Just a brief note: I’ll be cross-posting some posts to Glider Gun, which is a brand-new blog written by the dazzling cast of Future Platforms. The blog launched yesterday. We’re named after a pattern on Conway’s Game of Life: Gosper’s Glider Gun (see a longer explanation here).

Go and check it out and subscribe to the RSS feed!

It’s coming up to a year since I started writing this blog, and it’s gone through a new design for nearly every month! But that’s how I want to keep it: amorphous, and a sandbox for design-testing. Expect it to change further.
I’ve decided to drop the title “Design Idea”. As I predicted, it’s started to irritate me. So I’m calling it simply Rebecca Cottrell’s blog, which it is – with the tagline, “Design, Culture, Technology” (which is all I’ll ever really write about – besides, could my choice of words be more encompassing?).

It will remain focused on design, but I’m relaxing slightly with what I publish – it’s still not really a “personal blog”, and I intend to keep “personal-personal stuff” off it.

How I’m using social media has changed a lot in the last six months. I’m using Facebook less and less: why this is, I’m not sure. Possibly it’s the influence of friends: most use Twitter. Twitter, especially, is about right now: Facebook can’t keep up. Plus it’s closed, and therefore self-limiting.

It’s also a choice. I love meeting new people naturally via Twitter, and I was an edge-case in using Facebook to meet people who interested me, or to meet people like me who shared my ideas. Facebook’s not really for that. Plus there’s unfortunate innuendo attached to the “poke” feature, which the Twitter “follow” feature does not have. Apart from Twitter, I’m also using Flickr, Dopplr, and LinkedIn increasingly. Facebook’s still useful – but I find I use it mainly as an address book.

Oh yes, and my flatmate, Alex, and I, are looking for a lovely flat in central Brighton with two spacious double rooms, to move into before the end of October. Do get in touch!

Some personal milestones since moving to Brighton, in no particular order:

1. I live in Brighton.
Very fast and spontaneous decision. Zero regrets. It wasn’t easy, but I made it work: moving to a new city, jobless, and without ties or contacts, is something I thoroughly recommend.

2. Started, and actually maintained, this blog.
Scary, for lots of reasons. I’m Googleable. I’m making my thoughts tangible. Blogging has helped me to understand my job better, and it’s helped me to understand the whole industry better. Thinking, understanding, writing, sharing are all good things. I would encourage every single person to have a blog, if you can read, write, and have a brain. Just make a Wordpress blog and start writing about something that interests you. While I’m at it, I’d encourage you to use Twitter as well. Life is fleeting. Publish!!

3. Got a job doing something I love and am genuinely interested in.
Really glad I’m no longer in the shoes I was, post-graduating: flung out into the real world clutching a bit of paper. I was lucky to fall on my feet and figure things out.

4. Met some great people.
This isn’t really an ‘accomplishment’, but luck, and a side-effect of living here. Brighton is teeming with quite a number of smart, talented, inspired, inspiring, passionate people. It’s helped me to understand how important it is not to be an island, but to be part of a community. Islands don’t develop, they just get smaller. Great people help you grow.

5. Attended a BarCamp and actually did public speaking.
Kind of a big thing, for a girl who contemplated breaking her own leg to get out of it at school.

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Some future goals:

1. Write more and write better.
But at the same time, relax about writing: I think I automatically slip into a formal essay style, which actually constrains directions I want to go.

2. Do more public speaking (BarCamps)
And become more confident about it. My first BarCamp was pretty much baptism by fire, as James Aylett put it: my audience included someone involved with BarCamp’s founding, and several other muses.

The best way to think about BarCamp is giving back: sharing what you know, in exchange for learning more about what other people know.

Ah yes, and not entirely unrelated to the rest of this post: I’m going to SXSW Interactive (March 13–19th) in Austin in 2009, and can’t wait to catch up with the great people I met at dConstruct and at Nokia Open Lab.

A friend told me recently that she wished she had the same motivation to write a blog as I appear to have. I replied that it’s not the fact I’m blogging that motivates me… it’s what I’m interested in that I want to write about.

I don’t think much about blogging. Writing is not the point: while I love writing, my blog is just a side-effect, or a kind of “exhaust”, of life and everything I practice.

Exhaust is really too negative a term – there’s a connotation with pollution – for the hopefully positive, constructive, and interesting things I want to share. The purpose behind this blog is to keep a record, to explore thoughts related to what I do, and to put these ideas out for other people.

Why keep a record
It’s hitting me recently how easy it is to forget stuff. I found a stack of revision notes from my final year of university: very detailed notes, complete with dates, names, timelines – most of which I’ve forgotten. I can’t recall them in detail. I enjoyed the course – and did well in the tests – but where’s the knowledge now? It all seems a bit vague.

Details seem to very quickly fall out of conscious memory. Fortunately, we have computers to remember for us. Without infantilizing us (though some think so), we can store and share documents, keep a written record, and share data about our lives so it’s not entirely lost in memory. Twitter’s quite good for keeping a record. Flickr is good for keeping a record of photos. I value my blog, not least because its presence recently took me to Helsinki.

What I value most, actually, is my LiveJournal which I’ve kept since around 2003, which is a kind of private, online diary. It’s really interesting to look back and see patterns and developments in things that I write and record. Again, I’m shocked at how much I forget, so I’m placing more value on writing things down, recording things, taking photographs.

Apart from organizing and collecting data – which Flickr does really well – I want to analyse and synthesise, which blogging allows. I know that everything I experience is somewhere in my head, but really thinking about it, and analysing it, makes it more useful to me because I think it through more carefully and make new connections.

Blogging makes experiences more useful to others: by publishing in public, it’s at least accessible for other human beings to peruse – and they can choose whether to J-key-toss it, read it, or share it.

My own personal mid-year resolution is to do this more often: record things and ideas I like, take more photographs, analyse more (and better), update my blog more often.