Russell Davies

pizza privacy

Click here for a brilliant animated presentation by George Toft about the future of pizza delivery (making a larger point about privacy). A) it's a fantastic way to illustrate a point. Relatively easy to do but hugely compelling. B) it's a great point to make. Goes to show that just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should. And customer service can do easily tip over into customer abuse.

It's been about for ages, but I just heard about it on Culture Shock and found it via this LSE blog. (Culture Shock also features Piers and is well worth listening to.)

coffee this week

I've managed to wrangle meetings around, so there will be coffee morning tomorrow. (Friday) 11am. Breakfast Club. Coffee. Chat. No sharp stuff. Come one, come all.

little ideas

Trevor made great points today about the value of little thinking. Kind of like the tyranny of the big idea but better expressed, with more jokes. He stressed the importance of thousands of little ideas in building decent brands, not one big one. (Someone will have taken better notes than me and will write it up, I'm sure.)

But I found these illustrations last night while grabbing the stuff off YouTube to make my presentation:  iSquint has these great error messages.

I suspect proper interaction designers will hate them because they're a little confusing, but I think they're, well, charmingly confusing. They suggest there's a person back there writing stuff, a person with a sense of humour. And, actually it doesn't matter much if they're a bit confusing because all you're doing really is making the pop-up go away. But these are exactly the signs of humanity that get scrubbed out when 'professionals' and 'grown-ups' get involved.

(This is when you cancel an operation and it reverts to not doing anything)

football mad

A friend of mine is looking for some help - he wondered if any of you might chip in - here's what he's after:

We need to find the best football related websites in the world. Where do people go if they are into football? They can be manufacturer brands, TV channel brands, website brands, blogs, fanzines, magazines, newspapers, content providers – anything that you think is worth looking at if you’re into football.

Anyone got any suggestions? (And we mean football as in soccer, not as in gridiron). One randomly selected commenter will win a reasonably desirable football-related prize.

thanks for this.

post of the month - let the voting begin

I'm slightly feeling the life seep out of this project but maybe that's just me. I'm going to plough on regardless because I'm convinved it'll be fun in the end. Anyway. It's time for voting, so these are the nominations:

We Are Not Alone, Life 2.0

How To Explain RSS The Oprah Way

We Are The Hollow Men

Playing It Safe - Part Two

Now It's Time For A Bavaria

Snakes On A Plane, The Death Of Citizen Marketing

Winning New Stuff

Fighting - beautiful?

My Process

Science And Engineering Visualization Challenge 2006

Failure

Beauty And Aesthetics 2.0

The Future Of Brands And Planning

August's Top Blogging

What Blogging Does To Planners

And here are the buttons:

Voting will end at 11pm on Sunday 15th October (GMT).

good idea

   

                                                                       

Someone asked me at a conference the other week how to recognise a good idea. I mentioned the criteria for a patent under US law - is it new, non-obvious and useful? (Though, of course, I couldn't remember them all at the time). I think that's a pretty good set of questions to ask yourself when looking at any sort of creative/strategic project. New. Non-obvious. Useful.

(All hail spell with flickr)

generation blind

I've been doing a lot of stuff recently about computing. PCs, PDAs, music stuff, thinking about why more  people, especially young people, aren't more excited about the possiblities of the web etc. And I've been  trying to make the point that for many (especially younger people outside the US) the phone is actually the device that offers access and technology liberation. Not the PC.  And then, as I was re-reading the magical Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, I found the stuff below. Which just put it way better than I could.

(Cory Doctorow's ability to illuminate the present via his science fiction is well worth checking out. I've  always thought that his idea of whuffie - from Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom - would be a good way to think about brand reputations; if more brands thought of themselves as continually assessed like that, and were societally encouraged to do things that were creative and useful, many more of them would be any good.)

Anyway, the phone bit is from a sequence where a young alternative journalist questions the point of a couple of guys who are installing a free wifi mesh all over town, he suggests that a cellphone already does everything they're trying to introduce.

“Come off it. You old people, you turn up your noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with each other – even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines, twenty thousand people were mobilized in fifteen minutes in front of their presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the corrupt hearings."

“And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important phones are to democracy, there’s always some old pecksniff primly telling us all that our phones don’t give us real democracy. It’s so much bullshit."

“Look, I’m not trying to be cruel here, but you’re generation-blind. The Internet is great, but it’s not the last great thing we’ll ever invent. My pops was a mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You’re a PC guy so you think my phone is a toy.”

“Yes, in this abstract sense, there are bunch of things to like about your Internet over there. But I’m talking about practical, nonabstract, nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone for free. I can talk to everyone with it. I can say anything I want. I can use it anywhere. Sure the phone company is a giant conspiracy by The Man to keep us down. But can you really tell me with a straight face that because I can’t invent the Web for my phone or make free long-distance calls I’m being censored?"

Brilliant.

ronin support

If, as many of us suspect, the future for strategists, creative generalists, blah blah blah is as Ronin then it's becoming clear that there are business opportunities in Ronin Support. I'm certainly noticing, as we build OIA, that I'm missing all sorts of social and logistical aspects to employment and wondering how you replace them.

We talk a lot about how the future for creative businesses is similar to the movie studio model - groups of experts coming together for specific projects and dispersing but I suspect we can learn something else from the movie business - location catering. Well, sort of. I walked past this Airstream the other day, it was being used as a catering vehicle and I was thinking how perfect that would be to hire for a ronin project. Imagine you've got a pitch, you're putting a team of people together for it, what could be better than to park this in the client's car-park for the duration of the project (or somewhere else suitable, like where some actual consumers might be) and get the team together right where they need to be, with only temporary, project-based overhead.

(If you're tempted to get into the Airstream Ronin Support business, the marvelous Kathy Sierra tells you all about hers here. And there's more here.)

Then I walked past this new snack bar (opening soon) thats offering 'full conference facilities' in the basement. That'd be perfect for us. And you feel like you're going to see more of this kind of stuff. Places are that already socially oriented, used to coming and going, adding some of the neccesities of the workplace. The free wifi at The Breakfast Club makes a big difference but so do the smiles, the hellos and the feeling of familiarity. If they had a decent photocopier and a big, fast printer I'd never be out of their.

Because it's not just about the logistics, it's also about the conversation. I like our coffee mornings because they're like the good bits of meetings, without the bad bits. You get the banter and fun and news of everyone coming together at the beginning of a meeting, and the chat and advice of the end of one, but without all the crap in the middle. If there were other ways to do that I'd be very happy.

And then there's the brilliant Tower Stationery. Their business has grown up amongst all the little media, production, creative, retail businesses near us. They sell everything you need. Everything. And they're open a lot. And they're friendly. I find myself going out to get an envelope just to have a bit of social interaction.

I know I'm just scraping the surface here. There are all sorts of small business incubators and creative workspaces and all that. I need to investigate that more. But I suspect the missing opportunity is in places that do the logistics and the social-interaction, but without the permanent overhead. Hmm.

you're such a child

This is, basically, the conversation Anne and I had before I quit work and started OIA. It's the end of the wonderful Hucksters.

faint praise

Faint praise from Professor Kawashima and maybe a message for John.