Russell Davies

1997 weeks

I'm at the Four Seasons Bosphorus for the weekend, to do a talk for some planners from a global agency network. It should be impossibly glamorous, and I'm very grateful for the work but, right now, I'd really rather be at home watching Harry Hill with Anne and Arthur. It's the most contemptible whining, this is the path I've chosen, but there it is.

Arthur gave me this finger-puppet turtle to keep me company, which is helping.

The rest of the week's been good. Did some large-sports-related-organisation work, that's getting even more interesting, and they're really nice people. Did a talk in Dublin. That was fun. And actually managed to spend a day at BRIG and we had a proper Newspaper Club meeting (though Phil, who was overhearing described it as 'like panto'.) That's the good stuff. Making proper decisions, ourselves, about our own business, not really knowing what we're doing, but doing it anyway. It's good.

I did 1,250 words for next week's Campaign about political digital campaigning which was hard - actually needed to have some facts in it, which I'm not used to. But, managed to do my regular column on the plane on the way here so I'm a day ahead of myself. I've got to do a Wired column next week so I'm in the worrying about it but not actually writing it phase.

A good week.

like a sports thing

Tom's piece about curling reminded me of Matt's piece about sport and metaphor and connected with James' words about words and reminded me of a little theory of mine.

I think part of Nike's success is that they have access to an enormously rich and nuanced library of sporting metaphors and analogies. They're all athletes, or at least sport enthusiasts, they use sporting analogies all the time - and with tremendous subtlety. It's not just 'getting over the line' or 'hail Mary passes'. It's much deeper and well constructed than that. There'll be much more delicate use of metaphors - sometimes crossing sports to make precisely the right point. (I can't, of course, think of an example right now.)

This is especially helpful in new territories - when you're doing things that have never been done before and there is no established jargon or terms of art. Naming is important, and importing resonances and meaning from sport is tremendously helpful.

cheapfuturefashionfomatics

This is the S2H replay; an activity monitor/pedometer thing that does a similar job to the fitbit. Except it feels way more like the future than the fitbit because it's cheap, fashiony and simple. And they'll actually deliver you one outside the US.

There's a simple watch unit that fits inside a rubber band/casing - which means you can get loads of different colours.

It tells the time and measures how active you are in four chunks of 15 minutes each. Represented by these little bar charts / level meters. Complete an hour of activity and it gives you a code you type into the Switch2Health website - no USB, no wifi, no bluetooth, no whispersync - any browser, any computer, a bit of typing and you're done.

Your hour of activity gets you rewards - downloads, ringtones etc. I reckon about a week of ordinary activity will get you a month of Club Penguin. And there are leader boards and all sorts of capacity for games to be built on top of the activity monitoring.

And if you're not being active enough it tells you with a smiley face or a frowny one.

It's good because it's dumb, simple, obvious. (And rabidly commercial - they're furiously building a commercial ecosystem for this thing.) There's not much to go wrong. (Except my browser keeps warning me that the commerce site is 'untrusted'.) This feels like another prototype of a measuring pebble; something small and simple that will enhance my devices, something I can afford to break or lose but that connects to my expensive, unreliable, easily damaged phone/pad/whatever. And using the code to connect is genius - no need for capacitive sausage skin or hacking into the headphone jack. Easy, cheap, good.

1998 weeks

Got in early on Tuesday morning and discovered an inch or so of water covering the floor of our offices - our bit and BERG's. The water was geysering out of the plughole and pouring over the edge of the sink. I was very tempted to turn around, head for the cafe and let someone else be the first to discover it. Instead I steeled my resolve and set to simultaneously calling Berg to get keys to their bit, getting as much that was valuable off the floor and trying to bucket the water coming out of the sink. Thankfully it was just rainwater coming from the roof. It could have been worse - we had to get the toilets unblocked a couple of weeks ago. Fairly soon more BRIGands arrived and calm efficiency began to take over. It was interesting to see how quickly we reverted to roles as officers and men; I quickly shirked any responsibility for dealing with authority figures and set to bailing water out of the sink. Matt W and Tom T were much more capable of getting hold of plumbers, builders and landlords and trying to get stuff sorted.

We had an eventful morning of pumps, buckets and 4-foot squeegees but have escaped any serious damage. We're still living under the threat of flood but hopefully it'll be sorted out soon. Big thanks to Tom T for writing stern emails to the landlord and to Matt W who had to spend most of his birthday evening operating a submersible pump.

I've always looked forward to having my own little office space, sharing it with colleagues who are also friends and so far it's been a joy. But it's important to remember it's not all tea, biscuits and fibre-optic fairy ornaments. There's also blocked toilets and flooding.

(I wasn't in on Monday because I had myself a day off - it's half-term. It's a sign of slightly harder times that I only got a day off this half-term. When I started freelancing I was determined to take all the school holidays off - that was part of the point. That's not possible at the moment, I'm not earning enough to have that luxury. Ah well.)

Wednesday and Thursday were with the large sport related organisation again, where I think I'm beginning to make a bit of a contribution. I've found myself remembering those large org skills and tricks again, like a retired golfer rediscovering his swing. It's hard being in the same office all day though and it's a big building, hard to get out of. I just had to get outside for 10 minutes on Thursday and fortunately it was raining which felt like concentrated outside. I just stood and let it rain on me before heading back to the powerpoint.

And Friday was a treat, I got to be the MC at The Story which meant lots of the fun and none of the work. It was a really interesting and rather lovely day. Personally I'm still rather skeptical about whether the idea of story deserves all the hooplah it gets - to me it seems more like a convenient framework to hang all the important stuff rather than being that interesting in itself - but I have absolutely no way of making that case so I'm really glad I didn't have to do a presentation.

