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Another day another mind-blowing conference - today it’s 2gether08 which feels a bit like I imagine it is to crawl around inside Steve Moore’s head. Hundreds of gobsmackingly smart folk talking big, talking social, talking good.
I’m thinking again about the potential for action that this sort of event creates. Loads and loads of people, talking big ideas, connecting disparate subjects and disciplines, talking about what they’ve done, what they’re doing, what they’d like to do. Ooooh yes, let’s do that, let’s do this, oh my god, can you imagine if we did that? Let’s talk about it, let’s make it happen.
It’s something that happens every week at the Tuttle Club. People get enthused about an idea or another person or their work and they talk animatedly about what they might do and how they might collaborate. A small number of those collaborations actually have come quickly to fruition. Sometimes this is because they’re at the level of “hey! what if we could mash up flickr and google maps and ‘ta-dah’ - you know” ie it’s not really a new idea, just new to the people involved. Other times it’s more about already busy people having great ideas bu they don’t have time, or money, or time to generate the money to do it.
However, it is a weekly experience for me and I’m getting used to seeing the realisation of awesome potential and the later associated deflation. That’s in a group of 30 or so people. So it’s not surprising that we get it in spades at conferences like today.
So. Much. Potential.
I feel it physically. It’s painful. I think sometimes it’s the thing that winds me up most about events - the raising of potential and the lack of resolution. I know I’m going to feel it again tomorrow. The only answer I have by the way is something Umair Haque said this morning: “Organise something” Y’know like “just do it” but no, really do it.
Irony Alert: this post lacks a real resolution
(and I’m cross-posting to the 2gether blog)
One of the factoids that’s been repeated again and again in the recent civil rights car crash is that there is at least one CCTV camera for every 14 people in the UK. This from the wikipedia page on CCTV
“The exact number of CCTV cameras in the UK is not known but a 2002 working paper by Michael McCahill and Clive Norris of UrbanEye[5], based on a small sample in Putney High Street, estimated the number of surveillance cameras in private premises in London is around 500,000 and the total number of cameras in the UK is around 4,200,000. The UK has one camera for every 14 people.”
Can we do better than this? We don’t have to limit ourselves to a “small sample in Putney High Street” - Has anyone created an interactive map where you can submit known public and private CCTV sites? I think it would show large areas that are not covered by CCTV and many areas that are completely over-saturated.
Would knowing a more accurate number change anything? Would knowing that there’s actually one camera for every 7 people mean that we had any more power to stop the things being put there in the first place? I’d be interested to see what the tipping point is before we get so fed up that we start using paintball guns on the High St like Bernard Cribbins facing a dalek.
The heat on the tube and the introduction of fans to keep people more comfortable was a little news blip yesterday. Annie had of course covered it a few weeks ago and I meant to comment at the time, but y’know… didn’t.
The issue that doesn’t seem to have come up at all is how much the temperature on the tube is currently being raised by the new batch of illuminated advertising pitches. I might try to find one of those flat thermometers to see just what the surface temperature is, but in the meantime just laying my hand on one (or my back, actually, when busking) proves to me that it’s quite a lot warmer than a paper poster 
This goes for the animated doodads that line several escalators.
So how many of these screens are there now? I am not a physicist, so does anyone want to help me work out the effect a single screen might have on the ambient temperature? What is the cumulative effect of all the screens in one station, how about across the 24 stations that are getting them? And are CBS Outdoor, who are responsible for their installation, made any effort to counter the effects? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to be shouting about this if they were? And I’m not a green extremist, but what effect have these screens had on the tube’s carbon footprint as a whole - how much electricity is being used to run them?
Tired and very happy after a lovely day at Interesting ‘08 - thought I’d try blogging it quickly this time - it’s that kind of a day.
As I spent much of the day helping Russell to be slightly less worried, finding things for all the helpful people to do, filling up the water boiler and wondering about including audience participation in my slot I’m afraid I missed some of the startling, stimulating and assorted wonderful displays of interestingness. But…
Roo kicked off beautifully with some great historical images from that geek classic - Lego
Something about Horses and their blind spots. (Dave funkypancake picked up on “horse” later too while struggling against dead air)
I next tuned in to Collyn saying how she was bored with reality and expected more ferns and snails.
Not sure what happened then but next thing I knew, Dan Raven-Ellison was bigging up Geography and kicking History in the balls and then Michael Johnson was segueing from Django to Freddie Green to Eric Clapton to Jimi Hendrix to Jimmy Page and so on and so on with much pedalling and magical slide changing.
so Azeroth is about 16 12km in diameter and very, very dense according to James Wallis’s endearingly obsessive calculations - also something about chucking some bird off a tower and seeing how long it took for her to fall.
Phil Gyford reminded me of what fun mask work was, but also how difficult it is.
