おーるどぼーい - Old Boy

Wouldn't it be great if all those favourite movie scenes could be made into huge posters by uploading the image and then mounted so that you could choose how many sheets to print the job without having a city and guilds in Photoshop  

Participatory media as marketing in action is just the job at Block Posters.

Remember to use the blank side of used paper if you can.

Who is Kate Walton?

Over at Life in the middle the pressing question of the day is "Who is Kate Walton"? This sort of paralyzing Saturday afternoon existential angst is deeply troubling for us at Punk Planning, and has been known to take the edge off our evening Angel Delight and Rice Pudding. If you know of Kate Walton and why her name is on a five pound note please get in touch as soon as possible so that Paul can get on with the weekend and feel in good shape for some more rough and tumble man hugging tomorrow. Who are you Kate Walton and why is your name on that fiver? The public has a right to know.

Playtime

dreadedgmom

A post on Ian Tait's - Crackunit about the quality of YouTube commenting and community led me to do a bit of exploring. I discovered the 'Community Channel' Vlog by Natalie. She is an Australian born Vietnamese Asian, who at first glance comes across unfairly, as yet another vacuous and self indulgent net teen exploiting her natural good looks with a veneer of digital literacy disguised as drama talent vlogging. You'd be mistaken. Her video clips are wildly popular in the main because she is such a babe, but underneath it all there's a charming tenacity on her part to make engaging YouTube clips that often have a role playing make-believe narrative.

Natalie's videos generate mini waves of video responses from people like Van Awesome below that I particularly like, but what is remarkable for those video responses is that while in the main they are pedestrian (they're not meant to be Hollywood) there are flashes of rather good knowing film nods and techniques not to mention great humour. They're not consistently brilliant nor are they meant to be, but this is the future of community video entertainment and I can see no reason why Tim Tams haven't gone out of their way to offer Natalie a sponsorship collaborative deal, or indeed why a youthful brand isn't fostering the right environment where people like Natalie and Van Awesome can do stuff that keeps us coming back more often. Regrettably, I can just imagine that if they did, a monolithic and data driven marketing department wouldn't know how to handle a personality that is all about experimentation, making mistakes and sometimes mediocre musings on life with occasional flashes of delightful brilliance. MTV is surely missing a trick and so are a bunch of others. Snack brands seem ideal to me for this kind of bite sized entertainment format and shouldn't be an excuse for as Nigel Hollis writes, new media making old mistakes.

I guess the question is not so much 'is it good?', but instead, is it better. It seems that compared to other forms of entertainment and for up to 400 000 people who have watched Natalie's most popular clip, the answer is most definitely yes. Here's a video response to her work which has plenty of links for Natalie's own work. She may not be brilliant yet but I'll put money on it that she will be in the future. This is just the testing ground.

Stubborn Loser

Shame about that patronising and cheesy email they sent me before I saw the clip. I'm keeping an eye an an ear open. Thanks to Amber

What I'm Thinking

javiekitela

Mark Lewis from Planning from the outside blog, in San Francisco has generously tagged me as one of the blogs he thinks about, in the 'blogs that make me think' meme. I probably read way to many blogs and there's loads to choose from but here's a quick five and why.

Made in England - Simon Cook keeps me highly amused (if not rip roaring laughs), has an eye for visually refreshing and provocative graphics, design and art, is a keen observer of life and seems to understand how to make digital most compelling.

Make marketing history - John Dodds is actually one of the tightest marketing thinkers in blogging right now. He posts small and easily digestible but important guidelines as we inch forward into a new model of selling through communication.

Zero Influencer - David Bausola has one of the best de.licio.us accounts that he feeds into his blog. I want to do an interview with him at some point and find out how he gets hold of all the good stuff on the net.

TIGS - An obvious one but I'm a fan boy. We're in the business of storytelling and it takes someone who really understands the breadth depth and history of language to put into words some of the more complex ideas that are evolving in this very exciting time to be in the marketing communications business

Capt. Pancreas - doesn't have forever like we all seem to think we have and behave as if we do, its a short hard lesson in how to drain the sweetness out of every second and a highly compassionate reminder of how lucky we are.

