Russell Davies

apples scores

Simon and I have just been through all 50 entries for Assignment 10 for the last time. And since there were so many entries I don't think we can mark each one individually. Sorry about that. Instead we've recorded about 30 minutes of audio talking about the best ones, what might be good stuff to do and what to learn from this exercise. Hopefully.

Here are the 10 propositions from the winning paper from Ben M.

1. Apples help digest everything else.

2. Eat apples. Save the trees. Reduce global warming.

3. Sweet snack, good for teeth, recycled packaging

4. Apples. Earth’s vitamin tablet.

5. Apples. The dawn of Atheism.

6. Apples. Detox since before tox.

7. Apples. Smoothies without plastic.

8. (RED) Apples

9. Apples. Faster food.

10. English apples. Fruit without emissions.

They're not all brilliant, but quite a lot of them are. More than I could have done. As we discuss in the audio a proposition is a limited tool, increasingly unsuited for building communications today but it's a really good thing to get good at. It's like a musician practicing scales. Thinking propositions teaches you to think about precis, memorable language, tangental thoughts, differentiation, all sorts of things.

Even people who don't like propositions find themselves using this kind of thing as a kind of internal headline. A way of summing up an idea.

Quite a lot of you didn't really do propositions. Many of you gave us ideas for the marketing of apples, which is fine and dandy and many of them were great ideas, but that's not really what we were looking for, this is not what this exercise was about. This was about creating pithy little communications thoughts such as those above. Similarly many of you gave us 'territories'; areas where we might find a proposition (healthiness, range, englishness, temptation, etc) but didn't distill it into a coherent thought.

This might be because lots of you didn't read the task properly, including the addenda (is that a word?) to the task we added in the comments. First rule - read the whole assignment. However, it may be that we weren't clear so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and apologise for that.

Anyway - we'll bumblingly try and explain what we mean in the audio.

BUT, although Mr Grant will think me a hopeless ludite, I think this proposition thing is well worth practising so I'm going to suggest we do it again as a quick end of November task.

The subject is Maple Syrup. Just 5 propositions. Each one just a sentence of 10 words or less.

Try and do some as good as numbers 4, 6 and 7 above. Get them in before December 8th.

Hope this makes sense, and congratulations to Ben who wins this month's challenge. Though I've not worked out what his prize is yet.

MP3

no music day

If you're listening right now (2pm GMT) then Ben Thompson is interviewing Bill Drummond about No Music Day on Resonance FM. They've started with Douglas Bader talking about Hurricanes so it's off to a good start. I'm taping it off the internet (or trying to) so I can hopefully post an audio file later.

update - here's the audio, it starts oddly, street noise into Douglas Bader, and it's a little quiet for the first couple of minutes (my fault), if you want to skip through it gets to a reasonable volume at about 3:27. And it's well worth listening to.

MP3

And here's the text of the splendid Quentin Crisp quote.

all over the world

I'm increasingly convinced that what we'll know most about in a year or so is not brands and communications and that, but how to be a global small business. How to do distributed creativity and collaboration, that kind of thing.

The last post I did on this was inspired by Ryan Freitas's little gawker experiment, and this post, and our recent experiments, have been inspired by his splendid talk at Adaptive Path, available from IT conversations.

First thing, we've cut way back on regular email and started sending video to each other. It's dead easy to fire up iSight and email a video and they're just much more rewarding bits of stuff. They contain all the required factual info (or whatever) but also tons of useful rich context. Like how people might be feeling. How enthused they are. What time it is. The stuff you get when you share an office with someone but that you never pick up from text based stuff.

I would love an application that would extract these videos from our mails and build a single archive video with everything in the order it was made - so you get a sort of linear video version of the conversational thread.

I've also been experimenting with Twitter which is rather excellent. It gives you tiny real time glimpses into what people are up to. You can text your updates or do it via the web or IM and the updates come to you via SMS, IM or direct onto your blog. You can see the 'what am I doing' thing over on the left somewhere. At the moment it's only giving me an insight into the life of DanG which is slightly odd because I've never actually met him.

We're all also very excited by scrybe. We've signed up for the beta but not got invites yet. Seems like it's got a lot of stuff we might use.

faris wins

Faris wins. Congrats to him. It's a great read. As are all the entries. November is next, start making notes. Thanks to all the nominators and nominees.

it's soo fresh

God, I love this. Takes me right back. This is from a bunch of old school treats listed at music thing. Brilliant.

another job

Fallon are looking for a senior planner. Details here.

it is obvious

Went to see the H.A. Rothholz posters at the Margaret Howell shop. City Of Sound's already written about it better than I could but I was especially struck by the obviousness of the messages the posters were trying to convey - 'Fence All Openings' 'Buy Stamps In Books' 'Drivers Be Alert'.

Sorry about the bad picture, but this is a haunting reminder to tie your shoe-laces.

I very much like the stuff in Margaret Howell but they do seem to match the austerity of the product with a certain 50s chilliness in the quality of the service.

someone at nike or rga...

...or even snipperoo please tell me you're working on some way to get my nikeplus run data onto my blog more easily. I'm getting a little fed-up with screengrabbing and pasting these little graphs. It'd be lovely to have a little 'send to blog' button. Or a widget I can have running on the blog that would grab data from the nikeplus site. I can't be the only runner who desperately needs some public affirmation for every run he or she does.

Or does it already exist and I'm an idiot?

i love the smell of espresso in the morning

Faris and Asi, two of the brave souls who made it to Bar Italia at 7am this morning. Well played.

OF and Henry making it look a little colder than maybe it was.

Andy making it look like July. Good work.

And Ben, of The Design Conspiracy, who never show their faces. And I couldn't be arsed with messing around with blurring or something so here's a monkey in glasses. Doesn't mean anything. Just a monkey in glasses.

I do like this coffee morning business, I love the way all this digital stuff is leading to actual real person connectivity. It's fab. This week it's happened in Chicago, and I suspect it's happened in Toronto, Sydney and Kansas City.

new ideas

Richard, once again, is onto something.