In the background Tom continues to push beta invites out for Newspaper Club and a trickle of people are starting to make papers - the good news is that all of them seem delighted with the product and the process. Hurrah.

On the whole, a good and interesting week. Here's hoping the office won't be underwater when we get there on Monday.

 

always a good sign

1999 weeks

First thing I've realised - Monday is the wrong day for weeknotes. My head's full of the week ahead, not the week behind. It's already a struggle to remember last week. So this will inevitably be brief. And the next one will probably be on a Friday.

I've signed up to do a couple of days a week for a large sports-related organisation, but I haven't signed a contract yet, and I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk about it, so it'll have to remain anonymous for now. Good, nice, smart people and it's so nice to be thinking about sport  and sports culture again though. It's something I've done most of my working-life, I've never been the world's biggest sports fan per se, but I've always been fascinated by how it intersects with culture and society. Same as with cars and fashion. And technology.

I caught myself saying this in a meeting last week: "It may not be obvious to look at me, but I know a lot of about running."

Tom and I also had a meeting about a secret thing with a secret person, which was interesting and secret. And we've been working on something vaguely related to SAP which has involved looking at lots of these and researching radar screens and sound archives which has been a joy. Need to fix up a date to debrief that.

And, I did a spot of pontificating for the COI, about learning organisations and learning in organisations. I haven't really spoken/thought about that properly before. Made me realise I've seen a lot of of different companies deal with that in different ways, it might be something to write about some time.

And, speaking of writing, the blog is finally starting to be of some use to me. After I wrote last week's entry about weeknotes Wired got in touch to suggest that as a topic for a column - which is such a blessing because I've just delivered one and it means I've got four whole weeks to swim it around my head before writing it. And, after I wrote this, Campaign asked me to do a feature for them on the same topic, which gives me an excuse to research it properly. Result.

And, of course, there's Newspaper Club. Not much for me to do this week. We're pushing out beta invites, waiting to see what people make of it. It's exciting. And seeing people's (so far, very positive) reactions is incredibly satisfying.

digital campaigning

People talk about the Obama election as the first major political campaign to be fought substantially online. But many of the techniques pioneered then were about money and turn-out - data collection and activation - rather than using the internet to communicate and persuade. Obviously smart uses of the tools, but not all they can do.

And now, in the UK, we're in a slightly different environment, at a slightly different time, and we're starting to see new, slightly different stuff emerge.

The first, most interesting, development, was how successful the mydavidcameron campaign was. I bet that image, with suitably updated lines, will be around for the duration of the campaign and probably beyond. It's created a platform for people to engage with politics, playfully, but still expressing themselves. It feels like some power and voice as been re-appropriated from a well-funded media machine.

The second, really welcome development is that the lessons from that campaign have been shared - not squirreled away in a private debrief. An open campaign, open learning. And they're smart, thoughtful, usable lessons.

It was fascinating to read how they've danced on the line between total crowd-sourcing and curation. There's definitely a model here for finding resonant messages; rapid, public iteration quickly helps you discover the might tonal territory in a way that hard-thinking behind closed doors might not.

And, since they're smart cookies, it's a lesson that Richard and Saatchi's have taken right on board with their new poster. Which, actually, is clearly more of a platform than a poster - a thought that can be remixed to accommodate all sorts of specific messages. It might lose some of traditional, poster-type instant impact but this is a new, delicate, slightly different art, it's going to be fascinating to watch it emerge.

It's even more satisfying to watch the Tories struggling to construct posters that can't be 'mydavidcameronised'. You can see traditional, monolithic political posters fall apart in real time by watching alternative headlines for this new effort get suggested via the  #mytorytombstone hashtag.

This is going to be interesting.

2,000 weeks

I've been enjoying all the people doing weeknotes, inspired by the BERGians (though Ben reckons they got the idea from us.) I particularly like the different way people have thought about their week numbering system - BERG started at week 217, Rattle at week 1189. 

I'm going to do them myself - starting at week 2000 - because, looking at some actuarial tables, I've realised that, if I'm lucky, I've got about 2,000 weeks to live. So counting them down, working out whether it was a good use of a week, might be 'usefully focusing'. (Or deeply morbid, but let's assume not.)

lyddle end again

Some slow projects won't leave you alone. You might not have done anything about them for ages but your attention keeps catching on something related in the world, nagging you, reminding you that there's something that needs completing.

Lyddle End 2050 seems to be one of those. Every few weeks or so, since we started, something reminds me that we need to get it done.

Obviously some of that's because if there's a model village nearby I'll go and visit it. But then there are other things, like this Levi-Strauss quote:

Or these wonderful exercises in scale, or the connections between our Lyddle End imaginings and real-world (ish) architecture like this Terreform project or what Chris noted here.

Anyway, all of this says to me that we should get on and finish this thing, whatever finish means in this case.

So, here's a suggestion for the start of the finish - we have some spanking new offices, where we could start to get all the existing models together in a display of some sort and maybe get them photographed nicely in context. So, if you've made a model and you're willing to ship it, would you mind sending it to the address at the top of this page.  If you don't want to, or can't afford to, that's fine, we'll work out how to incorporate photos into 'the show'. If you've not finished your model, or not shot it, then here's your opportunity to rediscover your enthusiasm. Finish it off, shoot it, upload it to flickr tagged lyddleend2050 and it should end up on the tumblr.

Anyway. Just a nudge. To me as much as anyone.

digital democracy

This looks good. Wish I could go. Away unfortunately.