There really are loads more and some that I look forward to digging back in the archives for nuggets I've missed so no slight intended for the those that know I'm a regular reader and think about a lot.



Update: Yes I know its six I've listed (this is after all punk planning). I'm going to be at the breakfast club tomorrow from 11 am for coffee and hello if anyone would like to drop by :)

PSFK Conference - Niku Banaie

Niku Banaie, Managing Partner of Naked Communications did a heartwarming presentation that explored some of the more pressing humanist dimensions of digital life today. Niku's grandfather was one of the early entrepreneurs of arcade and pinball games in the UK and the lesson learned by him that a fundamental human characteristic of playfulness is a key driver of all activity was not lost. Niku outlined a guideline of five universal needs for successful understanding on interaction that apply not just to life but cascade down into winning people over in general social intercourse.

• Need for love
• Need to learn
• Need to give back
• Need for simplicity
• Need for play

Niku talked about the sense of loneliness on the net and how face to face interplay is still a hard wired necessity. He talked about how The Guardian, the worlds leading liberal voice, makes most of its revenue from Guardian soulmates by putting like minded individuals together. The irony of this massively connected world is the absence of love and how so many people are facing increasing levels of loneliness. Its remarkable how important it is for science to put a tactile face on its output and yet so often the results are engineered for efficacy rather than satisfaction. On learning Niku discussed the availability of MIT open course ware, a revolutionary sharing approach to putting the best lectures and learning materials in the world on the net. Self education with the aid of an internet connection really does open up the potential for people to explore and fulfill our learning instinct. When quality content and flat distribution are coupled, the potential for unlikely people to enable themselves is nothing short of magic.

The need to give back was best exemplified by an example of the Patagonia company I talked about in an earlier post and which if you listen to the podcast gives a number of heart lifting examples on how giving back supports a virtuous circle other than just profit. Niku talked about how the founder allows all his staff to get involved with environmental activism with the company paying for a get out of jail free card that will honour any amount of bail that is set for for related civil disobedience. Yep, Patagonia encourage their employees to break the law and put their money where their mouth is. Yvon Chouinard also discusses in that podcast how the company provides day care facilities for mothers and has a retention rate for his employees that exceeds anywhere else, thus limiting the expense of having to replace valuable human resources that other companies factor-in massive amounts of dollars to keep. Patagonia's problem he jests is letting people go even after they hit retirement age. Stability is a wonderful foundation block if companies begin the process by giving back to their employees.

Kiva was the next great example of giving back. They are a web interface that allows people to sponsor entrepreneurs in developing companies with loans that save lives. By putting people in touch with specific entrepreneurs a direct connection is made, cutting through the bureaucratic and less rewarding transaction of just giving to charity. If you take a look at the link you can see how Meas Sokheang of Phnom Penh is only $150 dollars short of raising the $1000 dollars needed to buy a motorbike and pigs to take to the market. We can chip in with a minimum of 25 bucks but its a loan and not just a donation. Its repaid back with interest but the satisfaction of knowing that a real vetted loan candidate is going to be given a fishing rod with which to fish and not just the food to see her through the day. When I first went to Cambodia many years ago nobody can be unshaken by the genocide that took place there and the barbaric torture that took place in Tuol Sleng. But one thing that lifts the soul each time I return is the kids who increasingly look less grubby and frankly don't have any recollection of the Khmer Rouge years that wiped out a generation and left a stain on a par with Nazism or the Hutu Tutsi conflict of Rwanda. Here's a chance to change and observe the process by giving back and you can also meet a bunch of other people (all from the U.S.) who are putting Meas Sokheang back on her feet with a loan that she will pay back over 21 months. This site is awesome and puts facebook social networking to shame. The world really is flat in this instance. As I write this post I see that Meas has raised the money needed but that Victoria Terko from Ghana is just 25 Bucks short of her crafts business she dreams of.