I think I caught some bits of Matt Dent’s lovely work on coin designs - I’m glad I met him at the sign-up table and got to tell him personally anyway.
Matt Webb told a lovely story about a South American mirror telegraph that might have been an hallucination, I really wished it hadn’t been, I like the idea of local physics.
Andrew Webb must have been next thanks to the matt-matt-webb-walkingshaw doo-dah. Oh yes - food - it’s all over the country, allegedly, and farmers are saying get *on* moi land!
Andrew Walkingshaw talked about having lots of names (like cats do) and uniqueness and ambiguity
Andrew Dick finally found how to get to sleep after years of insomnia - audio books of bad thrillers - not too exciting or interesting but also not too dull - also apparently the effect doesn’t properly kick in until you’re listening for the 2nd or 3rd time.
I bet Jenny Owen’s Churchill impression is even better when she has a cigar in her mouth - she gave us a bundle of interesting titbits about the great man though my blood sugar was plummeting as we got close to lunchtime.
To close the morning, Matt Irvine Brown displayed excellent headmaster skills getting 35 people to play the recorder - I qik’d it but it’s probably even more painful to watch on a mobile phone video than it was to witness in the flesh.
Then after lunch that fat baldy bloke from last year made us listen to him sing to a (very) small guitar and then made a mountain out of some molehills - other people will cover this slot better than me.
Simon & Curtis James & Ken Hollings did some weird thing about suburbia set to a radiophonics jam session.
Anna Pickard on why biscuits, flanges and gussets are funny.
Younghee Jung talked toilets - unfortunately this is when I managed to get to the toilet for the first time myself, so I had empirical experience, but I missed out on her theory.
James Bridle got me thinking about wine and evolution and talking about booze without talking about drunkenness.
Kim Plowright- oh god, Kim, I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention.
James Houston showed us why he just got a first class degree.
Jim Le Fevre wowed the hall with his live zoetrope demo - at the start Jim asked if he could bring his equipment in which included a turntable, so naturally I was expecting something audio but it was decidedly more visual - Jim, I’d love you to meet Steve Lawson - @solobasssteve - you could make great stuff together
Gavin Starks - all I remember is dodecahedrons and something about music from n-dimensional hypercubes
Joel Gethin Lewis tries to get people in the moment, talking about something untranslateable into English from Welsh
Was George Oats talking about flickr or was that Kim? I think that’s when I popped out to get some more milk.
Lea Becker I’d have like to see and hear more about drawing from her. I’m not sure about the taxonomy of drawing approaches…
Leisa Riechelt is clearly a lovely mummy and reminded me of how interesting your first small person can be. The young man in question had a domain named after him before his name was on a birth certificate. Excellent.
I agree with Max Gadney that we will see some serious re-appraisal of the second world war the further we get from it.
Lots of lovely lovely lovely people in the audience - Tuttlers, Headshifters, Interesting07′ers to many to mention individually but lots are mentioned here.
So yeah, it was, again and I’m sure it ever will be.
I find it very productive to sometimes think “What if I’m completely wrong about this?” You know, “What if this tightly-held, well-evidenced belief is actually not true?” Even if it does turn out to be true, it can be an illuminating exercise to consider what the world would be like or what our experience of the world might be or what decisions we might make differently IF it weren’t the case. It goes as well for global situations “What if the world isn’t actually flat even though that’s how my senses perceive it?” as well as the more personal: “What if it weren’t true that everyone hates me?”
An equally productive development of this rhetorical exercise is to ask “what if, rather than believing that everything about this situation is wrong, what if everything were just right?” In effect this is asking “What if I’m wrong about everything in my life going wrong?”
That’s what I was writing about yesterday. “What if the innovation edge conference was actually perfect in every way?” What does that tell me, what can I learn about it, what might I do differently myself as a result of experiencing it and experiencing my discomfort?
So today, as I begin another day with No Fixed Abode and seeing other people’s fear and insecurity when I explain to them what’s happening and being tempted to fall into that spiral of panic and busy work that I well know makes for little progress, today, I ask myself “What if I’m wrong that not having a permanent place to live is the worst possible situation to be in?” “What if it’s absolutely right and perfect that I’m flat-sitting for a friend?” What might I do in response to that, how would I think and act, what might it mean about me? And why might I have brought myself to this place?
And as I reflect on all that, a paradox becomes clear to me. This week I have had the recurring feeling of being safe and at home - *wherever* I am. I was in Epsom yesterday and went to the Post Office and walked along the High Street and it was all lovely and suburban and I thought “Oh yes, this is home, perhaps this is where I should live all the time” and then this morning I was in Pimlico and walking around the gardens of St George’s Square and had *exactly* the same feeling.
