Brand Tags

One of my favourite communication bloggers, Noah from Naked in New York has developed the sort of simple Web 2.0 interface that has way more validity than a lot of expensive research. Its called Brand Tags and allows tag clouds to coallesce from text inputs by people such as ourselves. Go and have a play and while you're at it remember that if a brand is a collective hallucination then this particular emerging brand has an awful lot of 'collective' going for it.

I just remembered that Noah probably wrote what he needed to create this interface himself with the self taught PHP/MySQL explained in this post over here. He's very clever like that.

West to East

Coming back from Xidan on Monday riding my electric bike, I did some drive by filming of the North end of Tiananman Square from the Western to the Eastern part where I live by the forbidden city. It's a little wobbly as I'm a bit of a porkster at the moment and trying to keep my balance too. As you can see I nearly got taken out around 40 seconds in because those Audis are driven by government officials and need not stop for anyone (although they are largely well behaved). I filmed this because I wanted to convey how huge Tiananman Square is and give some feeling of the impending seat of power on the planet if it isn't already psychologically.

I've gone up and down, and round and round this area time and again because I live so close and to do so, is to take in what China is all about. You may notice there isn't a single piece of advertising and while its not as warm as Time Square or Trafalgar Square you can't help respecting its scale and solemnity. As we draw towards the end of the fundamentally erroneous (and by logic, morally wrong) adventure in neoliberal capitalism, all we have to hope for in the long run is that this power shifts towards goals that are good for the collective. Either way its a Chinese world.

Why Should We Have An Accent?

This woman reminds me of my mother, bless her. Via the annoyingly gifted Popaghandi.