Russell Davies

exactly what I said I wasn't going to do

I've just done a thing for w+k, they had a petcha-kucha-style thing in Amsterdam as a way for everyone to get some sleep between the incessant parties celebrating their 25th anniversary. And they asked me to do my thing. The format was 25 slides for 25 seconds each and I made some slides that I thought might be useful for other people, maybe. I've stuck them up on flickr, but these are my favourite new ones. Feel free to use if you think they might be good for something.

You'll have to guess what I actually said to go with them.

absent

Probably won't be on email. And I've turned comments off here, too much spam to let the garden go untended I'm afraid. And, if you're going to the Little Big Voice Lectures, I'll see you there, come and say hello. And when I'm back there will be changes. Oh yes, there will be changes.

twoll

Steve Bowbrick's got a fantastic little twitter service called Listen With Bowbrick. He twitters to point you at interesting stuff on the radio. It's a perfect use of a constrained service. Then, yesterday, he discovered/proved/invented the existence of another great twitter use - the instant survey or twurvey. (I'd like to suggest twoll.) Obviously it's open to spammy abuse but as a quick way of finding something out from a few distributed people it's damn smart.

work avoidance

I noticed something about myself today (Hurrah, you think, how fascinating). Tomorrow morning I've got to hand in my copy for next week's Campaign and I've got nothing. No words. No clue. Thing is, I've got quite a good idea for it. I know what I want to write about. It's quite interesting and there are things to be said. But I just can't start.

It doesn't normally work this way.

Normally I have no real clue what I'm going to write about, but something churns away at the back of my head all week and at some stage a sentence or phrase pops out. So I write that down. Then plaster stuff to the front and back of it until it gets to 440 words. Then I look at what I've written, try and work out what it's about and tweak, nudge and massage it until it actually is about that. Then I send it off.*

Can't do that this week. I've started with a strategy. I'm screwed.

*And please don't tell me that's how it reads, I know.

grant needs help

Grant McCracken is looking for someone to help him with a food ethnography project. The job description from him - "What I need is someone who can help with translation, linguistic and cultural, for France, Germany, and Belgium in in-home ethnographic interviews.  The product category is food.  The project will take about 3 weeks, so it's full time.  And the timing is soon, starting maybe as soon as the 26th.  A genuine passion for ethnography, consumers, and contemporary culture is called for."

Get in touch with him via his blog. (Click on About This Blog and scroll down for his email.)

out with a whimper

This is among the most embarrassing, personal and silly things I've ever put online. I made it for Anne last year because I was traveling on Valentine's Day. But the personal openness experiment is now over. All that stuff is moving over here where you'll only need to see it if you're signed in and in my neighbourhood etc.

If you want planning, brands, school of the web, post of the month etc, that'll stay right here. (Don't forget Assignment 13 due in tomorrow.)

Anne, Arthur, pictures of trees, Hotel TV, that'll be on vox, love to see you there.

storm in a...

I'm already embarrassed by what I wrote earlier. Perhaps shouldn't have bothered. But talking to a member of my clique earlier I realised that it was also quite an interesting phenomenon and one that was worth discussing. I'm also pathetically grateful for all the nice things everyone's said. Thanks for that. But let's move on. Sorry for the fuss. I'm still going to take a bit of a blogging holiday, probably worth doing anyway. See you in a week or so. And Marcus - calm down.

bugger

I spend a bit of time when talking to brands telling them that whatever they do there's always going to be some corner of the internet somewhere who'll give them a hard time and they're just going to have to live with it. It's one of the inevitable consequences of it being so easy for people to get their opinions online. I never really understood what this meant until yesterday, when I happened upon a couple of bits of the internet devoted to slagging off this blog. And me. Most of it is quite funny parody but some of it feels a bit mean in that forum-y flame-war way that you kind of assume died out a while ago.

It was rather chastening.

I spent most of last night telling myself not to write about it because no good will come of it, but I think that goes against the openness I try to practise here. And I can't bring myself to link to it because it's, well, depressing, and I don't want to. I know I should but bugger it. Equally I know I'm just supposed to laugh this stuff off and be somehow flattered but I can't do that. I guess I'm experiencing some of the consequences of an experiment with semi-public living and I'm naive if I didn't see it coming. But I didn't. I'm doing a presentation today in which I'll be talking about the way people seem willing to abandon quite a lot of privacy online because of the benefits that accrue. I still think that's true, but I think I'm discovering some of the penalties of too.

The substance of the complaints seem to be; I'm affectedly bumbling and luvvie in my writing style, I serve up a stream of inconsequential insights, I'm always hanging out with a little clique of important planning people and/or complete strangers, I'm overly proud of my peripatetic, freelance lifestyle, I'm always pushing my family into the blog and I'm just generally a tosser and an arse. If I've missed anything I'm sure someone will tell me.

I can't argue with a lot of that.