From which I take that it was in order to fully appreciate that I really belong here, wherever “here” is, to fully understand that I’m at home wherever I am and that my physical location is purely a matter of choice, that I had to bring myself to this experience of “homelessness”.
So, phew! Having gotten that out of my system, I think I’ll choose a period of greater stability
I should be in bed, but no, I’m sitting up, singing and playing my ukulele like a fool.
My flat has lately become a meeting place for the above mentioned society. I don’t really know what to do except to let them out the window when I see them alive and collect and photograph them for posterity when I find them dead.
I suspect though that it’s the toasty warm of central heating that’s keeping them going and once they get outside they freeze and perish anyway.
At least it’s not cockroaches.
They are lovely. I wish there was one in the West End as expansive as this one in Spitalfields. I tried the new one in (upper) Regent Street today and it was lovely with predictably lovely staff but I really wanted to spread out a bit and stretch my legs
The tight conditions though did have a good effect. I had to share a table with (gasp) a stranger and because I was in Leon and everybody’s so happy and friendly, we couldn’t help just talking as though we weren’t hardened London sociophobes after all. Y’know small talk about what a nice place it is and how good and healthy the food feels, nothing too deep, but a very odd experience for me in that part of W1.
At our first prototype meeting, I perceived a tension between the people who were interested in making a profitable business and those whose interest was solely in the community possibilities and opportunities for collaboration. I came away unsure of what legal structure would work best - a traditional shareholder-owned limited company or a non-profit company limited by guarantee. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then.
On the same occasion I said something along the lines of: “What I want to create is a platform that enables people to create value for themselves.”
The inspiration for this comes from the tech world - CP/M & MS-DOS, the IBM PC, the Internet, the Web, Amazon Marketplace, Craigslist, Ebay, Facebook - what they all have in common is that no matter how they get paid for or how they’re organised, or whether or not they make money for their inventors, they have also given other people the opportunity to create new relationships, markets and businesses that weren’t possible before (btw, I use big examples so that people will recognise what I’m talking not because I think our little project will be on that scale.)
I want everything we do to in some way support people doing cool stuff on their own. I don’t think we have to own *every*thing and I certainly don’t want to create a walled garden. We’ll get a lot more done by creating the conditions for people to
So turning back to the legal structure, the choice seems to come down to a limited company (or a partnership) which exists to create value for it’s shareholders (or partners) or a company limited by guarantee which exists to… well do whatever we decide it should do - I think it should serve the needs of people interested in Social Media in London - if that’s not too wooly (or too specific) - but I’m open to suggestion. There was broad agreement that limited by guarantee was the right route for us but the aim and purpose does need to be boiled down to something that expresses what we want and allows us (as a group) to do as much good as possible.
So if that is sorted, my mind then turns to the structure of this business. I’ve always talked about the three bits - café, learning, working. But that might not be all we want to do together - other ideas for services have come up in meetings too. Can we make the Tuttle Club our base platform? With no direct services except to facilitate cool stuff happening. Then the first cool thing it does (quickly) is to set up a Social Media Café or perhaps the café space, a learning space and a workspace could each be individual, but co-located businesses. And then it can do other things too as they arise. Or am I making it too complicated?
Let’s talk about this at the next prototype - but there are many who aren’t able to join us there so let’s do it in the google group as well.
Our first little flashmob was quite a success in my view. It certainly showed me that there were people ready to turn up and talk about stuff. It also suggested to me that we need to follow a two-track approach for now.
I’m going to continue to write (as and when I have the space and time) a formal business plan to help communicate more clearly and completely what it is we are doing and to help people understand why they might want to put money into it. I want to get as much feedback and input from others into that as possible so I’ll be blogging about it more regularly from now on as well as organising face to face sessions.
In addition, I think it’s worth trying to keep prototyping and move slowly from the dormobile model towards the travelling circus model. For those who haven’t seen my presentation on this, I characterised the first phase of prototyping as a VW camper van where we just hang out essentially wherever we can find somewhere to park for the afternoon. The travelling circus is a bit more formal - it’s where we would have a venue that remained the same for a period, perhaps up to a month, before we moved on. So how might we do that? From the start people have been suggesting that we should just find somewhere to “squat” but ideas for actual places to do this have been thin on the ground.
Now, though, courtesy of the sterling persistence of Lee Thomas (londonfilmgeek) we’ve got a couple of initial sessions booked in the upstairs dining-room at (Norman’s) Coach and Horses in Greek Street (corner of Romilly St, opposite Kettners). To say the least, the place does have some media history. Far less significantly it was where we had the recent Seesmic Dinner.
We’ll be there from 10.00 to 13.00 on Friday 1st February though the landlord would no doubt welcome you staying on for a later lunch and drinking in the bar for the rest of the afternoon if you really can’t tear yourselves away
I’ve put a simple page on the wiki for sign-ups - just so that people know who else is coming.
