I’m a middle aged, middle class, white, educated guy. So the worst offences I tend to experience on Twitter is their advertising algorithm occasionally getting things a little bit wrong and showing me something I’m not interested in a few too many times.

I do run a few twitter accounts and have noticed — rather unsurprisingly — that the larger the following you have, the more people tend to invade your space asking you to retweet stuff or ask questions etc.

One such account is @kunstart, from where I tweet info about art exhibitions in Belgium.

The other day I had a lovely experience that I wish happened to a lot more people on this very open, but rather fragile medium of Twitter.

Someone interrupted me (that’s what Twitter is after all, a great big interruption machine), but they actually said “Excuse me”. It totally bowled me over. This is of course how we would act if we approached a stranger on the street and asked them a question.

Dale Davies on Twitter

@kunstart Excuse me, do you recognise this gallery? I'm trying to find the name: https://t.co/PBS9SdtW1i

Of course in the early days, Twitter started out as a great leveller, stripping away layers of hierarchy, giving access to people most of us would never be able to reach. It still achieves that, but there are so many more of us on Twitter now that it has lost some of the original feeling.

I’m not suggesting that we all waste 10% of our precious 140 characters on introductions, formalities and excuses whenever we connect with a stranger on Twitter. It’s a fast moving, open place where anyone can have their say. But the occasional injection of politeness into a Tweet goes a long way to reminding people that there’s another human on the opposite end of the tweet.

But more importantly, we shouldn’t just idly stand by when we see appauling behaviour and abuse on and off line. They’re our social networks and most of us are decent people. Let’s not offer a few bigots the opportunity to thrive.

P.S. In case you’re wondering, I didn’t know the answer to the question. If you do, please let @nuedd know.

Online Politeness — A Glimmer of Hope was originally published in Did You Mean? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So this week is global Coworking Week 2014 and I’m spending my day back at my coworking alma mater, Betacowork.

These days, I’m not to be found there so much as I spend most of my coworking time at The Mug, but I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at some of the coworking spaces I have experienced over the past 3 years. I’ve enjoyed them all, but usually in different ways as they offer something different for everyone.

I’m based in Brussels, but spend a fair bit of my time in New York and occasionally, London so I’ll cover those 3 cities.

Betacowork my Belle

As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, my first coworking space was Betacowork. It was the first coworking space in Brussels to really get traction and this in large part was due to the personality and drive of the founder, Ramon Suarez and the connection with the BetaGroup community of tech entrepreneurs.

I spent nearly 2 years there, on and off, and really came to understand what coworking is. Prior to coworking, I would A) spend a lot of time working alone B) compensate for this by spend a lot of time at professional events. Once I was installed at Betacowork, I stopped spending/wasting so much time at events. There was no need. My peer group and potential customers were around me and then the events started coming to me! Betacowork and the ICAB building in which it is housed quickly became the hub for tech startup events.

A crucial factor of coworking is the kitchen and food. You can’t just spend all your time making connections, you have to work some of the time :-) . Having others around you can have a great effect on your productivity, but when it comes to lunch time, this is where the best connections are made. People around you get to hear about the work you do, see and hear your passion for different subjects and the business usually follows.

Coparting is Such Sweet Sorrow

[Update: I’ve been back at BetaCowork since 2016]

So if it’s that great why did I leave? Well I’m no longer a freelancer and I feel that coworking doesn’t work so well for people in growing companies. It also doesn’t scale financially for a growing company. If you are a small, distributed company coworking is a great solution, but I see the real value of coworking as the building of connections. It’s a kind of passive networking. Companies need this of course, but they do it as a defined activity, it’s called marketing and sales. However, freelancers are often bad at promoting themselves until the point where they need more work. Being present at a coworking space like Betacowork, even for 1 day per week, gives you that continual exposure to people who need your services and to your peers with whom you can exchange knowledge.

I left to work in a startup where we needed space to grow and the ability to put stuff on the walls!

I’m now with a different startup called Greenamity and we have adopted a new coworking space, The Mug, while we figure out how to grow. It’s cosy, like someone’s living room, and we chose it because it is very close to where the 3 partners live, flexible and cost-effective. It’s a quiet space, well suited to writers and journalists due to its proximity to Schuman, but due to its size, you don’t have the same flow of people that you get in bigger coworking spaces.