On simplicity Niku Banaie highlighted how massively successful interfaces such as Google and Craigslist have become by streamlining the information we are exposed to and the number of linked options they can provide. He talked about the Sugar graphical user interface for the 100 dollar laptop that is set to launch in developing economies and how it is built around real life groups and communities, around the projects they work on the interaction between those groups. An intuitive dramatisation of first life communications on a screen if you like. The uncomfortable truth is as Asi has pointed out that our lives have become unmanageably full and we have too much to deal with. Niku talked about John Maeda's laws of simplicity: Shrink, Hide and Embody. A great example was the Wi Fi connected umbrella that alerts us to potential rain before leaving the house although the umbrella that can wail out when I've left it again would suit me. My record for losing one is five minutes after buying it. I hadn't even used it.

Niku finished up with the human need for play and gave us a bunch of examples that highlighted this important ability for positive reciprocity that all humans have and can leverage. Examples given were the climbing centre in Japan that 'reframed' the idea of simulacra rock environments and used old household objects such as picture frames and bric-a-brac to enable climbers to scale walls and a Danish school environment that had been designed around the understanding that different modes of learning included play, activity, reflection and collaboration but crucially in a manner conducive to knowledge absorption unlike that from didactic monologue.

I need also at this point, to highlight that while looking for some photos for these posts on the PSFK conference I came into contact with Lynette Webb who is also a user of Google docs & spreadsheets which allows us to share and edit in an open source manner on the PSFK conference for example. You can find the link to her notes here and I hope to be doing a post about online collaborative working with Lynette using the tools that are available to everyone. Check out Lynettes blog interesting snippets in the mean time.

"The good news is we're running out of oil. The bad news is there's a lot of coal" - Yvon Chouinard

flower_bee

The mountains above are in Patagonia, Argentina and the picture was uploaded last Saturday from Argentina. I do think immediacy isn't everything but in this case it is. You can almost smell the mountain air unless VW Eos haven't branded it as theirs with advertising. Patagonia is the same name as the clothing label run by Yvon Chouinard who is the real deal when it comes to, we are what we do, and living an 'examined life'. I'd never heard of him before a few weeks ago but happen to stumble across a podcast on the often slightly worthy Social Innovation Conversations. Around about the 38th minute into the podcast he says everything you need to know about putting sustainability back into the wealth creation business model with simple but brilliant marketing values. In this case its for an oil company but it applies to all business. This audience with Yves is the sort of podcast I recommend for a Sunday while prepping the vegetables for the Sunday roast. and getting a good pot of tea on the go. It doesn't need full on attention and its not a blow away grab you by the nuts Mr Motivator podcast. Instead its a conversation that to paraphrase the robust words of Paul Coleman gives "just a continuous unshakable feeling" that this guy knows how to make money, do the right thing, treat people right, sell responsible products and live an examined life. Its fun, interesting and I can't recommend it enough.

PSFK - Mind The Gap

The picture above is one I took while strolling one Sunday along Wimbledon Common a few weeks back. The guy was taking macro photography pictures of new appearances in insect life that hadn't been previously recorded and were appearing due to the changes in the British climate disrupting the ecosystem. Specifically, he was capturing a wasp like creature killing a dung-beetle like insect. Most people welcome a bit of warmer weather in the UK but the reality is that if we blindly continue with the current consumption is king economy, based on infinite growth, we can look forward to less acceptable changes in British flora and fauna. In my experience of the tropics its the snakes, large spiders and golf ball sized hornets that flip most people out.

One of the less obvious dimensions about the business of saving our own skins as the planet warms up is that a shed load of money is to be made in reshaping the existing wealth creation business model. The PSFK conference last Friday held a panel to discuss the topic with Karen Fraser from The Ethical Index chairing the discussion with John Grant (Greenormal), Diana Verde Nieto (Clown Fish) and Tamara Giltsoff (Ozolab). Not so long back I took some time out to study a bit about propaganda because it seemed obvious to me that there was no way that after the failure of Kyoto and the growth of China and India that the neoliberal capitalist model was going to rein in the excesses of marketing communications credo of sell more despite it 'getting hot in here' (so take off all your clothes). Actually I was pretty much floored by the release of the Stern Review Report on climate change which I had no expectation to see in my lifetime. If the human race can make a global business out of something like World Wrestling, Hello Magazine and Blue Tooth Headgear for anyone other than taxi drivers then I'm sure we can make a buck from shifting something not from A to B, but say from A to C. It really is as simple as that.