Right, so I’m now on the look out for more places like this and I thought I’d blog the requirements and what’s in it for the venue and see who out there might have have somewhere we can use or at least see whether you can come up with suggestions of places to approach.
What the venue gets - people, punters, customers, you know, dosh-givers - especially at those times that are usually a bit slow. More people drinking coffee and eating cakes, sandwiches and other geek comestibles (erm… I suppose I mean beer here, especially on a Friday lunchtime). Moreover the people it brings in are well-connected and quite influential in their own circles. And we’re generous - if you give us nice things like wifi and electrickery, we will say nice things about you. Don’t forget that when we say nice things, we say them quite loudly on the internet (a global network of interconnected computing devices), where they stick around forever getting clumped together with other nice things and thus bringing you warm fuzzy goodness - the kind of warm fuzzy goodness that encourages cash out of people’s wallets and into your till.
Our requirements - we’d like a space please that we can, however temporarily, call our own. It’s great if it can be demarcated in some way (a separate room, those three tables, etc.) and we need free open wifi (if you don’t have this, we can talk about how we can help you set it up) and access to electricity points. Errr.. that’s about it, really. Anything else, I think we can work around.
Know anywhere like this? Own anywhere like this. Let me know - my contact details are up at the top of this page.
but these two tickled me recently:
A USB Flash Drive for a giant’s laptop.
And a tale of two operators
(you may have to click through to read the destination)
Let’s see where this one goes - http://www.mapmyname.com/?id=4933
blogging about tech, blogging about social media, blogging about big ideas in mass collaboration, blogging about new ways of marketing your yada yada yada.
From time to time it’s really good to just read someone writing about something extraordinary in their life or something ordinary but nonetheless signficant.
I went to the absolutely packed to the gills, no room to swing a copy of Campaign or whatever these folk read, Coffee Morning at Breakfast Club Soho on Friday. A cracking hour and a half, not too long; plenty of opportunities for me to ponce about being a social media tart - explaining that this means I wander around Soho trying to make old men very happy - charming everyone with my moo cards and meeting a whole bunch of lovely people. I’m sure, in his self-effacing way, he frowns upon people calling it Russell Davies’s Coffee Morning, but it is very definitely his. Next one’s on 30th March at the same venue.
Note that you can tell it’s for advertising planners as they serve Fruit & Fib.
So after Open Coffee and a meeting up in Islington, I took a stroll and rambled on to myself into my recorder about what a busy and exciting day I was having - I touch on Open Coffee, Theatre Blogging, Social Media Club and the Nomads, all this while navigating the wilds of N1 (it really is grim up north london)
Get along to Fleishmann Hillard at 6pm this Thursday for the discussion group session for Social Media Club.
This month, the discussion will be led by Ronna Porter, who wrote this at the SMC Blog last week and took part in our podcasting session.
I was going to go into big detail on the four types or groups of people - or perhaps they are characteristics found within individuals that I noticed at the Uploading Innovation unconference on Tuesday, but I think I’ll just present them for now and maybe fill in the detail later.
The four elements I saw coming together more than I have done at other events are People People, Geeks, Capitalists and Philosophers.
People People - who focus on the social nature of collaboration, what it means to us as individuals and as groups of people
Geeks - who focus on technological facilitation of collaboration, what machines can do for us
Capitalists - who focus on making new businesses, how to make more money out of collaboration
Philosophers - who focus on the ideas and constructing theories about what this all means for the human race
Having contributions from all of these, rather than just one dominant group was one of the things that made the conversations on the day all the more interesting and productive. Thankfully most of those who came were aware of their shortcomings and there weren’t too many know-it-alls (my prejudice is that this is a geek trait - people people, capitalists and philosophers are willing to admit that they could know more about the tech, but some geeks insist that they also know everything about people, money and ideas) [ducks for cover]
Coming over to wordpress is good for the blog, but not for my e-mail If you are trying to get hold of me using the address in the image above - @perfectpath.co.uk - you may get bounced. If so, please try lloyd dot davis at gmail dot com
Since the last meeting (see video above) and a great conference call I took part in with Chris, Howard, Kristie and lots of other local leaders, I had another idea about how to do this in London. I would like to keep the third Thursday for the kind of discussion and networking activity we’ve had so far, but to expand what we do (probably spread quite thinly at first) and to establish a weekly meetup of one form or another so that we can say to anyone in London, “Thursday Night is Social Media Night.”
