Friday, September 26, 2008

Diesel S&M shop

...on Carnaby Street.
A decent homage to a 30-odd year old idea.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

digital choice




here's the printed version of the blip.fm snippet.

Friday, September 19, 2008

there may be trouble ahead....

Excellent thoughts around the current financial meltdown and ting this week by Charles and Neil.

What are things going to look like when we come out of the other side?

I've been checking out E.F. Schumacher's classic essay on buddhist economics. More and more it's starting to resonate - not as a dusty piece of history, but as a way ahead.

quote:
'For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.'

Charles says:
'One thing is for sure I'm sick to death of the word growth being used as if it's a sign of success.'

Marketing and economics are subject the law of impermanence - ie they pass through the following stages: birth, growth, maturity and death - just as humans are.

If we agree that innovation is often the outcome of 'conflicts' - the bigger the conflict ergo the bigger the innovation.

Like the fella once said 'if you don't like change you'll like irrelevence even less'

No-one's gonna argue we're not in the midst of a pretty major conflict at the moment so I'm looking forward to what's round the corner...

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

whats the story?...


This week's NME features a songbook with the chords and lyrics to four new tracks from Oasis's forthcoming album, 'Dig Out Your Soul'.

NME are inviting readers to upload their own versions of the songs in a competition.
The winners will be taken to a date on the Oasis world tour, somewhere in the world.

Add to this, last weeks activity where New York street musicians (that's buskers to us) were orchestrated to perform songs from the album around subway stations in NY (see clip below).

Unconfirmed rumours suggest that the next Oasis foray into 2.0 culture and brand participation will be a crowdsourcing initiative to find a hairdresser to fix Liam's barnet.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

liverpool daily post social media experiment

I came across this interesting audio case study by markmedia, which features an interview with Mark Thomas, editor of the Liverpool Daily Post newspaper.

The LDP is a business focussed daily paper who have recently experimented with using Twitter, liveblogging and generally engaging their readership in the social media space.

Among the topics discussed we get Editor, Mark Thomas's views on:
- The risks in opening up the inner workings of a news room.
- Unexpected benefits of engaging with the readership.

Markmedia's summary in presentation form is copied here, below.
And the audio file can be listened to or downloaded at the markmedia blog.

Monday, September 15, 2008

jesus is my friend

Just in case you're one of the few who havn't seen/heard this little number...
Can't get it out of my head.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

old punks never die....they go and work for apple


We took notice as this week's launch of the new ipod nano unfurled.
Each available variant is illustrated with an album pic in the screen relating to each colour.

The array of current pod-friendly harmless popsters - Clavin harris for yellow, Interpol for red, James Blunt for blue etc etc - is shamelessly disrupted by the inclusion, in the pink model, of...not
'would you?/wouldn't you?' brat poppette 'Pink' (as you may have predicted) but none other than...gnarled, drug-addled grandads of glam-punk ...
THE MIGHTY NEW YORK DOLLS,
THE TOTAL AND UTTER KINGS OF RAWK'N'ROLL AND GREATEST BAND IN HISTORY.



thanks John.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

end of the world pt2

..and DIY giants B&Q are quick off the mark with clever bit of search...

google commemorates the end of the world


nice to see google's traditional 'seasonal-home-page-looks' celebrating one-off events too...
the end of the world for example.

Sunday, September 07, 2008

i met the walrus




This is amazing.

"In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message."

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Best Practices in Social Media

Mitch Joel - Six Pixels of Separation - has initiated a meme around best practices in social media, i've come across it via servantofchaos.

heres the thinking so far:

Consistency (Mitch Joel)
Embrace your audience (Jason Falls)
Listen and add value (Kipp Bodnar)
Listen (Chris Brogan)
Be human (Kristie Wells)
Reach out to others (Morriss Partee)
Honesty and respect (Paisano)
Watch what people actually do (Liz Strauss)
Provide a platform (Beth Harte)
Tell a story (servant of chaos)

Permission to Play.

I'm adding this. It's a small idea we've been mulling around here lately
around the notion of 'permission to play'

The number of marketing managers etc we speak to who ask 'how can we get into Facebook?' or 'how can we build community round our brand?'

The key for brands is; to know where you have the right to be.

Apart from a few big-boys the blunt fact is that in most cases your brand is not actually welcome within social networks.
Knowing where you have permission to play comes from watching, listening and then, if you can identify a way to help, encourage or empower, there may be a role for you.

I'm tagging Neville Hobson, Benjamin Ellis, and toby moore, as we are all talking about some of this stuff at Social Media in Business in October.

1. Blog it.
2. Link to Mitch’s blog
3. Tag it “social media marketing best practices”
4. And then tag someone else with the meme.

marks out of ten? zero.



As Stan quite rightly points out.
'Have these people never seen a Bond film?
It's double O seven. Not zero zero seven.'

at last...twitter for tv!


Gah! I went blue in the face trying to sell the idea of a Twitter tv widget to TiVO, Directv in the US earlier this year, but to no avail. Maybe my pitch was too narrow... Seemed like a no-brainer to me and ,as it goes, some others now agree.

I've just spotted that Yahoo and Intel have got together to create a 'Widget channel', which will, according to the press release..

The Widget Channel will be powered by the Yahoo! Widget Engine, a fifth-generation applications platform that will enable TV watchers to interact with and enjoy a rich set of "TV Widgets," or small Internet applications designed to complement and enhance the traditional TV watching experience and bring content, information and community features available on the Internet within easy reach of the remote control. The Widget Channel will also allow developers to use JAVASCRIPT®, XML*, HTML* and Adobe Flash® technology to write TV applications for the platform, extending the power and compatibility of PC application developer programs to TV and related CE devices.

Among the initial applications mooted are an ebay widget (quel surprise!) and of course the ubiquitous Twitter.
"Transforming television into an interactive device for sharing real-time updates among friends, family, and other trusted sources is an exciting prospect that extends Twitter's reach into an important arena."
Biz Stone, Co-founder of Twitter.

There's some dissent/scepticism of course, i'm curious to see what devlops though.
Any thoughts?

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

we value your feedback...


from chaosscenario

design the cover for the next Soma records compilation


Glasgow's Soma Records have launched a design competition to create the cover art for its 2008 compilation album.

I've been rediscovering some early 90's techno via blip fm, Dave Clarke, Luke Vibert and god knows what else. Slam and Soma were, of course, very much part of that vibe and continue to innovate in that vein to this day, although they were probably second to Bellboy as Scotland's most important tech-house label ;)

Details and material to get working on the cover can found here.

I'm a bit late picking up on this though, time is tight, submissions are being accepted up until until September 6.

What are the prizes, i hear you ask!:
- a copy of the compilation to be released in December
- every album that has come out on the label during 2008,
- t-shirts
- free 6-month subscription to Soma digital downloads

spotted at flowmi

Monday, September 01, 2008

re: the first law of mass media

In another instance of pure synchronicity I read Seth Godin's post The first law of mass media on Friday morning and the same day was flummoxed by an element of a presentation i heard during a planning session for a car client.

The presenter was excited about the possibility of 'interactive' video (can't fault him there) however the examples showed were 'robot' driven pieces where the character in the vid 'answers' questions the user types in (from some kind of key word recognition gizmo that triggers answers from an FAQ database)

I questioned whether a robot answering was indeed better than a real person - there then folowed some debate about whether 'consumers' found it easy/benefitial to talk to 'real' car dealers.

If this relationship is percieved as broken then surely the task is repair the human relationship?

Seth says:

The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatise and anonymise the interactions.

The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win.