John Grant kicked off and although we've met in firstlife and talked bundles on his greenormal blog I only realised at the PSFK gig why he really does kick ass. John talks coherently in compelling joined up paragraphs and really could use an hour or two on his own to take us through a journey from sinners-in-denial to messianic converts. I think he's a national asset and at some point the British should collectively chip in to give him our spare carbon points because we need him out on the road and 'representing' for the U.K. around the globe since he practices what he preaches and only flies when only absolutely necessary. John opened with some breaking market research that aviation brands are the new dirty word. Can we anticipate a renaissance for the great British seaside holiday and the rise of the guest house again? Flying seemed to lose its sex appeal around about the time Pan Am were shot out of the sky in 1991, but its official now; only losers and drink drivers fly unnecessarily.

I urge you to buy John's about to be published book The Green Marketing Manifesto when it comes out, for all the juicy bits about how to do green marketing. He did talk about how the green (sustainable living) movement is in its early stages right now like digital was in 1995, and that there's a real opportunity for all marketing folk to get into this and start changing the senseless waste of that indulgent age 'The Consumer Society' and make good money out of it. Money and Green are not incommensurate, and one idea I liked was the movement to get children walking to school with a kagoul brand perhaps getting involved. However if you do check out one website to wet the whistle and that John has championed before, take a look at freecycle. Because sharing and recycling is the new Sexy black as I mentioned back here.

Tamara Giltsoff also chimed in with a similarly reasoned argument that a new sustainable business model is emerging and that its a front end change that we should be putting our marketing brain cells to, not short sharp shock. She also championed the need to put marketing and corporate responsibility (C.R.) together. We need to urgently be speaking to each other because doing good is actually something that sets products and services apart. Its not exactly rocket science is it? I did like the way that Tamara implied that SUV's were now approaching the social pariah status of something like a Chavmobile.

Diane Verde Nieto of Clownfish made a great observation for those in attendance, that modern communications professionals should be able to handle the schizophrenia of leading two agendas. One to sell our clients products and services and the other to build sustainability into the way they work. Again they are not incommensurate but it takes a twin track mind to handle the conflict in the transition stage. She also drew our attention to London's aim to be a sustainable city by 2020 which was something I wasn't aware of and will surely be a terrific motivator for business to reshape and retool. In addition Diane pointed out the Ariel low temperature wash cycle campaign(30 degrees) and that the internet is a heavy user of electricity impacting on the environment through huge data centers that are sprouting up around the world, as well as the costly running of computers and servers. Water, she alerted us, is going to be the next big challenge after carbon footprint responsibility takes hold. This makes complete sense for those who follow geopolitics around the globe and is a timely reminder for Sci-fi fans to reread Dune. Lastly Diane used a bleak euphemism for the business of carbon offset trading described as the equivalent for the environment of the morning after pill.

The Usual Suspects

Faris Yacob

Jenny Owen & Hugh MacLeod

George Parker

Charles - The White Album

Faris George Jenny & Hugh

Regine Debatty - We Make Money Not Art

Regine Debatty

Regine Debatty stepped onstage looking breezily stylish and was soon taking us down the path of biotechnology and art related projects. I've been meaning to check out her blog, We make money not art for some time now but within a few seconds of her presentation I'd resolved to add her RSS feed to my daily intake. Regina conveyed the importance of understanding what biotechnology really means and its impact on the human race. Examples given such as the victim less leather jacket grown from a combination of mice and human cells really got me thinking about what we define as norms and how science can make the mundane and inhumane (killing animals for their skin) appear to be more digestible than artificially growing biological organs such as skin. Regine asked us if this was the future of farming and its a good question for us to consider. Up next, Regina highlighted the potential for growing human hair from a deceased person as a way of drawing comfort from those we were close too and if that seems disjointed, as was later brought up, why would we not draw a parallel with the business of renting pets.