What I suggest is that anyone can come along at 6pm at a pre-arranged location to take pictures, make some audio or video, or just walk around town and blog about it, somewhere in London according to the following schedule:
* 1st Thursday: Photo-sharing
* 2nd Thursday: Podcasting & Audioblogging
* 3rd Thursday: Hosted Discussion & Networking
* 4th Thursday: Videoblogging
* 5th Thursday: Blogwalk
Except for the 3rd week, these will be out and about somewhere in London, maybe pub-based when weather gets rough, but dedicated to improving our social media skills by doing as much as by talking.
I’m committing to starting this on 1st March with a photo walk about in Soho, meeting at the John Snow pub in Broadwick St (bring your camera) - yes, it will be just getting dark at 6pm so the theme will be “Things you can photograph in Soho in the dark without getting arrested or your face smashed in”. Frankly, I’ll be happy if I get just one other person to come with me, but of cours, the more the merrier.
I’m going to start working up pages on the wiki to help flesh this out a bit. Do come and join in, the password is media. If you want to be kept informed, please do sign up for the London mailing list
tags: socialmediaclub & london & smclondon & social & media & photo sharing & podcasting & videoblogging & blogwalk
Oh mercy me!
The old one’s are, of course, the best. The opportunity to share with you, mah felluh blogizens, “The State of My Onions At Rest” was irresistable to my pathetic sense of humour.
Eat your heart out Dubya.
I saw it from this angle for the first time this morning and was, as the young people say, rolling on the floor laughing.
Apparently that makes me “such a boy”.
Which is a good thing. pfmmnnnf, it says “arse”
A trip for tea to Elys in Wimbledon (much more exciting that Starbucks or Coffee Republic and with water, unlike all of Wimbledon Village) yielded a bit of a surprise and a disappointment for anyone who’d been pinning their hopes on getting into what is clearly an exclusive bash. Tea parties when I was a kid were teddy bears (cuddly) or chimps (funny - at least as long as they’re kept at a distance). I think I would have had trouble keeping my tea and buns down if a Dalek had turned up.
I mean, I once saw Tom Baker at a book-signing in the 70s and a toddler had hysterics because there was Dr Who - he was real and not a puppet who lived in the telly. I just hope they have paramedics on call and have made sure the emergency exits are fully operational.
I also wondered how big the Dalek actually was, because the aisles were a bit of a squeeze as it was.
The Christmas trees throughout Elys are the same colour as the title on that notice (only sparkly) all I can tell you is that wherever Vera got them, they don’t seem to have come from Argos - and while on that subject. If you choose to have this in your home this Christmas, please don’t invite me round for mince pies. (note the url’s for the argos site will doubtless degrade over time, I wish I could give you permalinks, but they are just too tight-arsed about their intellectual property - just believe me when I tell you that the one I’ve pointed to is vile and actually looks quite like a Dalek who got carried away at Mardi Gras)
So it’s a fortnight since I saw the first bloggers screening of Hallam Foe, a film by David Mackenzie (softly spoken, but clearly a bull-headed Taurus underneath). I said on the night that I don’t like talking about a movie straight after watching it, but this is ridiculous!
We were asked not to review it but I will say It’s a gorgeous movie experience. So what has stayed with me for two weeks? I think foremost the that this is about taking the first steps in the life-long process of growing up, the paradox of growing up in a world where there are no grown-ups - or else that growing up means finding out that grown-ups aren’t all that grown up themselves. I was really glad that Hallam didn’t emerge from his rite of passage “a man”, grown up and finished, able to take on the world.
I also saw it about being apart from the city and it’s people, while being a part of the city. Also that despite moving from fabulous countryside to a fabulous city, he still takes himself with him - the tree house becomes a clock tower, his mother (literally) becomes his boss (Sophia Miles….droool), his father and stepmother’s relationship is replicate in his boss and her lover blah blah blah.
But I digress into reviewer, which I’m not. I was most fascinated by how my fellow bloggers found their own experience of adolescence in the film. Of course I did the same, but I’m going into details here. What do you think I am, some kind of exhibitionist?
Go see the Hallam Foe production blog by Colin Kennedy and the nascent flickr photostream. And if you’re that way inclined, check out the myspaces for Hallam, Kate and Verity
On 1 August 1994, the Audit Commission moved back into 1 Vincent Square after a refurbishment. It was also the day that I started working there and I was comforted in my newbieness by the fact that no-one else really knew where anything was either…
[pause while I shudder at the fact that this is all twelve years ago]
Well, the Commission moved down to Millbank a couple of years ago and No 1 has stood empty for a long time, but now it’s being done up again, I have no clue for what purpose. So, when I passed down Regency Street, I pressed my nose and my cameraphone up against the window of what used to be Publications (the site of so much feverish activity, now still and dusty) and love the fact that you can see right through to the front without all the clutter in between.
They came! Lovely lovely moo cards.
I’m just thrilled. If you haven’t seen them yet go look at moo.com.