My writing is a bit meandering and I've always liked the way this corner of the blogosphere tends towards the self-deprecating and quiet. I don't know how to be self-deprecating about self-deprecation. That might be a sprial of affected modesty no-one can escape from. And this stuff is pretty easy to parody. I like. To mix in. Short sentences.

I can see how you'd get luvviness out of this too. I hate the reflexive carping of a lot of online writing so have tried, especially recently, to only point at things that I think are good and worth praising. After a while it gets hard to find synonyms for 'marvelous'. So I can see how that would be true. (Though I think the stingingest barb was 'faux luvviness'. That's harsh. So I'm all luvvie but I'm also faking it? Blimey)

The one I'll immediately cop to is 'stream of inconsequential insights' - it's a blog, isn't that what a blog is? And I don't think I've ever claimed that any of them have enormous consequence. I think of it as 'thinking outloud' but maybe I should do less of it. Maybe I should think through more stuff before I post it.

It's hard to defend myself against cliquiness. I write about my friends because they're my friends. And I'm not sure where the line is between a group of friends and a clique. I would say though, that most of the people I've linked to and talked about a lot are people I've met via their blogs in the last year or so. It's a fairly permeable group.

The conspicuous lifestyle and trophy family issues are also understandable. This blog is a little experiment in over-sharing and I enjoy it most when I don't have to draw an artificial line between work and life. For all the people who log on for the latest inconsequential insight there are friends of ours around the world who are interested in what Arthur's up to. I know some people think it's weird that I post stuff like the notes that Arthur leaves me, but I also know some people think it's good. Maybe it's the hybrid nature of the thing that's off-putting, is this my diary or my professional journal? It's both. Sorry if that's annoying. Same goes for the work and travel I do. This is what I do. I write about it because I like writing about it and because it seems interesting to some people. All my silly music and photography experiments are offered in the same spirit. You don't have to read if you don't want to. But if I had to choose, I think I'd abandon writing about work and just write about life. Maybe that's what I should do. Maybe this should just be a diary on vox.

It has made me wonder if I'm a blog equivalent of a stage father though, always thrusting Arthur into the limelight. Whenever I've asked him about it he's said he likes it, but he's only 6 so what does he know? I may do less of that.

Tosser and arse? You decide. Probably both. Sometimes. Who isn't?

All this has also made me feel especially bad about those occasions when I've had a go at other people or their blogs. It's easy to forget that there's a person behind a blog, easy to think of blogs as just another media property but they are more personal than that. I can cope if you slag off an ad I've made but having a go at my blog is more personal.

And I've also realised that I may be exactly the wrong person to be living with this much openness. I have to recognise that I'm incredibly thin-skinned and I can't laugh this stuff off, so I probably shouldn't ever aspire to write for Comment Is Free. I imagine my critics response to this self-absorbed lament will be 'ah diddums' and that might be fair, but it's rather got me down.

I remember Mena Trott talking about the moment she'd had enough of very public blogging and Bobbie Johnson discussing how it feels to have your blog dissected like a biology experiment. I fondly imagined that wouldn't happen to me. I don't know whether I'm more depressed about the people having a go at me or my own naiveté in not being prepared for it.  Probably the latter.

Anyway. Lessons learned: 1. Blurry hybrids are tricky. People want to know what you're doing, what your motivations are. 2. If you're going to venture into blogging you should prepare yourself for a bit of slagging. But preparing yourself intellectually is different to how you feel when it actually happens. 3. Don't follow your links in, you might not like what you find.

I'm going to be traveling a lot for the next week or so, and I wouldn't want to bore you with that, so I think I'm going to suspend blogging operations for a couple of weeks and see how it feels to not do it. (Though I'll probably keep twittering and flickering, I've got to have some digital fix).

I'll see you all in a couple of weeks for the feedback on Assignment 13. cheers

three things

1. Plannersphere Rules

The plannersphere wiki seems to be up and running. Some good stuff on there all ready. A few people have already asked questions about policy and ettiquette and I wanted to be clear that the rules are as strict and concise as they are for coffee morning and APSotW ie - just get on with it. Anyone can contribute, you can add whatever you think's appropriate, don't worry about breaking it, if you can't think of anything to add there's always some tidying up to be done. But, remember this, if you've not added anything yourself you're not allowed to complain about what everyone else has done.

2. Jobs

There are a couple of interesting new jobs over there on the left, under distributed village notices. One from Chris is for an Art Director for goodtechnology. The other is M&C Saatchi in India looking for a planner. Personally, I'm tempted by both. The rules on job posts are equally clear. If you've got a job to offer people, let me know and I'll stick it up. All I ask is you let me know how it went.

3. Coffee

Luca and Valerio are organising coffee in Milan. They can't face mornings so it's aperitoffee. Details here. And Mr Crocodile is doing coffee in Normandy. It's a worldwide revolution.

the computer behind the blog

This is my contribution to Iain's excellent 'computers behind blogs' idea. This is probably how I most often work; laptop perched on drum stool, me perched on the sofa bed. Here's the flickr group.