Russell Davies

moving on

Adil at Amnesty asked me to stick this up. Anyone who might be able to help please get in touch with him.

"Amnesty International are looking for some digital-webby-developers-companies-geeks to help them "do something about the kidnapping, torture, secret camps, locking people up without trial or charge and general abuse our lovely government has been busying itself with as part of an apparent war on terror". It won't make you rich but it might make the world a tiny bit of a better place. They're looking especially for people who can develop social software and other clever web 2.0 thingy-me-bobs. contact adil.abrar at amnesty.org.uk for more." 

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

no more mr late guy

Right, following my slipshod behaviour with the last two assignments it's time to get a little rigorous. I will post on the first of the month. Entries need to be in by the 15th. Feedback will be posted by the end of the month. Honest.

So this is Assignment 13. (I'm counting the 'tell the future thing' as number 12, which I still need to think about). This one's supposed to be a little more real-worldy. See what you think. Imagine you get this email from a senior management person at an agency where you work:

"Dear Planner,

How are you? Good. Anyway.

We have an important new business prospect coming in to see us in 15 days. They are a packaged goods company considering launching a range of eco-friendly cleaning and laundry products.  Exactly what that means isn't clear yet. We're going to do all the usual creds and stuff. I'm taking care of this. Then they would like a 10 minute presentation on what we think the state of the market is in this country. This needs to cover - who are the most significant brands and competitors? what are the opportunities in the local market? what important things do they need to consider? You know the kind of thing - come up with some stuff to impress them. Don't worry about international considerations - just concentrate on this country, the one you live in.

As you know, since we spent all that money installing a marble floor in reception we now have no money to spend on any kind of market research or competitive information so you'll have to find all the information you need on the internet. And, I should point out that IT have informed me that email, phones, elevators and electric doors will be down for the next 15 days so there will be absolutely no opportunity for you to ask me any more questions on this project. This is the only information you will receive.

I know you'll enjoy rising to the challenge of this considerable opportunity, I look forward to seeing your thoughts when I'm presenting them to the client. Please bear in mind that if you blow this and fail to impress these people we'll probably have to fire 30 or 40 people.

Good luck"

Does that make sense? That's the assignment. If you'd like to take part please email me (russell at russelldavies.com) a PowerPoint document of 10 pages or less. No more than 3MB. Before 10pm (GMT) on February 15th. No extensions. No other formats will be accepted. 11 pages? Won't get marked. pdf? Won't get marked. 3.1MB? Won't get marked. Is that all clear? Remember to RTFQ. My plan, as part of the feedback process, is to round up some people and record a discussion of what they'd do when facing such a task. So that'll be interesting too.

blogging friends

So far, for me, blogging has been almost entirely about making new friends. It's one of the great things about it. But I'm now rather excited because an old friend has started blogging. And he's as funny and interesting online as he is in the real world. His blog is called TVGrouting (which he explains here). And I suspect it's going to be rather excellent. It'll be especially interesting to us lot because Richard spends most of his life as a lot of us do; trying to have good ideas and then trying to persuade people to buy them. It's just he's trying to think up TV shows. He's currently posing a question about blogs, diaries and television over here, so please go and have a look and see if you have anything to add. While you're there get him to explain his theories about never paying more than £11 for anything.

quantity equals quality

Sam points out this splendid contribution to the big ideas/little ideas debate. It's a pottery parable from Art And Fear quoted on LifeClever.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

 

all the channels

I know you've all been waiting with baited breath, so here it is: all the channels on the TV at the Hotel Tryp Bellver, Palma De Mallorca.

confluence

Maybe it's because it's triangles week at Brand Tarot but I've been thinking in threes again. I've been working on some presentations (which hopefully I'll be able to share soon) and this diagram occurred to me. Not that it was particularly relevant to what I was writing about but you know how these things pop into your head.

I think what this describes is the world that planning is heading into, the world that overlaps with UI design, experience design, product design, media of all forms etc etc. I think the fact that ad planners have some facility in translating ideas between these worlds is why we're being sucked into all sorts of industries. What I like about the world of blogging is that you can see the thinking that other people in the culture/commerce/creativity overlap are doing.

That's it. This doesn't really go anywhere yet. Just thought I'd mention it.

questions for howies?

Here's a message from Caroline at Campaign:

"Campaign’s running its Yahoo! Big Ideas Chair interviews again this year and the first one’s with Dave Hieatt. He and his partner Claire quit their overpaid jobs and sold their house to set up Howies. I'd like to hear if you have any questions to throw at Dave. Ethical, media, business...it’s all valid. The interview’s on February 1 so please make it fast. Big thanks."

If you've got questions for Caroline to throw at Dave please stick them in the comments below. thanks.

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.