I paid for this batch of 100 - US$19.99 which translated to £10.84. They came nicely packaged with a postage cost of £1.27 so even with a couple of duds they still work out at less than 10p each. Fantastic.
I’m just not sure that I want to give them away….
…or friendly concern at the speed of RSS.
I posted this to flickr from my cameraphone this morning and within minutes Euan had e-mailed to see if I was OK. Seems those eyes look a bit starey. And actually the colour balance doesn’t do me any favours - they look a bit red too. And of course I haven’t shaved and I hadn’t had time to caption it.
When I’d stopped giggling, I was actually very touched that a hand could be outstretched so quickly thanks to O2, flickr, rss feeds and aggregators… oh, and that nice chap in Buckinghamshire.
I’ve really enjoyed seeing Helen’s pictures of the Electric Picnic coming in through her flickr stream this week.
She’s back and has just posted a write-up and it just sounds a beautiful cross between idyllic, serene and crazy ape bonkers.
“Next was Gary Numan, who was awesome. Can’t get Are Friends Electric out of my head. And he was having such a good time on stage he couldn’t help grinning. Mooched around a bit including partaking of some flavoured oxygen. Then headed over to see the Super Furry Animals who I’m sure played a great set, but I just don’t know any of their songs so it all kind of passed my by. Sarah and I discovered Tilly and The Wall who have a tap dancer instead of a drummer. Kinda curious but kinda worked I think. Then I managed a bit of Belle and Sebastian (which was surprisingly rammed) and then I headed off to Sparks who were utterly brilliant. Quickly followed by New Order (where they announced Kelly Osbourne’s wedding in the Inflatable Church), grabbed some food and then listened to Groove Armada from the comfort of our own tent.”
Flavoured oxygen??!?!? Flavoured??!!? Oxygen??!!?!!
A bunch of us sat around in a loosely self-organised way in a tinder-dry corner of Hyde Park to start talking about what might happen in London (and the rest of Britain) in 2012 from a cultural perspective other than sport.
I had to leave just as the conversation was really warming up but what I am interested in is what intangible things would we like to be left after the games are over (as opposed to the tangible stuff of stadiums, improved travel etc.) and the way I suggested going into that was to think about what we would do today if it were 2011 and we’d just had an “oh shit!” moment that we’d forgotten to do anything in preparation.
We’d started talking about how we were going to welcome all these guests into our country - which was an interesting tack in itself, what do you do to get ready when you have guests coming? Friendly jolly internationalist stuff.
But then as I walked across to Marble Arch I couldn’t help thinking that the park was already full of guests from all over the world today - how welcome do they feel? What do we do to help them out? Do we talk to them? Do we even recognise that they’re there? And I started to feel a little more uneasy about the preparedness we have to share our culture with visitors. I think it’s going to be fun trying to turn that around.
OK, so something weird happened the other day. I cut my hair myself - I know that you know this… after all it’s obvious that I’m a self-cut man. Oh god, I don’t like the way this one’s going.
Ahem.
So I had my clippers out and was using a recent copy of FT magazine to keep the shavings off my lovely carpet. Of course I was thinking about other stuff at the time - the price of lychees, how many beans make pi, when to book my next windsurfing lesson…etc.
LOOK what happened! All the tiny hairs just automagically jumped into a pattern around Senator Clinton’s mouth, that if you look at it with your eyes all scrunchy makes it look like she has a moustache and a little goatee! Weird.
And then the headline is “I know something you don’t know” - how’s that for a spooky double-entendre?
I got an invite to this from Alison. Very hush hush and exclusive - secret location in W1 - cross my heart and hope to die if I tell you anything about it at all other than that about twenty effortlessly stylish (ok, one or two, not so effortless) young things from London’s fashion world squished into a private members club with some icy bottles of Ty Nant to meet, mingle and chat about their worlds, their businesses and the marketing thereof. No pictures from me, but Terry was snapping away all the way through - if pictures emerge for public consumption, I’ll let you know.
Overall learning point for me is the similarities between marketing all of these lifestyle brands and products - fashion, music, alcohol, theatre etc and the need to have talking points to get the conversation started. I’ll get on and make some ooze then.
I took this pic on my walk to work this morning. The beauty and prosperity of those big white houses in the sunshine just hit me like a brick.
This is about half way on my 10 minute walk to work. I just love living and working in London.
Debbie just sent me this picture - she was working on a TV show yesterday and spent some time with this bling-bling guy .
Answers on a postcard please on what kind of person owns a hand like this.
Why does the bloglines audioplayer work for everyone else but not me? When I listen to my own podcast I sound like Perky. That’s not a good thing, I don’t mean I sound, like, perky I sound like Perky. Perky the Pig. You know, Pinky’s mate.
Am I encoding my mp3’s wrong - does it work for you?
