Russell Davies

rewalkit

The splendid folk at walkit are looking for an agency to help them with a redesign. That'd be an excellent thing to do. Go on.

double oblong foolscap

I found this the other day: "a scale diagram of current popular British printing papers, excluding ledger papers etc". Current means 1968. It was from an article about the arrival of metric measures in the printing industry.

I vaguely remember talk of Quad Crowns and the like in media and production chat when I was a junior media-buyer booking poster campaigns. You can see why metrification would see sensible but it would be nice to see Double Oblong Foolscap as drop-down option on your printer menu.

and...

planning gubbins

A couple of my friends in planningland sent me emails which I thought might be of use / interest to the last few planners reading this that I've not driven off with videos of trees and bad percussion.

First, Regan sent this:

In need of senior strategic planners!! We* are seeking senior and PD level planners for positions in NYC, SF and LA. The senior level roles need 6-7 yrs of planning experience and it goes up from there. If you've got a strong mind, you play well with others, need little supervision, are nice, like to cook, enjoy Parcheesi and reruns of "Freaks and Geeks", and can't live without facebook and Skype, we might just have a job for you.  Really, if you just hit on those first few - send us your resume. Send resumes to: [email protected]; [email protected] Please indicate in the subject line:  Planner. We will respond to you as quickly as possible. Thank you!

* - "We" are outside recruiters working for assorted agencies in those 3 cities.  I'm Regan DeKoning and I was the recruiter at Wieden in Portland from '00-'06.  My partner, Joan Stephens was the recruiting manager at adidas from '02-'07.  We'd love to see your resume.

Second, Mark sent this:

It's 40 years ago this summer that  Stanley and Stephen came up with this wierd thing called account planning. It's been a great ride for many of us and in many ways much better than working! Thing is a week today, I'm standing up with my chum Domenico in front of a paying audience and talking about what comes next in planningland

And rather than pretend he and I have anything new, novel or even relevant to say, we decided to crowdsource the answers...(in other words, we will rely on other people's suggestions) We've set up a wiki, go there, give one piece of advice to future generation (and to make it our preso a more entertaining show), please cut and paste the URL of a youtube video that brings this alive. Already we've had great responses from Judie Lannon (editor of Market Leader and one of JWTs first ever planners), Dan O'Donahue (Global Planning Chief for Publicis) and the Spectator Magazine's Wikiman, Rory Sutherland.

But it'd be great to have yours, too. Go on, it's easy. Just one piece of advice and a youtube video

like sunday morning

I went to band practice on Saturday. And we went pedaloing on Regent's Park lake on Sunday. Above is a bit of both.

stuart hall = genius

via cityofsound

there just is

bored in charge of a template

I don't know if anyone's still reading this on the actual blog. But if you are you'll notice I've removed all that gubbins that ran up and down each side of it. The badges, the links, the counters. And all the FeedFlare and all that stuff. Don't know why. Just fancied a change really. If you want gubbins, there's quite a lot here. And there's a soupy stream of everything RSSable here.

urban earth

picture by roo

Daniel Raven Ellison was a big hit at Interesting2008, talking about, well, the picture is a clue. He told us of his Urban Earth project, and his planned walks around Salisbury, London, Mumbai and Mexico City. The Urban Earth blog is now up, with some fantastic timelapse/stopmotion walking video. Excellent stuff.

north american speechifier?

Speechification seems to be going well. People like it. We're getting more and more listeners (resulting in slightly larger S3 bills for us every month) and Roo is steadily adding new, technically cleverer things. It's also clear that the BBC are hard on our heels, implementing things that will make some of what we do redundant, not right now, but eventually.

So it seems like we should work harder at our larger mission - curating English language speech radio from around the world - and doing that means we've got some big gaps to fill, the biggest being North America. We all follow shows like This American Life and Radio Lab via podcast but we can't keep linking to them all the time; we need someone to do the hard slog of listening to radio all day, ferreting out the obscurer wonders of NPR and CBC. Anyone fancy doing it? It's not very onerous, a post a week would probably do. And with a lot of NPR you don't even have to grab the audio, they archive such a lot online. Drop us an email ([email protected]) if you're interested and we'll get you set up.