Russell Davies

switching

Thinking more about this and that I'm even more convinced that the way to encourage responsible energy use is not through one huge centralised campaign but through a bundle of little things with different actions and motivations. Gavin calls them microcampaigns - like his simple and brilliantly obvious Iveswitched. And there are things like walkit. And the small steps that Jon talks about.

And it strikes me that the best thing that marketingland can do here is swing in behind these things and start donating imagination and cash to try and make some of them 'tip'. We need to support the people with the passion and the ideas.

(Picture from Gavin's flickrstream)

making do

Iain recently wrote a post about the Bonfire Of The Brands book, which I wrote a little bit for, ages ago, and am now slightly afraid of. But a more interesting thing popped up in the comments - a link to Robert Llewellyn's Making Do project on YouTube. Mr Llewellyn's a hero in our house, because of Scrapheap Challenge, and this project is great. He's trying to go for a year without buying anything - making do - it's even more of a challenge because he's clearly a bit of a technophile. Fascinating, funny, honest stuff.

read all about it

This is a brilliant way to capture the full alarmist nonsense horror of the Evening Standard's headlines. (via bobbie)

beeker at interesting

Here's the estimable Rebecca doing her twenty minutes at Interesting. Her topic, obviously, is Ibsen and The Muppets. Top stuff.

elsewhere

Reading this and this I get rather excited with the idea that it might soon be the time when the internet stops being the interesting, inventive, remarkable thing and starts becoming the place where we hear about all the other interesting, inventive, remarkable things.

dave at interesting

Here's one of the real hits of the day. Dave of funkypancake doing over 200 slides in 20 minutes, and not a slide wasted.

gareth school

Following Andrew's tremendous effort Gareth has signed up to do the next Account Planning School of the Web task. I love this, I do nothing at all yet still feel like I'm getting some points for this somehow.

speaking of interesting

Rhodri Marsden of interesting saw fame*, has been doing a rather brilliant experiment in DIY music-making for The Independent.  In the process he's invented a band, made a quite lovely song, come up with a video that's getting tons of downloads on YouTube and written lots of funny stuff about it. I suggest you invest.

(* Just in this little world of course, in other worlds he's famous for all sorts of other things.)

grant at interesting

Here's a longer talk from Grant McCracken. After watching this again I've realised that it's probably a mark that you're living a good and interesting life if you can hold an audience spellbound for twenty minutes with a story from your own life. That's a good thing to aim for. Thanks to Roo for the thumbnail picture on the video. Again, the sound isn't brilliant but I think it's good enough. (It's about 16 minutes.) I think I'll get all the listenable stuff up as soon as I can, then we can add better sound for the final archive versions.

sophie at interesting

I was chatting with Jeffre today. He was telling me that the people who've written most about interestingness are people who do lots of database mining. And that they tend to ascribe two key characteristics to interestingness - it has to be novel, and it has to contain some information which makes us see new regularity where previously we hadn't seen a pattern. (I think that's what he said.) I guess this means an ability to help us see something in a new light, with a new fascination. And Sophie certainly did this for me. I've probably seen loads of Cezanne still lives in galleries or on tea towels. They've never struck me as interesting before. And then Sophie does three minutes of thoughtful, informed talking and they'll forever be fascinating. Thanks Sophie. Fantastic stuff.

Incidentally, the graphics at the start and the end are from The Design Conspiracy and the sounds are from Simon and Curtis.