Russell Davies

28 channels

Is this getting boring yet? More hotel television - the Crowne Plaza, Schipol.

fun at Schiphol

I'm a big fan of Schiphol. Though I'm there too much at the moment.

This is a Kodak printing machine at the airport. It sits in the corner and intices you with its cheery voice. It even tells you to 'share and enjoy'. Just like a product of the Sirus Cybernetics Corporation.

They have a nice museum, with work from Mondrian and De Stijl.

And who would expect an airport to use words like Meditation and Comfort?

This little WiFi station's nice too. Like an old-fashioned cafe table.

24 channels

More hotel television. You can tell I've been traveling too much recently. This time pictures from the Hotel Jan Tabak, Amsterdam

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.

good idea

This is an image from a simple site with a great idea. It's called moving air. You have to hit refresh to see more examples.

24 channels

Hotel telly - the Krasnapolsky, Amsterdam

on taking a new job

One of the things I’ve noticed about starting a new job is how all disorienting all the little things can be; especially if you’ve been at your previous employ for a long time. You expect all the big things to be different; you’re doing something different with different people in a different place, you’d be a fool not to expect difference. But the little things throw you.

Like the way you lose all your informal status. If you’ve been somewhere for a few years people know you, they know your status, they know what you’re allowed to do and say, they know if they have to listen to you or not. Not in the formal org-charty way, but in the little casual complexities of company life. Yes, you may be in such and such a position, but are you going to be around for a while? Do you matter? Do people listen to you? When you’re new, they don’t know this and they don’t know how to deal with you.

And you don’t know how to operate in you new place, you don’t understand your own informal authority. Again, not the formal systems, but the informal things that you used to know so well; how to get IT to do stuff for you; which meetings are essential, which are disposable; who you should listen to; who you should pretend to listen to; who you should ignore.

As ever it’s the little things that make life interesting.

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?

spousal blogging phenomenon

My wife, Anne has just started her own blog. Today she's making some interesting points about bad analogies and Tory metaphors.

But already reading her blog has let me know stuff about her life I didn't know. And about stuff that's happening at Arthur's school.

You know what it's like, at the end of a work day you don't neccesarily get time to share all the little stories and ideas you want to. You're too knackered or you can't be bothered or you forget. But if you blog them, then you share them. It's like reading someone else's dairy - but with permission.

I think it's going to be interesting.