The topic will be further discussion of VRM – ideas, concepts, definitions, explanations etc, – a follow up on the game playing at the January session. Those who didn’t take part, do not fear, we have detailed notes on the results of January Game Playing.

Sign up here.

Doc Searls, the VRM godfather, will be at the Unlocking the see-saw conference, talking about VRM principles as part of the introductory hour before the user panel and the vendor panel discussions.

Mike Nutley, the editor-in-chief of the New Media Age magazine will be joining the ‘vendors’ panel, commenting on how VRM impacts branding & marketing.

And finally, thanks to the generous support of iCrossing we will be able to network drinks following the afternoon sessions as well as refreshment during one of the breaks. This makes a difference to me as VRM Hub normally operates on less than a shoe-string.

For those who missed it, here is the conference programme: Unlocking the see-saw and registration.

Look forward to seeing you there.

The sign up is here, look forward to seeing you there.

Sign up is here.

The meetings are open with a sign-up on the VRM Hub wiki.

We plan to have regular monthly meetings, usually falling on the last Thursday of the month, unless there is a compelling reason to move it.

January meeting is tomorrow evening from 6-9pm in Grape Street Wine Bar in Shaftesbury avenue, private room.

February meeting is currently planned for 28th February, with a good chance of Doc Searls joining us.

For more details and sign up:

The new look is a WordPress theme that will do for now. I know a very cool artist and web designer who I would like to do the blog design. So the look might change at some point.

Finally, many thanks and much gratitude to Alec who has toiled many hours to make the move seamless at my end. This is not a common experience for anyone moving their blog unless they have an ubergeek at hand. There was a bit of hacking and thinking done in order to preserve the existing links to my posts. This way I don’t have to have a blog ‘archive’ for the ‘old’ blog but continue blogging on Media Influencer, just powered by a different blog engine. I do hope that Alec blogs his experience as he came across a few ‘challenges’ and I am sure others would benefit from his solutions to them.

First of all, it’s built in Flash, which is pretty but a bit of an overkill to say the least. But perhaps mainstream users like a graphically designed interface, so be it. Not everybody has to be a fan of gmail style simplicity. I moved on.

Secondly, when you sign up, you get to import all your contacts from your main email client. I use gmail and the import was smooth and effortless. Too effortless in fact, as I was clicking through the steps, there was a line at the bottom of the (visible) screen with a box checked, which only flashed before my eyes, as I was clicking ‘continue’. It said ’send invitation to goowy to your contacts’ or words to that effect. With horror I watched as responses (mostly out of office replies) started piling in into my new shiny inbox. You may say that I should have been more careful about proceeding to the next stage in the set up but you’d be wrong. I was setting up a simple email client, which is something I do all the time, when testing various new applications coming out of the blogosphere.

This is the real killer and the message is – You. Do. NOT. Check. Anything. Intrusive. By. Default. For. The. User!!! I am now incredibly pissed off at goowy for effectively spamming all my contacts. I did send an unhappy email to comments@goowy.com and I know I’ll be watching the fallout from this with growing unease. David appeared on my IM asking about goowy already as he received invitations from two of his contacts. He commiserated while I was fuming, offering the opinion that they don’t deserve to stay in business… And in true blogosphere fashion, he already blogged about it. I second that and may you burn in spam hell, goowy.

And now, what do I do? Send a link to this post to all my contacts? Groan.

Update: Dennis has a warning of his own.

And Ben sums it up in biz terms for them:

Sure, this clever stunt may have (artificially) boosted your sign-ups, I’m sure the VC’s will love that. But it’s created a lot of immediate bad vibe about your product, and that’s before you realise the main service is just a crappy flash app. Considering the way you have gone about all this, what percentage of these signup do you think will ever come back? Very few I would suggest.

Thanks Goowy for showing the world how not to launch a website!

There is much to tell and I hope to do so sooner rather than later.