I thought that Regine made the point that scientists are now much more creative than the artists when it comes to biotechnology related disciplines although I'd like to double check this point as it seemed to me that the art collectives can't wait to get their hands on the laboratory test tubes and petri dishes. Other topics covered were the potential for biotechnology created armies, replacement kidney supermarkets which are already a reality and being harvested from prisoners in China for wealthy people. Coincidentally the day before the conference, China's leading kidney transplant expert in Shanghai accused of organ harvesting from the outlawed Falun Gong, committed suicide by jumping out of a hospital window. On the subject of mass harvesting take a look at this to see how mechanization of biological processes is already taking place.

Regine also covered the idea of rapid prototyping, which is a concept I'd come across before in a Poptech podcast by Neil Gershenfeld of MIT about the Fablab which uses incredible technology in ways which can dramatically change the lives of people through concepts like making perfect stuff out of imperfect stuff.

Other topics covered were Spimes, which will challenge our definition of what an object really is once it can be tracked before development and after manufacture. One amusing anecdote that Regine related was a tale of a friend whose luggage was on the wrong plane and that it was the passenger who had to disembark and follow the luggage on the wrong plane even though or possibly because it had radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging which is a technology that will intervene in our lives and is already making headway in Prada's 40 million Dollar flagship store in Manhatten. RFID is a technology that like barcodes is going to become ubiquitous due to the falling cost of technology. If you can imagine what the falling cost of processors and storage has done for computing than take some time out to imagine a world where everything ever made and those that use them can be tracked.

Timo Veikkola - Nokia

Kjirstin

I went to PSFK's conference yesterday in London. It was billed as a morning of trends and ideas, and an afternoon of new marketing. The whole day was hugely enjoyable and I'm not just saying that because PSFK put me up at the Metropolitan and paid for those Cannes tickets I was moaning about. I made some notes of the thoughts and ideas that made sense to me or even didn't make sense but somehow needed to be taken down. Here they are.

The first speaker was Timo Veikkola (picture by lynetter) who is a future specialist at Nokia (what a great job), and seems to have a similarly exciting position as Jan Chipchase. Timo is one of those social science types that the Scandinavian countries excel at integrating into big business much more sympathetically than many U.S. corporations. His goal is to make communications as natural as possible while picking up on future trends to integrate into Nokia products and usability. Timo pointed out that there is no other stimulant like travel and I'd fully agree with him there. Anything else is just Disneyland really. Timo is currently planning for the year 2010, and reminded us of the question "can the human mind master what the human mind has made?" (Zygmnunt Bauman). For a Clinton Kid like me, the last 6 years have been quite depressing and Timo underlined how war is thematic for this decade despite the number of casualities at this moment in time. He talked how these visuals of the oxymoron 'war on terror' have started to seep into culture and may also explain why there is a considerable counter movement for the honest, fun and simple.

Many years ago I was in Vietnam and noticed that despite all the efforts of the mighty U.S. military machine it was Coca-Cola that had really won the war. One slide by Timo of a car covered in Arabic text reminded me that if we look at the population growth demographics for Islamic countries it shouldn't be too long before, along with India and China we should in the future begin to see more Arabic text creeping into our culture. I always find text fascinating and have even etched a few Khmer and Siamese tattoos on my body. I can think of nothing more exciting than nipping up to the Turk, Sri Lankan, Kurdish and Tamil supermarkets where I'm living and looking at 'foreign stuff'. Somehow Coconut Milk from Southern India is much more romantic and kosher than something packaged by one of the supermarkets. I am also quite frankly bored with all the web 2.0 cuddly logos sprouting, although I do realise that style is more important and useful than identity in this overloaded logo world.

