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coffee success
Beeker clearly did a splendid job hosting coffee morning yesterday. High quality attendees and excellent reporting back. Maybe she should do it every week.
game on
Arthur likes a challenge. Here's Paul's attempt to out shout him. Here are a couple of responses:
scream1.mov (224K)
scream2.mov (356K)
You decide. Paul or Arthur?
ethnographies?
Someone's got in touch to find out if there's a research company or someone out there who can help with a project like this:
"We are looking to find a company/group of people that can help us conduct some self-directed ethnographies. Ideally, we would like to create these ethnographies online in a blog (or similar) format to start. From there we will follow up with some face to face video ethnography work. Finally, we need to be able to conduct this project globally, (North America, South America, Europe and Asia). Help!"
I suggested OIA, but they weren't convinced. So if anyone's done something like this before and wants to do it again for a global brand in a hurry please leave info in the comments or email me and I'll pass your details on.
arthur and technology
As requested by Paul and Ben, more Arthur. In this episode he attempts to get the iSight mic to overload.
arthurscreams.mov (1.7MB)
brand-free until 2007
I’ve got nothing left to say about brands and advertising. It’s not that complicated. I don’t think the blogosphere needs any more pontification about that sort of nonsense from the likes of me. And, frankly, I’m beginning to bore myself with it. So I'm going to take the rest of the year off and not talk about brands. Hopefully I'll have some new thoughts in the new year.
In the meantime I’m going to try and write about other things. Not sure what. Just other things. Just to discover what I think of them. It’s only for a month and a bit.
(Though I will acquit myself of my responsibilities on the School of the Web and Post Of The Month, if brands come up there I guess we can talk about them.)
And it looks like I'm not the only person who suspects we need to reduce the amount of blogging noise about brands. Or at least increase the quality.
the rules of coffee morning
There will be a likemind meeting in Oslo on 1st December. (Likemind is like coffee mornings except more branded and ripe for monetisation.) And Angela is keen to organise some getting together and chatting in LA. Anyone fancy helping her out? (hi Angela)
If it helps, I'll make up some rules of coffee morning:
1. Do talk about coffee morning
2. Say you're going to be somewhere at sometime (ie 11am at Breakfast Club) and turn up and sit there. Bring a book to read. If no-one else turns up that's fine, you've got a couple of hours of book reading. If someone does turn up. Hurrah!
3. Anyone can come.
4. No agenda. Just talk about whatever comes up.
5. Other beverages are allowed.
this is your brain on music
I suspect that one of the reasons I’m a creative generalism enthusiast is that I wasn’t allowed to do the A levels I wanted to do at school – English, Music and Physics. The timetable didn’t allow for that combination of arts and sciences. I’ve always had this feeling (obviously untrue) that if I’d been allowed to do that I’d be Thomas Dolby by now.
This strange combination of interests probably makes me the core audience for This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J Levitin but I suspect it’s more than just me that’ll like it. And I really liked it. Mr Levitin started life as a musician and then became a well-respected recording engineer and producer. Before chucking it all in and becoming an expert in neuroanatomy, cognition, perception and music. What a brilliant life. And he writes really well too. If you’re interested in the way the brain works, or how music works, or how people work you’ll like this book.
I’m never any good at writing proper book reviews so instead here are two little moments I attached sticky notes too. They don’t necessarily indicate what the book’s about but they were bits that snagged on my brain.
He mentions the British philosopher Alan Watts, author of the The Wisdom of Insecurity; “if you want to study a river you don't take out a bucketful of water and stare at it on the shore. A river is not its water, and by taking the water out of the river, you lose the essential quality of river, which is its motion, its activity, its flow.” I love that idea. And it explains a lot of my dissatisfaction with the way most industries do research.
And he also talks about spandrels, a term that evolutionary biology has borrowed from architecture. A spandrel is apparently an accidental byproduct of a design decision – so if you design some arches to hold up a dome then the space between the arches is a spandrel. And, according to Steven Pinker, music is a spandrel. "Music is auditory cheesecake. It just happens to tickle several important parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way, as cheesecake tickles the palate.” He thinks music is a byproduct of our evolutionarily adapted tastes for language, rhythm and stuff. Levitin disagrees and thinks music is useful evolutionary behaviour (citing the fact that Mick Jagger has slept with thousands of women despite being hugely ugly.) I'm simplifying tremendously.
I’m not qualified to enter that debate. But I think spandrel is a very useful term and will be attempting to shoe-horn it into all sorts of conversations very soon.
Reading this and listening to Bill Drummond talk about No Music Day has made me think about my own relationship with music again. I started a blog explicitly to talk about music. Because I felt I should be talking about something that’s that important to me. But I almost never write anything in it. I think I don’t like writing about music. I certainly don’t like reading about it. I think music might be an unbloggable part of my life. It’s good to know that something is.
beeker coffee
Beeker's going to host coffee morning on Friday because I've got to work. Usual arrangements; Breakfast Club, 11am, Friday. Anyone can come. You don't have to be a planner, or work in anything like advertising or 'digital', you won't be expected to talk about brands. It's just chatting about whatever comes up. It's nice.
Please someone turn up and show Rebecca some support.