June is traditionally a busy month in our business.   Lots of things happening.  Conferences.  Meetings.  Several of them in Washington D.C. as the temperature goes up, up, up, and the cost of hotel rooms goes down (a little bit).

I was on the road most of June and woke up last Monday, in Washington D.C. with a longing simply to be in my own home doing regular people things (cooking, laundry, talking to my family) rather than media & technology type things.  I knew it had been a long June because the evening before I’d been invited to join some friends at a great, reasonably new restaurant in D.C. and couldn’t even eat the minuscule delicacies that were delivered to us on oddly shaped plates–the foie gras meatballs remained virtually untasted (although we all managed the desserts).  

This whining rant–or ranting whine if you will–is less about poor me having to travel because I am well aware of how lucky I am to have a travel budget–and really more about flitting from place to place without enough time to sit and think about the implications of papers and ideas in one place because it’s time to move on to the next place.  It’s also a little bit about how much wasted effort there is in our field, tremendously talented people consistently trying to reinvent the wheel because they don’t know about other colleagues, conferences, and consortia. 

What I need is a talent my husband has in business.  Whenever Curt has a couple of spare hours he is generally reading business magazines and newspapers (for fun!).  And when in the Private Equity Newsletter he reas about Person A who is doing something interesting and in Business 2.O about Person B who is doing something equally as interesting and perhaps in a related field, he writes notes to Person A and Person B telling them about one another.  My husband isn’t after anything, he just likes connect people.  ME?  I have stacks and stacks of business cards from interesting people but because I don’t immediately sit down and write notes on them, they end up in little piles on my desk awaiting divine intervention (that’s the only thing that will help at this point).

 I was hoping if I started writing there might be a point to this blog.  Turns out there isn’t.  Or maybe there is–what we don’t need is another conference to hook us all up to the conferences we ought to be attending. We all got excited about unconferences a few years ago (http://www.unconference.net/). But unconferences interfere with the whole “let’s meet in the bar after sessions” scenario that is so important for greasing the skids in our world. 

Anyhoo, following some unconference links I ran across an interesting reference to an organization called CRUMB (Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss) in Charlotte Frost’s blog (http://blog.furtherfield.org/?q=node/121).  I’m sure many of you already know about CRUMB, but just in case, here’s a link to their website and mission http://www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb/phase3/main_frame.html.  Somebody out there you may know really needs to know abut Charlotte and CRUMB.  I can’t hook them up today because I’m going to get fired if I don’t clean up the piles of business cards (yes, little square paper things) on my desk.   Can you do it for me?