What is eightbar? As the About page for this blog states:
We’re a group of techie/creative people working in and around IBM’s Hursley Park Lab in the UK. We have regular technical community meetings, well more like a cup of tea and a chat really, about all kinds of cool stuff.
That’s all still true. That’s who we are. Over the past four years this blog has featured lots of cool things. It started with an small group of folks into emerging tech talking about life at Hursley (who remembers Roo’s post about the dome of cups, in his pre-metaverse days?!). It continued to grow to cover virtual worlds topics as we began to explore those spaces. eightbar became a bit of a tribe and expanded to include many others who were into interesting technology. Increasingly we’re seeing the technologies that we talked about in the early days of this blog hit the mainstream – take 3D printing and augmented reality as just two examples.
eightbar is more than just a group of people. It’s a mindset, a grassroots culture. If you asked me to sum it up, I’d use phrases like “the frontier spirit”, “bleeding edge”, and “Web 2.0 is Web Do” (with a very definite nod in the direction of epredator for the last one!).
We’ll be including more folks from the lab as authors and guests here over the coming months – eightbar has always been a kind of “shop window to the world” for the things we are up to. The kinds of people you’ll find writing and contributing here are also likely to be found out and about at unconferences around Southampton, London, or other places. There may be a few changes to the look and feel as well as to the content, but the spirit is absolutely going to remain the same. Oh, and by the way, check out the links in the sidebar – you’ll find that many of the contributors have great content out on their own sites, too.
Why is this post entitled Tribe 2.0? Simple: fresh thinking and fresh ideas FTW! 🙂
