A less waffly version of these thought crumbs features on the Outside Line blog

I check in regularly via Foursquare which updates my Twitter feed. I find it a quick and useful way to share somewhere interesting I’ve attended with my real life friends that I chat with via tweets. I favour Foursquare and its automatic updates to Twitter rather than Facebook Places and updates to my profile’s wall because I like the light entertainment of badges and points, find my iPhone’s Facebook app a little unwelcoming and occasionally enjoy browsing Foursquare’s user generated tips.

You wont see me shouting about being at the local takeaway in the early hours or sitting on a park bench, but you’ll find me putting my virtual flag in the digital ground of interesting gigs, museums and great restaurants or bars. When I get back into work after the weekend or catch up in person with friends that follow me online, location has proved to be a catalyst for conversation. ‘I saw you checked out that new bar the other night…’, ‘How was that new band you watched?’ and so on. Cynics will challenge the benefit of that over just starting a conversation from scratch in person and have a point, but they’re also some of the same people who said Facebook status updates would never take off and were pointless because people like being private and wont feel inclined to broadcast their thoughts.

Ultimately, social media activity’s often about showing off. People using location treat it as another outlet to present themselves through in a way they’d like to be seen. I want people to see that I went to a Rakim show this month so they associate me a little more with decent, historic rap music and knowledge. So I checked in at the gig. I don’t want people to know I munched through an all you can eat buffet at Pizza Hut because I”m a bit ashamed and would rather people not know I’m unhealthy and live off grease from time to time. So the phone stayed in my pocket.

In terms of what location can offer brands, I think this will increase with time and new developments in tools and functionality. At the moment, location’s a fairly separate aspect to social media activity, homed in its entirety on a lone platform (Foursquare) or a little hidden in iPhone app tabs and busy news feeds (Facebook Places). If Facebook were to put a leader board at the top of every user’s profile page showing the places they’ve visited the most or most recently, there would suddenly be a permanent, prominent place for a brand’s name to be championed to a user’s private network. I think that’s when critical mass will pick up location more and people’s inclination to check in at locations will increase. Then brands can start promoting themselves to more people at a louder volume.

In 2006 I began work as Site Editor for a large online gambling company in the UK. It was a great company to join at the age of 22 for my first serious job. The number of free parties and streams of booze from countless open bars were a great kick in the arse to make new friends and move from my parent’s house in High Barnet to Central London. I also gained a wealth of work experience.

For a year I lived with close friends I met on the job. We slept very little, instead raving around the clock in London’s clubs, parks, house parties and pubs. It was a wonderful exercise in liberation from my very quiet, rarely social life at the end of the Northern Line. Then the fish bowl set up of working, partying and living with the same small set of friends gradually became tiring and claustrophobic. My attendance at parties became infrequent and simultaneously, my closer friend of the bunch and I took to reading about meditation, attending lectures and classes rooted in spirituality. We’d later pretentiously refer to these activities as part of a path.

The superficiality and insincerity of forced smiles and laughs at managerial bar banter to win favour come bonus time felt empty. Our investigations were fulfilling and snowballed rapidly after a traumatic Halloween themed night at Farringdon’s Turnmills night club. Both worse for wear, we spent hours in the staff cloakroom whilst a medic tried pulling my friend out of a Ketamine and Ecstasy induced hole. Defibrillators were on hand incase his heart beat got any faster than the double speed it was working at and came to a stop. We were eventually able to catch a black cab home after he’d woken out of his unresponsive state of inaudible chants. We sat sobbing on my bed, still in our white boiler suit costumes, listening to All You Need Is Love by The Beatles on repeat. The face paint of a David Bowie zig zag was smudged down my face. It was like something straight out of a Hollyoaks special.

Withdrawing further from partying, I took a course in Tibetan buddhism at Kennington’s Jamyang Centre, attended talks at London’s Buddhism Society, practiced lots of yoga and did several detoxes. Meanwhile, my friend had heard on the holistic scene about a lady who used an electric drill like device to vibrate your upper spine behind the neck. This was done so fiercely that it changed the angle of a particular vertebrae, apparently sloped inwards due to alien contact with Earth… Once corrected, the lady claimed patients would have a straighter, more direct route for energy to burst past the third eye chakra to the crown chakra. These were two points said to be prominent locations for spiritual energy in ones body. It sounded farfetched and over the top to me but he got it done. He wasn’t boasting about how much he’d drunk the night before anymore, but still had claims of extremity, just at a different end of the scale.

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When he’s not making genuine and humble bids to become President of Haiti, however laughable that sounds if you’re not familiar with his work there, Wyclef Jean’s busy living out of a guitar case making music that varies from record breaking singles to mix tape obscurities.

Having cemented his name in the history books as the figurehead of the world’s biggest hip-hop group of all time, The Fugees, Jean has gone on to release almost as many solo and collaborative projects than his ex partners in hits making Lauryn Hill and Pras have recorded non Fugees songs.

It would be a lie to paint Jean as a faultless artist. His discography is littered by collaborations with wrestling stars and members of 1990s British boy bands. There are tracks that murder the classics of legends if not shamelessly mimic them and over-kill songs of screeching indulgence. For those, the mainstream has turned its back, uninterested in the artist unless his group’s early tracks are remixed into a club’s set. Critics barely bother paying any attention at all.

But whilst commercial success and intrigue has stalled as dramatically as Lauryn Hill’s state of mind, Jean has quietly released regular albums showing much growth in his skills as a musician and producer, and approach as a lyricist. Gone are the days of the man clearly feeling the expectation to continually elevate from one gimmicky big hit to another (think It Doesn’t Matter or Pussy Cat). Gone too are hints of confusion in the artist as to where he fits in such as the trend jumping hijacking of Thug Angels or the pleas for credibility within the hip-hop community that made him such as The PJs.

Jean has pretty much dropped rapping (in English, his second language), rarely puts out studio covers of rock gems anymore and instead has carved out a varied approach of story telling, life celebrating, society documenting efforts delivered in a conversational, at peace with itself delivery that sits somewhere between lazy rapping and introverted singing. There are songs about child support, lack of community, road safety and place. Others launch an offensive to get listeners educated on genres outside of hip-hop and pop or simply to have listeners up on their feet having fun.

Here’s my chronological newcomers list on Last.fm as to what the radio’s not been playing with a few sentimental golden oldies and of course a couple of appearances by a pre ‘Call me Ms. Hill’ L-boogie.