Russell Davies

listening to consumers

I know this is a cheap shot in a way but this post at 37 signals / signal to noise demonstrates really well how useful consumer feedback can sometimes be.

These are all consumer comments on the MacRumours forum following the original announcement of the ipod - so these are from hardcore fans, exactly the people we're always told to pay close attention to.

"I still can’t believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently! Why oh why would they do this?! It’s so wrong! It’s so stupid!"

"gee! an mp3 player with a HD! how original! kinda reminds me of a JUKEBOX i once knew.
I’d call it the Cube 2.0 as it wont sell, and be killed off in a short time…and it’s not really functional."

"All that hype for an MP3 player? Break-thru digital device? The Reality Distiortion Field is starting to warp Steve’s mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off."

"There are already two products similar to this on the market. The Nomad Jukebox and the Archos Jukebox which can come with a 20 gig HD. The iPod is obviously a lot cooler and has firewire, but it is far from revolutionary. I for one am disappointed and think that apple is making a mistake by trying to get into this market."

Good job Apple paid attention and abandoned that whole ipod thing.

ken robinson

At TED. One of the best speeches I've ever seen from Ken Robinson. Charming, funny, modest. But also hugely powerful and thought-provoking - about the need to stop educating the creativity out of kids. I can't explain it all here. But you should probably buy his books. I've not read any of them but I intend to. I hope they're as good as he is in person.

One useful thought for planners/ad folk. He defined creativity as "the process of having original ideas that have value". I like that. You know how agencies are always going on about how creative they are, and then other people talk about them overplaying their creativity, and that creativity isn't important, it's efficacy, or whatever, and we have this bizarre tradition of some people being called 'creatives' and some not etc.

I think a lot of that could be short-circuited by asking - 'are you having original ideas that have value?'

Technorati tag: TED conference

frozen ashes and snow

Went to see the Ashes and Snow exhibition while in LA. In the Nomadic Museum.

The art was a bit ho hum. The artist made a very good decision to have his art in such a magnificent building because otherwise it would have looked quite a lot like new age hotel art. If architecture is frozen music then this art is frozen Deep Forest. Big, monumental, ponderously full of staged significance. You can imagine a BP logo in the corner.

The building though is fantastic.

A cathedral of cardboard and shipping containers. It’s all cheap, everyday materials but the scale and proportions make it beautiful and lovely. Too big for me to get decent pictures but you can see some here. It’s grand and intriguing on the outside and mysterious and calm on the inside. Very like a cathedral.

StoryCorps

StoryCorps is a fantastic idea. People interviewing each other as a way of collecting oral history. Of course being a planner I'm instantly thinking - what a great way to do research. Particularly as everything's better when you put it in an airstream.

Future Marketing DooDah

Piers has asked me to mention this on here, and since he says it's going to be good it probably will be. It's got an interesting bunch of people speaking at it.

I thought I was going to be speaking at the London one, but I can't be because the guy they've got listed on the site only has one 'l' in his name. And no-one would invite someone to speak at something and then misspell their name would they? It's not like the correct spelling of my name is a closely guarded secret.

And also, it can't be me because it says there'll be no lecturing or platitudes, and if that's the case then I wouldn't have anything to say.

unintended features

This is my phone - a Sony Ericsson K750i - I'm a big fan of it. All the pictures here were taken with it. And it has a splendid feature which I suspect they didn't design (though maybe they did) but which is genius and falls into a general class of very important features I'd call fidgetability.

You know when you're sitting in a cafe or a bar, for some reason, people tend to have their phones out in front of them, and they fidget with them. The great thing about this phone is it's perfectly balanced, and the lens cover creates a pivot so it spins round really well - with only a minimal shove. (Observe movie below.)

I think these ludic features will be increasingly important as actual functionality standardises. (Many thanks to Richard for teaching me what ludic means.)

spinning phone movie (About 5.5MB)

I've just noticed my camera does it too. So following phone filmed by camera, here's camera filmed by phone. Maybe Sony are onto something, ipods don't spin well. Anyone else got any technology they want to spin?

grass science

Was at Highbury for a meeting the other week, then we tacked on to the end of a tour and went down pitchside. They had these huge Close Encouter style lighting rigs on the pitch which I assumed were something to do with drying out the pitch, though that seemed unlikely. But I was wrong. Apparently they're there to make the grass stand-up after it's been played on. Which is what they want to happen. Isn't that an interesting thing? The lengths people go to.

