Just because people seem interested here's the full list of where people have come from, from the last bit of the visitor log:
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the magic number
Today is the third anniversary of this blog. Blimey. Half of me thinks it's flown by, I've only just started, half of me thinks - three years, that must be enough, I have nothing left to say.
Anyway, I hope you'll forgive a little birthday indulgence, it seems traditional to celebrate with a round-up of stats and posts so I'll do the same.
994 posts - I should have made it the round 1,000 for the third anniversary. But the 2,782 comments, that's all down to you lot. Well, mostly. Many thanks.
Technorati says that 978 links point to this blog. Or maybe 1,082. Who knows? More than you'd think anyway. Which makes me the 8,217th most read blogger in the world. (So if you think of Boing Boing as Liverpool FC, this makes me rather like a reasonably succesful junior school team. Doing quite well at a county level. Though I've just noticed that if you combine all my blogs I get to be the 3,924th most read blogger in the world, which maybe more like being Loughborough University's second team. Don't knock it. They do a lot of sports science there.)
According to statcounter (which I've been using since June 2005) I get an average of about 1,500 unique visitors a day. But that includes ebcb too, I've never worked out how to untangle them. The big spikes are visits from the BBC website, to do with the book.
But what always blows me away isn't the numbers, it's the fact the all these people come from all over the world. Brilliant. Out of the 9,000 visits in the current usage log (and I have no idea what that really means) 3,431 are from the UK, 2,247 are from the US, but more interestingly 32 are from Bulgaria, 15 are from Peru, 1 is from Angola and 122 are from Unknown.
Looking through the archives it becomes very clear that I have a very limited number of ideas and that I just keep repeating them. But these are some of the bits that stick in my head:
Benches. They crop up here and here, two and a half years later.
Silly projects like 'Brands In Our Bathroom' and Hotel Telly. And of course, there was disappointment.
Remember this picture from ShowStudio?
And I think this is the post that taught me what blogging is all about. You just put stuff out there and the world decides what to do with it. Have a read of the 98 comments on this thing. They own this post, not me. Very interesting. And then this is when I noticed I was being read.
I won a pair of FLOM dunks and then I went on sabbatical starting here with Arthur's first appearance on the blog.
And ending 66 days later here, with Arthur worn out in the car.
Looking at the sabbatical entries again it's become clear to me that that was when I decided to build a life that involved more not-working regular hours, hence Nike, freelance and OIA. If you're a little disgrunteld with your working life, don't take a sabbatical, it's fatal.
I found this sign on the door of the loo's at Unilever.
Went to Bucharest with Bill.
I talked about life in badges.
ebcb won a yahoo prize.
We geeked out at the Acton Depot. And I stuck some of my w+k music up, featuring jed and joe. And actually started writing stuff about planning and that.
I think this is my favourite picture on the whole thing.
Here's the first APSotW mention and the first bit of video. And now I'm starting to think like I'm boring you all and there's no point recapping stuff that's not that old.
That's something else I've noticed about my blogging. Lots of it just seems to peter out...
...but before this one does can I just say how much I've enjoyed it all, because of you lot. That's been the best bit about the whole thing, making friends with all of y'all. Thanks.
how to be a planner
Just found a brilliant quote over at Creative Generalist. This will now become my standard advice for everyone who wants to get good at planning.
"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." - Thomas H. Huxley
highly abashed gearhead gnarlyness
(This is a stream of nonsense about cars. Because everytime I see one of metacool's splendid Gearhead Gnarlyness posts I want to write something. But I don't know anything about cars, really.)
I'm getting old. I'm finding toy cars more and more evocative and nostalgic. I was in a model shop with Arthur the other day and found this Battle Kings Tank Transporter and this Bertone Barchetta which overwhelmed me with nostalgia (a bit, I'm not Proust or anything). So I bought them.
(I especially remember the bouncy suspension on the mid 70s Corgi Whizzwheels. They don't make them like that anymore)
And I was in a very nice model car museum near Skegness (it was raining) and saw these rather fine Hot Wheels Blings. And they made me start to think about my relationship with cars.
I've worked on car accounts for most of my career in advertising. A few years on Fiat/Lancia, a few on Nissan and a few on Honda. I've always rather enjoyed it but I never really fit in. Because I'm not a petrolhead. We used to the British Grand Prix all the time and I spent the whole time complaining about the noise. We'd drive a selection of exotic sports vehicles and I'd try and get everyone to slow down. The first time I took a company car home to show my Mum and Dad it was a Nissan 300ZX and I was proudest of the carphone in it. I probably never got it above 80mph. (Apart from the time I spun one, showing off to some creatives, which finally proved to me that I was not built to drive fast.)