When we were figuring out where we would work, we looked at a number of different places. We needed to stay flexible for the Summer so coworking made sense. One place that we tried and struck us was TransformaBXL. They are aimed at social enterprises, so it fitted Greenamity’s profile well and the park in which the building is situated is gorgeous. It would have been quite a Summer there, but in the end, it was just too far for all of the team. It’s close to Boisfort [Update, they are now in Evere] , so if that’s your neighbourhood then it’s the perfect spot. They even have a microbrewery setting up camp there.

There are many coworking spaces in Brussels now, some not-so-coworking and community oriented, some more like a shared office. My advice if you are looking for one is to try a few out. They should all offer a trial day for you to test it out.

Getting Out of Brussels

Further from home I’ve spent a bit of time coworking in Berlin, but the places I went were very like café culture, but that is not viable in the long term as it’s uncomfortable, lacks power points and you spend a lot of money on food and drink that you don’t need.

Across the Atlantic, when in New York, I head straight for New Work City ( NWC ). It’s one of the oldest coworking spaces out there and the real asset for me is the people. It’s a great community and when you’re new in town, that’s just what you need. Perhaps spending time cooking and getting to know each other over food is more of a Belgian thing than a New York thing, but NWC has its equivalent. They have their own beers on tap and it serves the same purpose as the BetaCooks of Betacowork though usually at the end of the day rather than the middle of the day.

Coworking is a community and I’ve even spent time with Ramon from Betacowork at NWC where he launched his Coworking Handbook.

Back to Blighty

Finally, back in Europe and my place of birth, the UK, the final experience I wanted to relay to you is the Google Campus in London. It has a lot going for it and I highly recommend it if you are passing through London, or even going to London for a few days to inject some energy into your business.

The benefits of this place is :

• it’s free
• has great wi-fi
• has a great café
• but most of all, it is really buzzing. It’s full of energy for you and your laptop.

It’s a great place to observe startups and see what trends are emerging. It’s a great testimony to what people will achieve if you just give them somewhere to sit, some electricity and good wi-fi. Also one thing that struck me was that it feels like half of the conversations there are going on in French. Which is strange coming from Brussels where half of the conversations are going on in English.

So What’s the Conclusion?

Well they say you never forget your first love. And if you’re looking for a coworking space that has a great community and is an ideal fit for growing your freelancing career or creating an early stage startup then I don’t think you can beat Betacowork.

But seriously, try them all and see what suits you best.

Need more coworking? Read, The Magic of Coworking

A Tale Of Two Coworking Spaces was originally published in Did You Mean? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yes, creating value is not difficult. Most founders seem to get it now. What matters is for whom you are creating that value. Creating value for others is relatively easy. Find a problem, fix it, convince people you have the solution. However, capturing some of that value for your startup is a lot more difficult.

If you have a bit of time and money to burn through, then value creation will come over time. You just always have to have it as your goal. The problem is, there’s so much focus on this. You can’t ignore it, it’s definitely a “must-have”. But creating something valuable without looking at how you sustain yourself, your team and grow the company is dangerous. And it’s easy to do, because there are lots of positive feedback mechanisms to tell you that you’re on the right road. They’re great, they’re what you need to keep going, but they’re just the first step in ensuring you have a successful company.

Sound like you? Congratulations. You’ve created something of value. Now make sure you can see how you’ll extract enough value for the company or you won’t be around very long. And that’s a pity, you’re product would probably be missed.

Creating Value Is Not So Difficult was originally published in Did You Mean? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Trying to do too much at once is very common in business model design and as your model evolves, you have to wield your editor’s knife carefully and precisely, surgically removing all hints of confusion.

In business models, I think of our code smells and darlings as artefacts. They remain like echoes of a former iteration, hanging around after a pivot. If you review your business model regularly you’ll spot them. They interrupt the flow of a business process or a customer’s understanding of your offer. Take note whenever someone is listening to your story and then raises and eyebrow or frowns in puzzlement. For you, the business owner, that should feel like a bump in the road, something that clearly needs to be fixed.

Take time out, stop and think

Time for reflection is so important. Unfortunately it’s a scarce resource in many startups, but it shouldn’t be. After all, it’s free.

If you don’t take time to reflect on your new business model changes you’ll suffer the negative effects of iteration. You’ll just keep adding more and more stuff like layers of paint on an old door.

So take some time out, sit back and think, sit back and don’t think. However you do it don’t be afraid to remove things and simplify your business model. You’re probably doing way too much already. Bury your artefacts, not your startup.

