Dug points at Flickr toys, which is nice. I wasted many attention calories on The Hockneyizer.
big noise for make trade fair
Stevie was kind enough to email about this. It's an opportunity for people to offer their ideas to Oxfam's Make Trade Fair campaign, the winning ideas will get made. It seems good. But it's only for people under 30. Damn.
penguin
There are still few enough good corporate blogs in the UK that it's worth pointing them out when they hove into view. So all hail the Penguin books blog (and associated flickr stream). Simple. No frills. But oozes Penguin-ness and lets you have a little peek behind the publishing curtain. They're also doing Penguin Podcasts (and they're already up to no37, I've obviously not been paying attention) which again is a simple, smart use of all the resources they have at their disposal.
You could make a convincing case that Penguin are the smartest branding/product business around at the moment. (And that they're have had the longest history of doing so, they've been innovating since 1935)
They're doing all sorts of interesting stuff. Much of it is purely the crafty, entertaining re-purposing and repackaging of existing content. There are The Designer Classics, the My Penguin idea and the Penguin 60s were innovative so long ago that Suck wrote about them. Then with new works there are little bits of genius like The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters. And I particularly like the transparency and openness of this post about Puffin books. (Those that remember Puffin, I'd encourage you to take part, I will, when I've thought of something to say.)
I wish Harper Collins had been this smart when I did egg, bacon, chips and beans.
a transparent campaign
Chris Anderson (of The Long Tail and editor of Wired) has written a fascinating series of blogs considering the future of journalism and media, focused through the question - what would radical transparency mean for Wired? (part one, part two and an interesting follow-up).
Some really provocative, thoughtful stuff in there, and through the serendipity of bloglines it was the thing I read just before the latest musings from Gordon's Republic (a blog by the editor of brand republic, the online presence of Haymarket titles like Campaign and Marketing).
And although you wouldn't call Gordon's Republic 'radical transparency' it's a really welcome slice of timely opinion on ads and marketing and stuff. It's sharply-written, simply designed (versus the visual assault of Brand Republic) and has the blessed feedback mechanism of commenting, which at least gives it the potential to be more of a conversation than a lecture (to use Mr Anderson's analogy.) Let's hope the Haymarket powers that be read The Long Tail blog. It's also good to see that George Parker is going to be writing for Brand Republic next year. That'll wake some people up.
(Full disclosure: I write a column for Campaign so depending whether you think I'm bigging them up or having a go, you could see me as either sucking up or nibbling the hand that feeds me.)
gwen's brilliant blog
Scamp points us to Gwen Yip's blog (scroll all the way down and start at the bottom) - the story of her adventures looking for a job in UK advertising. It's fascinating, original, charming and smart. If her works half as good as her blog I can't understand why no-one's snapped her up.
geography
I've been doing a little bit of webxploring for someone, they're thinking of trying to use their staff (who are all over the world, in some fairly unreachable places) to create interesting stuff for the internet. They want to find easy ways to upload pictures and other stuff to the web, and to automatically geotag it.
So I've been looking at geotag related stuff and I thought I'd chuck it up here. If you're familiar with this world then this'll be very old hat. But it might be useful to someone.
I'd never looked at wikimapia before, which is what you'd expect. Here's Stonehenge, here's BBC Broadcasting House (with Dr Watson's House to the left) and here's Multnomah Falls.
I've been half-heartedly playing with Platial for a while. I like the way you can build your own themed maps (here's a map of the Top Ten Cities Looking For Information On Chapped Lips According To Google Trends) and I imagined it would be a good companion to ebcb and agpfacotaat. But somehow I've not really got round to much.
I've done a bit of plazing too. I like the sense of discovery you get when you log a new plaze. But I'm not really sure why I'm doing it beyond that. Except the badge down there on the right indicates just how much time I spent at home.
Not quite sure why geocaching hasn't gotten bigger than it has. There's something in it. Similarly all those things that allow you to tag the real world somehow (with stickers or big yellow arrows or whatever) don't seem to have achieved critical mass either. I wonder if it's all just too much trouble for people. Or am I just missing something?
I do like the ease of adding geographical tags to pictures in flickr. But I guess it depends on being somewhere that's mapped and it's a little after the fact.
You really want to be able to do it automatically. The best option here would seem to be the Nokia N95 when it launches, or using a GPS mouse and Zonetag (as described by Tom Coates) but that again seems to require a Nokia 60 or some Motorola phone. I got my phone to talk to a GPS thing and work with Nav4All and I've got Shozu installed and working, but I can't see how to get info from one to the other. This Sony thing looks nifty too but it'll only work with PCs (I think).
swivel
Robin emailed me about Swivel. It's brilliant; 'YouTube for data'. You can upload and share whatever data you've got and you can compare your data with everything else they've got. And the system will even look for correlations in the background and point out things you might have missed. This is going to be fantastic.
And it reminded me of a conversation we were having the other day. What happens when things like Yankelovich reports start turning up on BitTorrent? They already get passed around informally by email (you know, between friends) but that has some sort of socially imposed limit. You know where it came from. But P2P makes it anonymous and one person can share with many, with no-one knowing anyone else. Makes you wonder, are owners of huge amounts of proprietary research the next record companies?
PR planning
John's trying to get a list of PR planners together. Any of you out there, get in touch with him here.
a bunch of stuff
I have this huge bloglines clippings folder, full of things that I fully intended to build a whole post around. But it's not going to happen and I want to share, so here's a bunch of stuff:
I updated the Creative Spaces Squidoo to incorporate this post of Leland's about the perfect office space, inspired by this post from Diablogue, inspired by this one from Creative Review.
I love this post from Citizen Agency about Obvious Corp, challenging the conventional wisdom about how a tech business is supposed to behave - i.e. they're planning for sustainability rather than aiming for selling and running at some point. Maybe that's one difference about OIA versus the standard creative agency model.
The only disappointing thing about this AmbientClock is that it's not a real product - but that's also what's interesting about it, it's an online beta of a potential real-world product.
Ben wrote a great thing about what Alex Ferguson and Michael Beirut have in common, if you've not read it, you should.
Beeker's had a smart idea about 'virtual interns' which I fully intend to engage with at some point but my head seems to be rejecting ideas like it might reject a transplanted pig's brain.
Jon Leach has great advice about building a compelling presentation.
All these doodles and design drawings from The Smithsonian are magnificent (via notebookism).
Todd's written some smart stuff about Ogilvy Transient, which is an interesting idea if likely to be doomed.
This is old stuff from the Fallon planning blog but still worth reading - all about George Lucas and the long tail. (Which reminds me that Arthur and I have a genius suggestion about what George Lucas should do next - he should just remake all the Stars Wars films. Shoot them all again. Same scripts. Different actors. Better effects. It'd be brilliant. And then he could hand the business on to the next generation and someone could just keep making the Star Wars movies using the latest technology, every twenty years or so, until the end of time, kind of like happens with King Kong.)
Paul gives sensible and sensitive advice on evaluating and feeding back on creative work. Very thoughtful stuff and a skill that's not talked about often enough.
John Kricfalusi writes with genius and passion about soft toys and the death of form.
This is what people should use to monitor brand tracking data.
Diego's written a post on to-do lists, especially public to-do lists, that's stuck with me for a long time. I guess I think of this very blog you're reading as a public to-do list, and this one as a public have-done list.
And let's end with two great YouTube moments - The Communist Manifesto illustrated by Disney and Amateur (via Music Thing)