I have seen the future and it's Dutch

I'm sitting blogging at Schipol, killing time donated to me by a delayed KLM flight.

I've just used the extra time to sign-up for the Privium programme which is a marvel of the future.

It's an iris scanner and card-reader thing which allows you to bypass passport control and sail past your fellow passengers, who all think you're some kind of James Bond. Incredibly swift and efficient and easy to use. If this is the future in DavidBlunkettLand then sign me up. I'd love to pay for the bus via an iris scanner which automatically debits my GovCreds account. And so what if they were continually monitoring me, at least then they might be able to tell me where I dropped my keys.

paul feldwick - he's the man

I picked a book up at Schipol yesterday – Brands and Branding (The Economist Series) Rita Clifton et al. (Interesting how it was multiple authors, where most of the other books in the series weren’t; does this remind us what a subjective business branding is?).

I motored through it on the plane, lots of good stuff fin there, lots of good reminders and suggestions, though nothing a good planner wouldn’t have come across elsewhere.

(And why do these books always have to be so dry? Yes, brands are important (lifeblood of the consumer economy, socio-cultural artefacts, blah blah blah) but they’re also frivolous and very human and working on them can be entertaining and exciting. You wouldn’t get that from this book.)

But the best chapter by far is Paul Feldwick’s on Brand Communications. Really good. What smart man. Though very few people would put us in the same branding camp (he’s really committed to his beard, I only flirt with mine) I found myself agreeing with everything he says. I’d particularly urge you to read his section on Watzlawick which is really clear and useful. I saw Feldwick speak about this once, a while ago, and have stolen everything he said and integrated it thoroughly into everything I say. (Mark Earls was at the same meeting, and I bet he’s done the same thing)

I thought I'd written about Watzlawick once on here, but now I can't find it. Though I bet it wasn't very clear, so buy the book and read the Feldwick chapter instead. (And simultaneously support my ecommerce experiments).

blogging questions

Someone emailed me these questions for a research thing so I thought I'd answer them here. And if anyone else wants to chime in I'm sure they'd be grateful.

what does it mean to you - expressing your ideas and intrests on the web?

It's a way of getting my thoughts out of my head and finding out what I think. I'm very bad at working on my own, much better at collaboration and the blog is a small way of getting around that. It relates to that quote 'how can I know what i think until I hear what I say'. I'm the same, I don't know what I think until I see what I blog. And ebcb is just a silly little interest that got too big.

I've always been a person who had ideas of things to do but never ever did anything about them. The internet (and blogging and let's not understate the value of digital photography) is a really easy way of doing something about them. EBCB has taught me the value of just starting things. If you start something, and do a little bit every now and then, suddenly you look back and you realise you've done a lot. I like that.

I also find it a great way of keeping a personal history. I've never kept a diary or journal or anything but now I have a searchable index of lots of the stuff I've thought about.

who do you think reads it?

I don't really know who reads it. There's quite a lot of people who find things accidentally. And it's become very little to do with me.

Then there are people who I would now kinda regard as my friends even though I've never met them. Like Dave and Anne. (Hope that's not too presumptuous or sad.) And then there's people I used to know a bit (like Steve) who I think I know much more now. Via their blogs. And their interaction with this one. I suspect blogs shouldn't really be understood as singular things, they should be understood as bundles of people and threads

and, how would you express these intrests if the internet didn't exist?

I'd mutter in my sleep.

just a short reply would do.

ok

i'm just doing some work on internet communities and if the internet is complementary tool for
forming social bonds of whether it takes away from physical social relations.

For me it's entirely complementary. I'm not that good at social bonds in the real world. I like people I know. But I'm shy of other people. This is a great way to know people without meeting them. And then you can move on to meeting them after you've established what you have in common.

Hope that helps. What does anyone else think?