Timo talked about how protest and political statement will likely be more present in design of the future and this was reinforced later by the sustainable design panel. I can certainly see a future where homogeneous brands, products and services are more likely to differentiate themselves by what they stand for - their values as it were. Timo also described that we seem to be living in almost biblical Revelations-like times with famine, pestilence, disease and floods from things like SARS, Hurricanes and Tsunamis, he then talked about the move from a celebrity culture to a knowledge culture which simply can't come soon enough for me.

Many moons ago on a hardcore right wing political chat channel that I liked to sharpen my teeth on I was arguing (or rather being shouted down) about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of driving SUV's in a world with rapidly diminishing oil and young Americans and British people dying for it while serving in the armed forces in Iraq which everyone knows (except the oil addicts) was invaded for its oil reserves and the Green Zone that will administer it. The one weapon that unsettled the frothy mouthed right-wing-nuts in the debate (95% of the channel) was the question, would Jesus drive an SUV? The unholy alliance between the Neo-Conservatives and the Christian fundamentalists is always unsettled by this simple question and mark my words for the future of sustainable consumption, religion and culture will be huge factors in the war of ideas. Ask yourself if Jesus would purchase an SUV, because it looks to me from the picture above that Mohamed wouldn't have minded a Big Mac. That is every reason for being optimistic about the future...... which according to Arthur C Clarke is going to be 'utterly fantastic'.

Jobs vs Gates

When asked what was the greatest misunderstanding about their relationship in yesterdays interview at The Wall Street Journal's D Conference. Jobs replied 'we've kept our marriage secret for over a decade now'. (8th minute)

Listen Discover Share

ScottMacleodLiddle

Hot off the press! CBS have purchased Last.fm. The makers of CSI and David Letterman have shelled out 280 million dollars for the London based music social networking site. I'm a big fan of Last.fm right back from when they were audioscrobbler which was a software addition that listened to what music I played on my computer and then made recommendations. Its become a lot more sophisticated since those days and the website has a bunch of features that are addictive.

My musical holy grail is to construct a radio station that plays random music that jumps from Classical to Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) a bit of Drum and Bass and some Jazz thrown in. I'm constantly feeding Last.fm music to get the balance right which keeps me occupied but there's some other stuff that I really like about this software and website that I want to share.

The killer app is thaty just listening to Last.fm allows me to listen to music that I like. The tastes I have described above are not an easy brief to meet and only Last.fm comes close to giving me that. I think its cool that I can give it a macro taste brief jumping from genre to genre or if I'm in the mood I can listen to early electronic pioneers or some other micro tagging channel. If I have to really concentrate and work hard only intelligent drum & bass works for me but there are a number of moods that Last.fm meets splendidly. The more I know it, the more demanding I get. Its nowhere near listening to a terrestrial frequency radio station where laissez faire listening slips in.

I have friends on Last.fm and I love to be able to find out a little more about them or discover new music if I'm in the mood. I also meet people who come and check me out, are connected to me or I discover completely new folk. Music is a really good indicator and while I can get on with all sorts, the 'taste-o-meter really lets me know if I connect on a deeper bobbing heads level. I have three DJ friends who keep me topped up on the freshest stuff possible. Each of them is a little different and its amazing how their personal radio stations have their own flavour despite us all having highly similar tastes. I have to point towards my chum DJ Stewart from Bangkok who plays electrofrequencies on Monday night at Bed Supperclub along with Saint Vincent. Both are the nicest of people and totally dedicated to their craft. It's not like they are on the other side of the world while I'm in London listening on Last.fm and sometimes I can tell if Stewart's going in a different musical direction like the retro action that seems to be going on recently. The other star is Audiossey from Germany who has a distinctive style that is beginning to approach my top 3 or 4 music DJ's and producers in the world. I met him through Last.fm. There's a few others too that I love including Sushigroove, Russell Davies, Zero Influencer and my latest classical music discovery Chalcemon.

