers unaware of the impending adventure
There’s nothing as adrenaline-inducing as a plane landing in less than optimal conditions. Today our team of bloggers got to enjoy(?) a dicey descent after a thunderstorm caused us to change airports on the fly.
We were headed for Lanseria airport, but the massive black clouds forced a 45 minute game of storm chasers before the pilot diverted to nearby Oliver Tambor airport. The charter plane is open to the front, so we could see the pilots manning the controls while clearly struggling with the elements.
As we approached the lighted runway, our aircraft was continually being pushed about 10 degrees to the right, and the pilot grappled with the wheel, turning left, left, and left again. It reminded me of my meager attempts at Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Every correction was met with an equal force of wind, and my heart started pumping as we got close enough to see the narrow white lines of the runway. Even after the wheels seemed ready to scrape the ground we were still a few degrees off course, but our adept pilot readjusted and got us squared up on the runway only seconds before touchdown.
I couldn’t wait to speak with the captain when deplaning. When asked if this were one of his trickier landings, he said “Most definitely,” with an exasperated sigh. “It was a struggle all the way down.”
We blog the world: US bloggers hit RS of A
The idea was to show some key US bloggers what our country is made of: the good, the bad and the complex. I decided to tag along for the Cape Town leg of the tour, which is an exhaustive/exhausting nine-day trek around the country by plane, bus, helicopter and boat. (See 360 degree pic of […]
Click on headline link to visit matthewbuckland.com for full article
360degree bloggers
Our first proper day of excursions kicked off today with a helicopter tour of Cape Town. What an absolutely stunning city CT is. I wont go in to that too much because this post is purely going to show you all the bloggers on the tour with me and the links to their respective projects […]