Bonus link: Pinky & Perky go off to outer space
The seriousnicity of this blog has risen to unacceptabubble levels. And so today I give you the news…Nazdrovian style.
Mazd Kravia!!!
Following on from the marketing 2.0 content 2.0 debate earlier I was struck by this advertising on the side of a van which I spotted at Embankment on my way here. Not for the obvious reason but because I’d also just seen on Breakfast TV Charles Dunstone from Carphone Warehouse being grilled by Declan on why he hadn’t achieved perfection and complete enligtenment and got a bit of planning wrong (which he’s admitted to on his blog where he’s now also explaining what they’re doing about it.) Now Mr Dunstone’s blog might not be the shiniest and most blogworthy in the world. But I like a man who does this much better than someone who slaps a half-naked girl on the side of a van to sell me more cheese - which I don’t eat by the way, no matter how many naked girls they show me.
This is my bright shiny new wordpress.com blog. Ain't it luvverly?
As if my face weren’t lovely and soft enough, I have to go and slap some moisturizer all over it. The G-Room moisturizer, number 5 in the range, promises to restore, protect and defend, pretty strong stuff from a squirt of white goo. You’ll have to watch the video to find out just how restored, protected and defended I feel by the end of it.
Bonus(ish) scene: you get to see a half-hearted attempt at my impersonation of Marlon Brando in the Godfather.
Only one left now, those of you who have been watching from the start will know that we reach the G-Room videoblog climax with Hair Wax tomorrow. Mmmmm… Hair Wax.
technorati tags: g-room, videoblog, moisturizer, my face, grooming
At the NMK User Generated Content event last week Anthony Lilley from FourDocs and Helen Copnall from MSN appear to have had differing views on the size of something. Answers on a postcard or in the comments please to:
1. What were they comparing the size of?
2. Which of them do you believe?
[btw I'm writing this using Flock - and I like it]
technorati tags: nmk, london, events, user generated content
This is the second of three podcasts I’ve produced associated with The Policy Unplugged event at Channel 4 last week, The E Word. Fifty or so thinkers in education - without many of the usual Whitehall suspects gathered to talk about the state of education policy in the UK, to see where there was common ground and explore their differences. I was there as a host with special responsibility to help record the day and capture the essence of the conversations.
After introducing themselves to each other and discussing their passions about education, the guests gathered around subjects that had emerged in the discussion. I joined a table hosted by Victoria Marks to talk about Lifelong Learning. In this section you hear from Pat Kane, Tom Bewick, Dave Harris, Marion Seguret, Victoria and err… Lloyd Davis.
During The E Word (19:03 mins - 8.7MB)
Photos for the event are in this photoset
tags: education & education policy & Policy Unplugged & Channel 4
Podcasting & Commercial Radio
Head of New media strategy at Virgin Radio
wearing a firefox t-shirt so obviously one of us!
four stations in the brand portfolio: Virgin Radio, Xtreme, Groove, Classic Rock.
Thinks that ‘amateur’ is the wrong word for podcasting.
One station, one platform => one station many platforms.
Right now 26 differnet platforms, all sorts of internet ones plus cable tv & fm & am etc
Nothing new in portable audio distribution - 1958 transistor radio - the difference is that we can now get things that we want, when we want them. Virgin first to create a daily podcast in March.
Chop out the music, partly because of rights, but also because the personailities are what people want to hear (sounds like a lame excuse to me - do people really want this stuff?) but it’s still full of timechecks. 85,000 downloads a month?! who?
Announcing today for October ‘best of the guests’ and unsigned bands on Xtreme…and possibly Vic Reeves - Big Night in on Wednesday - going to wait and see how that one might turn out..
limited advertising within each podcast eg Special Constables, Orange, Mastercard and Expedia. Trying to be intelligent and place carefully and relevantly (still bloody advertising though).
Shows Top Subscribed Podcasts with Pete & Geoff at No 1 before they’d actually released one.
itunes effect - before itunes 2278 over three weeks, but with iTunes 3644 in one week.
Threats: Nokia 8310, a portable music device. 77% use it to listen to FM radio. Nokia 6610 83% listening. Says this isn’t a threat to them (yeah right). Live TV and DAB stations.
41% of 6300 Virgin website users had a portable media player of which 32% had an iPod and 68% had other types.
Plays out with Pete & Geoff on Mummy, am I ugly? as example of how to raise revenue through linking in to your website (and a way of taking the piss out of your audience)
http://james.cridland.net
Q: I don’t think you get it. It’s about control. Don’t think about it simply as distribution - it’s about control of what you get, when you want it but we’re all struggling to understand what it means.
Q: Matt Gibbs, any plans for charging for podcasts or is it all ad sales. We never have charged for anything. Issues - eg can’t get round iPod DRM. We’ll be interested when we can do it.