Theres a bunch more too and I listen to them all when I feel that I need to get out of a rut and check out what other friends are into. I also think the recommendation radio station is great although I''m not sure if its based on what Last.fm recommends or if it factors in friends individual recommendations sent to me, which is another feature that I get lots of suggestions from. Either way theres also the 'loved' track function and the 'ban' track button too plus skip if a track seems to be going nowhere.

On top of all that there's a full array of social networking tools like music blogging, shoutouts, tagging, neighbourhood radio, loved tracks radio, history radio and more and this all applies also to other members of Last.fm on the network. I can even listen to friends specialist radio stations that they create. Then there's the widgets, the free downloads, the charts and music events based on my location. I could go on because the site in itself could probably keep me occupied a few hours a day just exploring, but I also like to keep an eye on a few of its competitors to see what's new but the thing I really like most about Last.fm is that it raises a philosphical question which is at the heart of marketing. It makes me ask myself when I know that I don't want to listen to stuff I know, and thus forces me to choose between if I want to listen to what I know I don't know, or if I prefer to listen to stuff I don't know I don't know. If this sounds familiar its another way of expressing Donald Rumsfeld's known unknowns and unknown unknowns which despite its obtuse Yogi Berra nature is in actual fact a stunning example of the business we're in. CBS have gotten this site for peanuts. Its easily worth more than myspace or Youtube in my opinion and I hope it stays that way. Thanks audioscrobbler/Last.fm for a few years of terrific music discovery and like all good radio for being a friend. And here's my latest playlist which is another function I've only just begun to play with.



And here's a hot presentation they did with more stats and facts.

Joy Division

bluePantone292

The Ian Curtis biopic won Best European Film at Cannes. The post-punk aesthetic of Anton Corbijn's stark black-and-white cinematography was winning over the critics on Friday night but I'm delighted that one of my early music heroes is beginning to earn the the full credit he deserves. I'm also a bit annoyed that I didn't reserve lovewilltearusapart.com when no one else had thought of it and it was going for... erm a song.

Update: Video not functioning. Will investigate.

Switched On Kid

Kate Priestley

Yuvi Panda just kicked ass on the internet. He's a 16 year prodigy techno guru geek from Chennai (formerly Madras) on the East coast of India who is wired to the nines and blogs about IT stuff on a wobbly bandwidth-restricted internet connection. Some time back he did a post about the former Microsoft supremo Robert Scoble's blog presenting a lot of statistics gleaned from Technorati. He's just done the same for the mother of all tech-gadget blogs called Engadget which has a huge readership. I came across Yuvi through Scoble's 'shared' items blog feed as we both use the same Google Reader for zapping through RSS feeds (although incredibly Scoble does up to 600 a day, down from 1400). Scoble shared this pretty exciting post from Jason Calacanis one of the founders of Weblogs Inc and former GM of Netscape which offers Yuvi a job for project X on the spot.

If you do a google on this enterprising young man you can see there aren't many digital stones left unturned and his entrepreneurial side shows through wonderfully . He realises that by delighting the digital blogging A listers he may get just that little bit closer to achieving his dream of working at Microsoft. I like this story, it's representative of how democratic the internet is which is a post I've touched upon but have lined up for more in-depth examination in the future.

Direct Versus Indirect Communications

Here's one of those questions usually asked by global or regional advertisers that applies anywhere communications are to be weighed up from a cultural or even category perspective between direct and indirect messaging. Its a presentation I wrote about the debate between blunt messaging and interesting complexity last year and that I want to go into a bit deeper at some point, as its an important (and possibly inconclusive) question that others have also tackled here, here and here. Do feel free kick it around a bit if the mood takes you and I should let Nigel know I used a couple of Millward Brown slides although I don't think it's anything kick-ass confidential. (Somewhat spookily I see that I've surfaced in Nigel's latest post since I've been offline a wee while)

Fight Club

Floating around London town recently, and talking to a lot of interesting, likable and smart advertising people, it’s plain to see that there’s a need for some input on the whole idea of social(ist) media. Most of the people I talk to simply don’t have the time or the inclination to log on and check out a smattering of the 200+ RSS feeds I have coming in each day. It is an addiction but its not quite the same dedication as working though 300 pages plus of Les Miserables before something cheerful happens.