But it's not that I don't like driving or cars. I love driving and cars. I just don't like driving fast. And I don't like all the stuff you're supposed to like about cars.
This seems to capture more of the essence of 'car-ness' than some fancy Porsche or Ferrari.
I love the way we use cars to say so much about ourselves. They're such a conscious, careful and expressive brand choice. And I love the way we turn them into our little worlds. (The best ever expression of this is Martin Parr's From A To B and the accompanying TV programme - does anyone have a tape of that? This picture's from there.) And I love the romance of driving. Late nights. Shouting along to the radio. Truck stops. All that.
This is probably my dream vehicle. I'd love one of these. But if not available at large scale I'd settle for this.
But I hate the complacency of the car industry. They promise so much and deliver so little. (Which is why Honda was such a refreshing change). But the thing that constantly gets me is the paucity of the design imagination. Hot Wheels, Matchbox and Funkmaster Flex can come up with stuff that actually excites people. Interesting shapes. New ideas. But the car industry? Nothing.
Which is why I've started collecting vehicle designs that actually seem interesting to me. Like these fantastic looking RNLI rescue vehicles. Look at the shapes and the scale of these things. This is what we were promised in the 70s.
You're not telling me there wouldn't be a consumer market for one of these. It might be slow but it'll out Hummer a Hummer.
(Finally a front three-quarter facing right, I knew we'd get there eventually)
Or look at this. Finally someone has taken their design cues from Gerry Anderson. But why does it have to be a crane? Why can't it be some cool, hybrid, electric truck? That's how we'll persuade people to give up the gas guzzlers. By building stuff that looks like the future was supposed to look, not cute little smart cars.
Anyway. Hmm. I'm getting interested in cars again. It's been a while. More on a car theme later. (And it's become clear to me. Basically, I like big wheels.)
plannr.net
Some things have come together. I registered plannr.net a while ago as a sort of 2.0 joke, not sure what to do with it. And Alex P built Web2.0 logo creator. And lots of the people on the list of 'all the planners' were slightly floored by the number of extra blogs they might 'have' to read. So I added another thing to my ziki, pointed plannr.net at it and added all the feeds for everyone on the list. So, assuming it works, you can go to one place and see the latest stuff that any of those 100 plus planners has written. Or you can subscribe to the whole thing here. Let me know if it seems useful or not. (And if you want to be removed, let me know.)
Add: hmm. The ziki doesn't seem to be working right now. I'll try and work out what's up. And the subscription link about needs to be right-clicked and pasted into a feedreader. You can't just click on it.
i never should have left
Huge congrats to everyone at w+k london. And to the rest of the w+k world which seems to have gone blog crazy recently. Made me quite nostalgic for April 6th 2004, when I stuck this picture of Sean, Boo and Mick up as the first entry on the welcome to optimism blog and everyone said 'what's a blog?'.
This picture still sums up quite a lot of what w+k's about. Apart from anything else, it was a Sunday.
the great british holiday
There's been a lot of talk in the papers recently about the revival of the traditional British holiday. Especially following the hand-baggage farago. We've been doing that for a while, not because of security scares or because of eco-concern about flying but because going abroad is always such a hassle. And there's lots of bits of Britain we've not seen yet. Anyway. Here are some pictures of our holidaying in Mablethorpe and the North Yorkshire Coast. Just incase you were thinking of cancelling that club med trip.
art and commerce
I've always thought the interesting thing about advertising and many of the creative industries is the enforced and everpresent tension between art and commerce. It's the combination of the two that makes life interesting. Jarvis Cocker talks about Art Schools on this radio 4 programme, and the little bit of history in there throws more light on that tension. It also points out one of the reasons why Britain might be unusually good at those industries - the provision of art schools occasioned by the industrial revolution.
while we were camping
We've been off camping in Lincolnshire and staying in a house near Whitby/Robin Hood's Bay. Very nice. Hardly been near a computer. Not checked my email. So sorry if you've been trying to get in touch. One thing I did was pop into a cybercafe a couple of times and contribute to the Fast Company blogjam. I suspect I got hold of the wrong end of the stick with this. Everyone else wrote long, thoughtful pieces about innovation, social networking and themselves and I wrote short, pointless things about frozen spam, baseball and goths. Ah well.
Also, while I was away, Mark McGuiness posted an interview we did together about business emotional intelligence and stuff. I can't bring myself to listen to it but I hope it's OK. Mark's a really interesting guy, you should read his blog.
Picture above is of Feedback Loop by Kenny Hunter. We called in at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park on the way home, which is always worth a visit. Here's Arthur studying James Turrell's Deer Shelter sky.
out again
We're off to the seaside again. Won't be back for ten days. Posting will be sporadic. Probably pictures from my phone if anything. Except for occasional trips to wifi locations for work stuff.