1. I worked in Austria from late June to mid August.
2. Moved to Sydney from mid August to mid October.
3. Moved back to Melbourne from mid October to December.
4. Repatriated to the United States in December and was in Colorado to mid January.
5. Moved to San Francisco for a month, and…
6. Took a job in San Diego which I started yesterday.

All that time I’ve been co-authoring a book and have tried to keep blogging.  Man I can’t wait to be settled again.

What I’ve noticed immediately is that most blog and twitter updates now happen throughout the day.  In Australia it was like reading the newspaper, where when I got to work most of the blog posts and twitter updates from my US counterparts had been completed already, so I’d spend 20 minutes or so catching up on the “news”.  Now my reader constantly has updates.  I’m not sure which way is better actually.

Anyway, I’m hoping to visit more conferences now that I’m in North America and meet some of my blogging friends in person.  I might look into heading to the FASTForward conference this year to get me going. 

It’s good to be back.

I’ve worked on more traditional systems integration projects with large telcos and banks, done some interesting enterprise search implementations, built some cool demo applications, and preached the enterprise 2.0 doctrine to prospects who, in some cases, knew more about the topic than me! I’m very encouraged about the momentum I see in Australia in the social computing space, and I think my firm is well positioned to make a positive impact here.

I wish the best of luck to my colleagues. You can always find me on twitter or here on this blog.

Most of the work we do is strategic in this space, but we’re gaining a lot of momentum, and I’d be surprised if we’re not part of several E2.0 implementations next year.

If you’re interested or know somebody who might be, send me an email at jeremy.thomas at socialglass.com. I’ll respond with more information about the firm and the opportunities at hand.

We use Confluence for sharing project information, and it’s amusing to see wiki patterns in action. My project is based in Australia and is staffed with Australians. Yet the other day I noticed an edit to one of our pages by somebody based in Washington D.C. A wiki gnome.

The change was minor, but it made me realize that my project’s activities are visible to and grab the attention of a wider audience across my company. After all, wiki gnomes have to read wiki content before they decide to modify it. So perhaps the presence of wiki gnomes is an indicator that an enterprise wiki is accomplishing its task – diffusing knowledge and connecting people.

I don’t think it snows here in Melbourne as it barely gets below 8C (about 46F) in the winter. And yet when one takes a look around the train station on a “cold winter’s morning” one sees scarves, gloves, beanies, ski coats etc. When I first got to Melbourne I couldn’t believe how bundled up people got for 45F. But now that I’ve been here for a while I understand. 8C is bloody freezing.

They say I’ve been “climatized”. I’d say I’ve been “wussified”. Regardless, I’d never let my Colorado friends know.

I must say life down here isn’t that different than it is in the states. Australia is a wonderful place and I’ve never met a culture that has such a good work/life balance.

I have Foxtel (cable) at home and as a result get a healthy dose of US TV including CNN, ESPN, Fox News, and Monday Night Football (broadcast live on Tuesday morning). This helps me keep in touch so I can talk with my brothers about the important stats.

But there are a few differences – like “Rice Bubbles”. Why can’t they call them “Rice Crispies” like they are in the states? And why do Aussies say (and forgive my horrible attempt at phonetics) “straw-bry”, “ras-bry”, but “blue-berry” (“bry” vs” “berry”)? Believe me I’ve had hours of fun with my Aussie friends debating these very important issues.

And I love vegemite.

Onto more serious matters, despite all of the press talking about Australian Web 2.0 companies seeking venture capital from abroad because Australian VCs are just too conservative, there is a healthy a share of Web 2.0 companies based in Oz. Check out Vishal Sharma’s list of these companies here. Omnidrive and Atlassian are perhaps the most famous of these. Google also has a significant presence down here.

So, while there are roughly 19,000,000 people in Australia (California has close to 60,000,000 for a little perspective) I’d say that per capita the Aussies aren’t doing too badly in the Web 2.0 space as far as company presence goes.