Bury Your Business Model Artefacts was originally published in Did You Mean? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So I went looking for an alternative source. The article that had brought my attention to the story, referenced De Tijd, a Flemish language Belgian newspaper. I don’t read Flemish, so I usually use Google Translate and I figured that, although many ( probably the majority ) of my followers don’t speak Flemish, it’d be no big hardship for them to put the article through Google Translate too.

But before tweeting it I copied a snippet of text from the article to put in Google Translate, just to make sure I was going to share the right thing ( and drive people to their advertising laden site for free ).

I was surprised to see some text had been added to the couple of lines I copied. This is what it said.

Kwaliteitsjournalistiek vergt veel investeringen.

Als u een artikel wil delen, gebruik daarom onderstaande link in plaats van de tekst te knippen/kleven.

Meer informatie over auteursrechten of intellectuele eigendom vindt u in onze Algemene Voorwaarden. http://help.tijd.be/?op=detail&articleId=8916071&nodeId=3474

Wie bijkomende rechten wil kopen voor collectief of commercieel gebruik, kan terecht bij Reprocopy.

http://www.reprocopy.be Hierbij vindt u de link die u makkelijk met anderen kan delen: http://www.tijd.be/r/t/1/id/9391255.

My very bad and rather loose English translation of this is …

Quality journalism requires a lot of investment.

If you want to share this article, use the link below instead of the text you have copy and pasted.

More information about copyright or intellectual property can be found in our Terms and Conditions. http://help.tijd.be/?op=detail&articleId=8916071&nodeId=3474

To buy additional rights for collective or commercial use, contact Reprocopy. http://www.reprocopy.be/

Please find the link that you can easily share with others: http://www.tijd.be/r/t/1/id/9391255.

You get the gist.

I’m not saying the newspaper shouldn’t include this copyright text, but it’s indicative of their mentality that everyone is out to steal their work. It largely ignores the role their readers play in spreading their content and amplifying their message. I can only imagine the conversation that went on between the execs and the web team to get that feature implemented!

Shhhhh. Don’t tell the execs about view source, they’ll either insist everything is published as a JPEG or take their newspaper offline.

Is this now common place? It’s the first time I’ve seen it used and I do a lot of copy paste into Google Translate.

Newspaper Says “Please” To Prevent Copying was originally published in Did You Mean? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For me, social media has been social in the offline sense. Whether or not social media made us more or less social was big debate back in 2008 when Twitter was still in its infancy. Advocates defended it for its ability to be participative and accessible.

If you’re still cynical or just need an occasional reminder of its awesomeness just check out this amazing conversation that developed around Hyperloop the other day between Elon Musk, John Gardi (?) and numerous others who felt able to chip in. Needless to say, there’s no TL;DR here. Take some time and enjoy.

Yes, I do know IRC exists and these forms of communication existed before Twitter, but they didn’t really take off in quite the same way.

Social Media Is was originally published in Did You Mean? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If a never ending stream of ideas aren’t the thing that keeps you awake at night, but you’d still like to have a crack at creating your own business then how do you go about finding a problem to solve?

Listen don’t think

The answer as always, is listen. Or at least, read, in an empathetic way.

Start out in online fora.

You’ll find fora littered with , “Where can I find?”, “How do I create?” type questions. Stack Exchange is great to the technical minds amongst you but they do cover diverse topics such as cooking, homebrewing, German language usage and Lego. Here’s the full list, but any well trafficked forum will do.

Fora can be pedantic, petty little places where a new member — often someone who has a problem and thought they’d ask what they perceived to be a relevant group — is often shot down in flames for asking a question that has already been answered or for being off topic. But they’re a gold mine for starting to understand customer pain.

Sometimes you just don’t realise what you do know and what other people don’t know and cannot / do not want to figure out for themselves. Give yourself some credit. That might just key to unlocking your business idea.

Next of course, you have to get up, step away from the keyboard and seek out these people in the offline world rather than just being a passive observer.

Looking for Problems was originally published in Did You Mean? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a old ( 2010, ha! ) presentation by, Harry Brignull, but still incredibly relevant today.

Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People (Presented at UX Brighton 2010) from Harry Brignull

Dark Patterns on the Rise was originally published in Did You Mean? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Regarding SNOBOL: In recent years its use has faded as newer languages such as AWK and Perl have made string manipulation by means of regular expressions fashionable.

Yeah, you really have to watch out for those PERL hipsters and their shiny new regex don’t ya.

Programming Fads was originally published in Did You Mean? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Perfect Customer Segment was originally published in Did You Mean? on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.