Russell Davies

tom at interesting

Here's the very erudite Tom Lewis-Reynier giving his by now legendary History Of Knots. Sorry about the spotty sound on this, we will try and fix it for the final, archived version, but it's well worth persisting with. Only three minutes long. And here are the notes that Lloyd took for the slowbloggingsysteme. I think he captured the essence.

matt at interesting

Matt was last on at Interesting2007 (which is why he's a bit longer than the average, Bobbie forgot to stop him) and it was the perfect end to the day. His omnivorous interests meant he touched on all sorts of things that came up throughout in a nice rounding-everything-up and spinning-if-off-in-an-interesting-direction kind of way. And he cited all sorts of books that made people want to go and read them, which is an excellent thing. You feel like you should pay attention to the stuff he cares about, it's going to be interesting. And you've just got to admire this kind of semi-grumpy enthusiasm, it makes things happen.

(picture above, of Matt's final chart, by Roo. And thanks to Curtis for helping fix the audio on this)

chris at interesting

Chris here was probably the inspiration for the whole interesting thing. I'd not met him before thinking of the conference but I'd read his blog, which was always interesting, knew he was used to presenting (had done it at lots of tech conferences) and knew he was interested in food. And it occurred to me that it would be fantastic to  hear him talk about food. That was exactly the idea of the thing - get interesting people to talk about their passions. And it had the additional benefit that I got to meet him, over a large fry-up. His talk about a 21st century ebcb was fantastic, just the right thing. Apologies to him and to you for the slightly troubling video camera which interfered with his demos a bit.

(picture above by roo)

matthew at interesting

Matthew was one of the unexpected delights of Interesting. He got in touch, out of the blue, before the conference, I think because he liked the sound of it all, and asked if he could talk. I said yes because I didn't really know what to expect. What would you expect from the editor of The Spectator? Not a masterful Al Pacino impression and an actual incisive point. Life is full of surprises. (And if you'd like to compare and contrast - here's the original.)

(picture above by tim)

beeker at interesting

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

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.

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.

adrian at interesting

Hats off to Adrian for this one. Blimey. He'd never done anything like this before and I made him go first. What a git I am. And he does a brilliant job with three minutes that absolutely set the right tone. As did Johnny with his compering (I've included a bit of that so you can see the pressure the speakers were under. Friendly pressure. But pressure.) And, also, full marks to the crowd - I asked them to be enthusiastic and they were.

We might have a way to get better sound on here, but it'll slow the posting process down a bit. What do we all think? Is this OK?