Russell Davies

the future of something

Regular readers of this blog (both of you) will be familiar with Stefan Bucher. He's a smart and talented man. And he's a gentleman too. I interviewed him a while ago. And Arthur weighed in with thoughts on Stefan's monster book. And Stefan designed lots of stuff for us. And then Stefan started doing his Daily Monster thing. And we talked about it here because it's smart and nice and he does that interesting blowy ink thing that I'm still not convinced has a proper name.

But the fantastic thing is, it's just completely taking off. People are posting brilliant comments, and playing the games that Stefan's playing with them and I think it's much more than a designer trying to spin out some book idea, it's turning into some new way of doing and thinking about illustration and communication. Or something. It's something genuinely new and special. I think so anyway. And so does Der Spiegel (click on the lady in the blue and wait for two minutes). Stefan's turning illustration into a digital performance art. Or something. Whatever it is, it's brilliant. And I bet it keeps growing. Someone let boing-boing know. 344 design - we love you back.

before the internet had the the

Let's campaign to get the the taken out again. This is fantastic. 15 million people! Via The Fruits Of Imagination. (And they're doing coffee tomorrow, if you're in Toronto, please join them.)

I'm off to explore internet. And web.

martin cole

Interviewed the irrepressible Martin Cole this morning. He's a planner with WPP and a top musician. And I took this, my first pinhole polaroid portrait. Which means Martin managed to hold this half smile perfectly still for 30 seconds. Spooky.

We ranged far and wide, including things like; how to wrap cable, Agent Sumo, The Search For Cool,  (youtube links),  what is cool discussion, what is cool result, Kim Jones, jobs on microsoft and taste,  iain tait's youth image,   Livingstone Skate Park, Whitby and Goths, (we talked pathetically about the collision of goth and hip-hop, betraying that we know nothing about it, but it seems to be out there and represented best by Alias), Bill Drummond, No Music Day, bowling for columbine. The audio is roughly edited because of battery failure on various devices but it seems reasonably listenable. 

MP3

thankyou Martin, that was an absolute treat.

want to work at tribal ddb sfo?

Mark Lewis is trying the 'fill your vacancy via blog' route too.

"We are looking for someone fairly senior (7 to 10 years) with a mix of online, offline and general business experience. We aren't just looking for someone who is comms focused, but a person who can generate business building ideas too. In return you get a chance to help the Interactive Agency of the Year expand even further into the world of 2.0. Current clients range from Clorox to Nike and everything in between."

All the details and contact info are here.

coffee morning christmas party

This looks interesting. Shall we make it the Coffee Morning Christmas party? I'm getting a couple of tickets, if anyone else wants to go, that would be nice, see you there.

maple syrup

Don't forget, if you want to get your maple syrup propositions in do so by the end of December 8th.

geography

I've been doing a little bit of webxploring for someone, they're thinking of trying to use their staff (who are all over the world, in some fairly unreachable places) to create interesting stuff for the internet. They want to find easy ways to upload pictures and other stuff to the web, and to automatically geotag it.

So I've been looking at geotag related stuff and I thought I'd chuck it up here. If you're familiar with this world then this'll be very old hat. But it might be useful to someone.

I'd never looked at wikimapia before, which is what you'd expect. Here's Stonehenge, here's BBC Broadcasting House (with Dr Watson's House to the left) and here's Multnomah Falls.

I've been half-heartedly playing with Platial for a while. I like the way you can build your own themed maps (here's a map of the Top Ten Cities Looking For Information On Chapped Lips According To Google Trends) and I imagined it would be a good companion to ebcb and agpfacotaat. But somehow I've not really got round to much.

I've done a bit of plazing too. I like the sense of discovery you get when you log a new plaze. But I'm not really sure why I'm doing it beyond that. Except the badge down there on the right indicates just how much time I spent at home.

Not quite sure why geocaching hasn't gotten bigger than it has. There's something in it. Similarly all those things that allow you to tag the real world somehow (with stickers or big yellow arrows or whatever) don't seem to have achieved critical mass either. I wonder if it's all just too much trouble for people. Or am I just missing something?

I do like the ease of adding geographical tags to pictures in flickr. But I guess it depends on being somewhere that's mapped and it's a little after the fact.

You really want to be able to do it automatically. The best option here would seem to be the Nokia N95 when it launches, or using a GPS mouse and Zonetag (as described by Tom Coates) but that again seems to require a Nokia 60 or some Motorola phone. I got my phone to talk to a GPS thing and work with Nav4All and I've got Shozu installed and working, but I can't see how to get info from one to the other. This Sony thing looks nifty too but it'll only work with PCs (I think).

swivel

Robin emailed me about Swivel. It's brilliant; 'YouTube for data'. You can upload and share whatever data you've got and you can compare your data with everything else they've got. And the system will even look for correlations in the background and point out things you might have missed. This is going to be fantastic.

And it reminded me of a conversation we were having the other day. What happens when things like Yankelovich reports start turning up on BitTorrent? They already get passed around informally by email (you know, between friends) but that has some sort of socially imposed limit. You know where it came from. But P2P makes it anonymous and one person can share with many, with no-one knowing anyone else. Makes you wonder, are owners of huge amounts of proprietary research the next record companies?

rainstorming

Spent this morning tiptapping away on the webbynet. Gave myself a headache. Went for a run. The run wasn't that good, but being outside was a tonic. Then I saw this story in The Metro about a school that's given all its pupils rainsuits; they aim to do at least half of their lessons outside within the next two years. And that's what we've all been missing. The outdoors. That's the best creative space.

I'm thinking I'm going to do more working in the park, will need to investigate ruggedising solutions for m'Mac. But I'm also thinking how interesting it would be to try and do brainstorms and stuff outside. Things to think about:

you'd have to find waterproof versions of those huge post-it notes.

you'd have to think hard about terrain. If you're going to be sticking lots of post-its up you'll be needing lots of trees. Or a hedge.

you'd have to organise your agenda around the light. Brainstorming during daylight, powerpoint presentations before dawn or during the twilight. You could do it like one of those outdoor cinema things, with everyone in deckchairs.

I like this idea. Anyone want to try some outdoor meeting/brainstorming something?

want to work at tbwa?

Here's a message from Tom Morton of TBWA:

TBWA\London is looking for new talent for its planning department.  Two positions are on offer - one rising star / midweight and one midweight / senior.  Both are opportunities to work in a hybrid advertising / content / digital environment, and the accounts up for grabs include PlayStation.  Please send applications to tom.morton at tbwa-london.com.

And if you want to know what the competition might be like have a look at what Robin said about the responses he got when he stuck a job up here and on his blog.