Along with my daily RSS sprints, I’ve been casually jogging around the latest round of social networks since 2002 when the original Friendster went big Stateside, spread out to Europe and is now a dominant force in Asia. They should realistically relocate their pampered U.S. asses out of San Francisco to Singapore. Its this hubris that led them to having their lead stolen by myspace. I’ve been watching straight faced as the plannersphere piles into Facebook of late but the interesting social sites are in Gaia and Habbo Hotel at one end of the spectrum and Secondlife at the other (Mekong Charlie if you must ask). Yes the first two are for kids but those kids are the first generation virtual world builders/social media networkers on the scene and they’re going to be quite demanding if myspace wants to win them over in just a few years. Anyway News International and Roop Murdoch will probably just buy them when as he knows all too well what the conditioning element(s) of using a media format can be in selecting the next one.

My blogging chum in Singapore, Marina raves on about ecircles which closed down in 1997 and was a little too early for it’s time, but for the real deal on sharing conversation, pictures, mp3’s as well as changing status, quasi tweets and building community with likeminded people it was/is and always will be IRC for Internet Relay Chat or mIRC as it’s better known. Cheap as chips and basic ‘code-monkey’ software mIRC is very usable and easy on the processing power resources.

Want to leap into a conversation with Baghdad and/or Boston? It’s IRC that has the full spectrum of seasoned veterans from the 80’s as well as newbies up for a bit of digital conversation and of course there’s a twitter channel on there too for those who wander why the list of people who follow my twitter twaddle is up in the 90’s.

I do concede that the original BBS people are the Daddy when it comes to practically all shades of early internet life but why would you want to know something about a format that is still only huge in China? OK, I’ll do a post on that another time, what with China having the largest internet and mobile phone market in the world right now and they aren’t even in second gear.

So what’s my point? Well I’d be the first to advocate for social(ist) media, as indeed Fightclub did that there are no rules. Main stream media (MSM) is so obsessed with imposing old revenue models on new media that its in danger of getting out the invoices for the telegraph-wire which kicked off this whole media-at-the-speed-of-light-gig.

Or maybe its just sheer fear that makes MSM want to impose the old rules of interruption in the new environment, which in a way is fine (and part of the ‘no rules’ dictum), because after all it is in precisely this manner that we rather patronisingly conditioned the post war (ahem) ‘consumer’. Rather disconcertingly, there’s a sizable segment that actually like it that way and which Faris did a post on cheekily calling them the passive massive? But anyway it’s looking like not for much longer. We’re on the edge of something new and to bring an old mindset to a new media really is indicative of how uncreative, stuffy (or scared) we have become. After all, if the discovery of the Americas has resulted in a new Europe being built, I doubt if the internet would even exist. Its time to take the gloves off and get stuck into socialist media your own way; make friends, be authentic, honest and useful but ‘monetizing’ socialist media is precisely why nobody has really done it yet. Groundwork needs to be laid, and fortune favours the brave.

Socialist Media

Tony Benn, Durham 2004, originally uploaded by barney britton.

I only really discovered Tony Benn when I found all my understanding of power and production was completely discredited. I never expected losing my politics to ever bother me but in many ways, it cost me more both financially and emotionally than losing my religion ever could have. Tony Benn was my succour during the tail end of this period.

So, earlier today I took a look at some stats for socialist media in the United States and I was surprised to see that imeem, a small media-sharing social-networking site that I stumbled across last week to use for posting the Danwei podcast was beginning to take root. They're at number four in the table below, and means I can now share a brilliant Tony Benn Podcast, plug a new socialist media and lay the groundwork for my Marxist media post which is designed to irritate the living hell out of people who drive gas guzzling Jags like the wonderfully erudite Rory Sutherland who writes beautifully on his blog.

Update: The embedded audio no longers exists. - cfx2020