Russell Davies

gardeners' answer time

It's time for a full hour of audio nonsense from me. There's a bunch of music in there, some radio, and an interview with the esteemed Richard Reynolds. He talks about what it's like to be a planner who does stuff, especially Guerrilla Gardening. And there are interesting little links/connections between each song and the next - if you can spot all the links there's a mysterious but exciting special prize for you. Post your guesses in the comments.

Audioblog/Hipcast seem to have given up for the last few days, files just sit there transcoding forever, so I'm afraid you can't stream the audio from this page, you'll have to click and download. Or something. It's about 60MB.

gardeners_answer_time.m4a

writeroom

WriteRoom is for MacOS. A very simple, no distractions word processor that's more like a typewriter.  DarkRoom is the Windows version.

via 43 folders.

history matters

A fantastic article by Stephen Fry in today's Observer. Well, actually, it's a speech he gave at the launch of History Matters. You should read it. Because if planning isn't about learning from the past to try and think about the present and the future then what is it about?

I studied history at university, I didn't enjoy it, partly because I was lazy and stupid, partly because it was really badly taught but I've always thought its breadth makes it the perfect discipline for a planner. Anyway, whatever you think of history you should read Mr Fry's piece, because it's beautifully written, smartly argued and true.

germany 3-1 portugal

off the list

I'm excited to announce that Kevin Rothermel is coming off the Hire These People list (over there on the right). He's got himself a job at  McKinney-Silver.  Congratulations to them and well done to Kevin. That's brilliant. Anyone else want to leave or join the list?

coffee morning two and other things

Coffee morning two was top fun. Dave was first to arrive. (You should check out the simple genius of his brand vs brand thing, it's slightly addictive.) Then came Jason, who'd I also seen on Wednesday at the WARC conference thing.

Then a slew of people arrived, Rich (far left), then Paul, with Lebowski inevitably in tow (far right). (They blundered in rather loudly in the middle of the two-minute silence and were more embarrassed than I've seen anyone embarrassed for a long time.) At the back of the peloton was Picklin Paul, who to the regret of all brought no piccalilli.

And almost lastly was Henry. And as I type this I've remembered that he requested a mocha when I was getting some drinks in and I completely forgot. Sorry Henry.

Topics of conversation - Paul's fencing and running (and bleeding).  How apparently PSFK isn't some gleaming corporate machine. How to make pickles. The future of Google. What a great place Canada is. How it was a shame that coffee was all blokes this week. And other things.

Jeffre arrived too late for much conversation. But here he is, later that day, watching The Batman with Arthur.

School of the Web - the World Cup assignment

As you might have noticed, I've been rather enjoying the world cup, there's been drama, joy and decent football. And there seems to have been lots of bad design.

So, while we're working on marking Assignment 7, I thought I'd set Assignment 8.

I'd like you to write a design brief for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. You decide what that should incude. Logo? Mascot? Opening ceremony? Special stupid rules for Sepp Blatter to suggest?

Why?

1. Because effective communications planners are going to have to learn how to brief design.
2. Because it's football. It's fun.
3. Because The Design Conspiracy have splendidly volunteered to help me mark it, and do some designs to the winning brief. (And that's your fabulous prize.)

Minimal rules and clues this time - but you should know by now what we feel about concision and direction. Deadline, end of July. No file bigger than 3MB. Have at it.

IT conversations on Thursday 8

Hey all you Continuous Partial Attention junkies. Here's who invented it - Linda Stone with a fantastic presentation from Emerging Technology 2006.

what next? brother beyond to tour?

Thousands of years ago I was a 'Head Of Interactive' trying to convince Leo Burnett that the internet was going to be quite popular. It didn't work. And Steve Bowbrick and Ivan Pope were starting Webmedia, inventing everything and being two of the British faces of Bubble 1.0. (Though obviously we didn't know it was 1.0 then, or a bubble.) I didn't know them, but I used to pretend I did.

Then they went their separate ways and I had the occasional coffee with Steve and swapped the occasional comment with Ivan. Both very nice blokes. And then I saw on bowblog that they're back in business together, with a really interesting thing called snipperoo. It made me feel all warm and nostalgic, like when Madness reformed for that first Finsbury Park gig. Ivan's got a great post about the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 here and I liked this glum picture of Steve. The best of British Bubble luck to them both.

portugal 0-1 france