In an article at Wired.com, 'Cafe 2.0: After the Gold Rush,' Ryan Singel talks about the extent to which coffee shops, and in particular San Fran's Ritual Coffee Roasters, are fast becoming the new Garages for start-ups and biz ventures. At Ritual Coffee Roasters, alone, teams from Flickr, Rollyo, Bar Camp, Placecite, HotOrNot, Netflix and others, either used to gather or still gather to get wired on great coffee and plan the next move. Of course not all caffeine induced conversations amount to greatness, but even the greatest hitters in baseball get a hit 3 or 4 times out of ten. It doesn't hurt though to have a place to meet, with like-minded people, who share... stuff. And despite how expensive coffee drinks can be at places like Ritual Roasters or Peets, gathering at these places is cheaper than, say, renting an office space in Boston or the Bay area.
But how does the coffee-shop as office movement, which clearly is happening in places well beyond the hip zip codes, (I mean, there are even a few creative conversations—beyond the relative merits of 'intelligent design'—that take place at coffee shops in Alabama, and when that happens, you know something is going on!) connect with the larger social networking impulse that is connecting the creative the world? Despite signs of a recession, entrepreneurs and independents carry on building businesses around culture and cultural identity. There remains aspiration out there everywhere, with plenty of people still dreaming of cooking up businesses that do something, that mean something, that matter. But how to connect?
Artists, technologists and other creatives already gather and create all the time, just look at the success of places like ActivSpace—office space for artists, musicians, craftspeople, designers, etc. They are out there, gathering, moving around and trying to do stuff, but until recently there has been a missing link, a missing node...
Now it is finally happening—physical nodes (coworking spaces and communities) are rapidly self-forming out there in the network, for us nerds who like connecting with one another around ideas that MBAs find quaint but 'edgy.' 'Edgy'? Fuck you! If I had a dime for every time some bald, frustrated and overweight corporate asshole had said of Google, 'Yeah, it's a great idea, but where's the business?', I would have already bought Stephen Colbert the US Presidency!
The Butcher
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