About

Who is ‘Cas’?
I am a blogger who lives in the sunny south of the UK. I graduated with an MSc in the slightly esoteric field of Archaeological Computing in 2006. It was at uni that I fell down the rabbit hole and was seduced by the lure of the World Wide Web, wikis, and how online self publication could be used to aid in the dissemination of ideas and creation of mediated identities.

Since finishing the MSc, I have been leading something of a double life. By day I help the disadvantaged of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight find training and employment. At all other times I spend far too much time at my computer screen, sprawling across the net, writing for my website Bright Meadow, playing with any emerging web technologies I can lay my hands on, and generally immersing myself in social networking spaces.

I am fascinated still by how the internet and mediated spaces can connect people and facilitate conversations. An active lurker on more mailing groups, wikis, blogs and forums than you could shake a moderately sized stick at, I am always on the lookout for new people to talk to. I (not so) secretly cherish the dream that somehow all this experience can be parlayed into a career in publishing.

Bright Meadow is a proud member of the 9rules network of blogs. Not only is this one of the best places to go for kick-ass content on every topic under the sun you can dream off, it also means that if you upset me, on top of the army of penguins at my disposal, I also have a moderately sized strike-force of some of the best bloggers in existence. Just saying.

A distributed life:

• Bright Meadow - main website where the fun has been happening for the past six years or so
• Flickr - pictures
• Twitter - short thoughts throughout the day
• Facebook
• Chawlk - community fun
• del.icio.us - links from around the web
• Antiquist - archaeological thinking and community
• Tumbleweeds on Tumblr - tumblog that aggregates bit and pieces

What is Bright Meadow?
Bright Meadow is the focus for a rambling chat among friends, both new and old, about life and all the multifarious joys and tribulations it brings, sites, blogs, and other tid-bits gleaned from daily trawls of the Internet. Throughout it all, I hope to aim for tone that is up-beat, self deprecating, gleefully irreverent, and blonde in a left-handed kind of way, with a healthy dollup of British sarcasm. If on occasion I make even one person stop, think, and look at something differently, then I am happy. If I’ve made people laugh, well, that is even better.

More importantly, why Bright Meadow Take 2?
Why, you ask yourself, when you have a blog on your own domain, do you also have a wordpress.com blog? I started it because I needed Akismet and the only way (at the time) to get the API key required was to sign up for a wordpress.com blog.

I made the decision to keep this blog for two reasons -
1) I’ve grown very attached to the “Bright Meadow” brand. It’s mine and I don’t want anyone else using it.
2) I am currently on a really crappy host but the whole shifting servers is a scary prospect I am putting off as long as possible. Plus I paid for the year damn-it, crap service or no! This will be the place you can find me when my server goes to hell in a handcart (as it does every now and again).

Why blog in the first place?
First, read these posts.

Now -

Why not? A couple of reasons do spring to mind though. I am keeping my finger in the pie of research into the field of social computing, and it would seem a little odd if I didn’t have a blog. Also, for someone who likes to write, I am the worlds worst correspondent. I keep in (more or less) regular contact with people all over the globe, and was getting heartily sick of the frequent “are you alive, Cas?” emails. The only part of my old site that was going anywhere was the ‘news’ page, so I figured I would go back to basics.

Is there anything you won’t blog about?
Yes. And you will never know what.

I have more questions for you…
Good. I do like people to have enquiring minds. If there is anything else you want to know, just ask in a comment, or feel free to shoot me an email on:
cas.brightmeadow@gmail.com

Please include “Bright Meadow” in the subject line - I’ve got some fairly hefty spam-filters set up and want to make sure your comments actually reach me! I will do my best to respond quickly, but every now and then the penguins stop me, so feel free to keep prodding me if you don’t hear from me within a few days.