Q: any research on when people are actually hearing them? No. Isn’t that the most important thing for advertisers though? Nearly everyone in the room listens both on computer and on a portable music player. Everyone assumes that people only listen in mobile scenario.
Q: You’re in a great position to make the point on rights to the music industry. We’re waiting for DRM.
Q: Podlisteners are expecting something else. I don’t agree. People want to hear stuff that they’re familiar with.
A rainy start to this morning as I make my way through puddles with a damp left arm.
Talking about umbrella loss and other irrelevant minutiae, an update on Public Service Conversations and my decision to move it over to Movable Type and start to tell you about my syndication idea but leave you hanging as I have to sprint to leap aboard the 08:22 to Waterloo.
Update: ooops just found my umbrella at the bottom of my bag sorry family for defaming you.
That’s what Thomas believes and I think it’s certainly worth a try. But then as one of the early contributors, I would wouldn’t I?
Meet the sushradio gang - they’re German, Geeky (in a Good way) and errr… they’re…. a Gang (and they’re all so good looking). I’m really looking forward to hearing something from bicyclemark there but it’s really easy to make something suitable, it just has to be 3-6 minutes long and have interesting information about someplace anywhere in the world - how hard can that be? Go on, have a go yourself - you can send links to your 3 minute tidbits for the ears to sushiradiomail@gmail.com.
I’ve resolved to make my next contribution shorter and louder (well my voice, anyway) but no less informative. I’ll let you know when it’s done.
After the most frustrating will they? won’t they? since the Gold Blend couple, Helen Keegan talks with me (behind Franklin D Roosevelt’s back) about how she got where she is today and what’s up in the world of mobile marketing including what she’s doing to make sure it’s more about the user experience than the size of your server. Features an excellent example of Helen’s outstanding CV and client-list recitation skills and a snatch of the theme tune to Bod.
tags: mobile marketing
Thanks to Sam Curtis Coutin on the yahoo podcasters list for this not very permalink which leads to this
and lets us know that one of the finest minds of the 21st Century is about to start podcasting, no doubt fired up by the success of her previous forays into decentralized media. Turns out it’s part of the promo for her new movie “House of Wax”. As Eric Weaver followed up on the same list, “Podcasting just got very UNCOOL :(”
You still have time to head for the hills, it’s not officially starting until April 29th but till then there’s a teaser on the House of Wax site.
Pass the sick bag.
tags: podcasting & Paris Hilton
This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing.
Wooo (with a hoo and just a smidge of yay) I’m off to KM Europe next week. Unconvinced of the value of the paid-for plenary sessions (and certainly not interested in vendors), the thing for me is meeting up with cool people, hearing what they’re up to and taking part in the PKM Workshop on Tuesday afternoon.
A shame though that I couldn’t also afford flights up to Sweden for Blogwalk V but hey who knows what might happen between now and then!
More of an art day than the last few sales sales and more sales.
Spent an hour at the V&A this morning drawing.
And was struck by the difference and similarity between the two images I created of the same robe.
Especially in contrast to the “reality” of the photograph. I know this isn’t a new idea in art but in management (even Kmanagement) it’s rarely this clear to me.
More of an art day than the last few sales sales and more sales.
Spent an hour at the V&A this morning drawing.
And was struck by the difference and similarity between the two images I created of the same robe.
Especially in contrast to the “reality” of the photograph. I know this isn’t a new idea in art but in management (even Kmanagement) it’s rarely this clear to me.
Nostalgia lovers - and those new to my world, can now see the old LloydDavis.co.uk pages on this server. Yes, that’s still the mobile number, the e-mail is at perfectpath.co.uk
A workshop/course/event/need-that-I-could-fill thing is forming in my brain.
The potential punters are - anyone who struggles with the difficulty of working in an organisation, anyone who feels that they haven’t quite got what they need, and no matter how many times they try to do what they know is the right thing to do, they hit a brick wall (a cultural one usually)
The basic ingredients are:
1. Coming to accept and understand how the world has changed, but business hasn’t caught up yet. That brain has replaced brawn and that looking after your brain, using it to make new stuff and connecting it to other brains is the name of the game. That while we continue to manage organisations in the same way that we learned to manage coal mines, steel mills, and automobile production lines, we will continue to hurt inside.
2. Celebrating and nurturing your own creative ability and that of others as the number one neglected bit of knowledge work. Exploring how to do this in whatever medium rings your bell.
3. Learning to be comfortable with the new tools (the old-new tools of browsers, websites and search engines, the new-new tools of blogs, wikis and social networking and whatever is coming just around the corner)
Any takers? How long would you like to spend on this - is it a day, a week, a lifetime? How much would you pay for a day of it?
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