Russell Davies

welcome the undermanager

Warning - this is one of those tedious posts where people write about their social media strategies rather than just getting on with them. Apologies.

Anyway.

I liked twitter a lot more when you could get it via SMS (which you can't now, in the UK, not without doing complicated stuff that's not worth it). I liked that you could then use it in different ways depending where you were and what you were doing.

I used to follow loads of twittering streams but only set up a much smaller number for SMS. This seemed to work well. SMS was kept for people I was likely to bump into, or people I knew well. At home, via twitterific I was happy to see almost anything burble by in the twitterstream.

When SMS access went away I really missed it. I liked those little buzzes of update popping up all the time. Now, when I'm away from m'computer I have to check the mobile twitter site on my phone, which is fine, but it's really making clear how much twitter is filling up with all sorts of other stuff. And I think I need another bifuraction strategy to sort the twitters I want while I'm out and about and the ones I want dribbling ambiently into a big display.

So, I'm going to start some social pruning on the regular account - leaving people that I might bump into, might want to bump into, or know well enough to want to know what they're about with an unseemly amount of haste. This is partly for attention management purposes, partly because I'm not sure I want loads of people I don't know reading all my twitters. Some days I mind, some days I don't. But, anyway I'm going to get a lot more discriminating with letting people in there. To see how that feels.

And I've started the Undermanager account for following delightful objects, fictional people, company puppets, people I don't know well but like the sound of, people who seem to have stopped twittering much, people I'm unlikely to bump into, people who mostly twitter about the fact that they've written a blogpost etc etc. I'm not having a go at these things at all. They're all part of the rich tapestry of twitter. But I'd like to catch-up with them at my leisure, on my computer, not at the post office, while paying money to Orange. And I might use the Undermanager account for those things myself. Not the 'going to get a coffee stuff' but the 'I've written a blogpost' 'listened to a track on blip' stuff. The Undermanager is life admin. If you'd like to follow it, that would be delightful. If you wouldn't, that would be understood.

search engines off

About an hour ago a song clicked onto the ipod and I was moved to issue this tweet.

Mr Tinley caught the vibe, which was nice. And it occurred to me that you could run a good pop quiz via twitter. And a second later it dawned on me that it would be no fun because ease of googling would ruin it. Which made me think that it would be nice if all the search engines would switch themselves off for an hour a week so quizzes could happen via twitter. Certainly there'd be revenue lost, massive inconvenience and huge global coordination issues but it'd be nice wouldn't it?

Then, a bit later, I noticed Ben had done it anyway.

euro - strong against the dollar

And also against the kentucky.

ten worst posts

NDG's had a splendid idea, which is bound to spread through the humbler pastures of the blogosphere. He's written a marvelously honest set of Ten Worst Posts. So I thought I'd try the same. It's always good to learn from your failings.

Manifesto - not especially original and it doesn't really sound like me. I hadn't got the hang of who I am.

I am pedant - with all the mistakes I make on here, I can't afford to be this pedantic.

Denning - this just illustrates how hard it is to be as funny as Dave.

Cars and cameras - this smacks of looking for a post. Desperate. For anything.

Stranded - this was a lesson about politeness. Anne actually saw this picture first and she wasn't pleased that I didn't mention that. Fair enough.

14th August - why did I imagine anyone needed to know this?

Toy of the month - this is a tale of failed initiative. I liked the Toy Of The Month idea, and I just let it dribble away.

BT to gherkin - this was supposed to be a bold breakthrough in urban landart. But it turned out to be mostly just a line.

shuffleswap - quite a good idea, never followed through on. Sorry.

skypecast scaredy-cat rethink - this was me getting too big for my boots. I thought I'd do some global chat thing and then chickened out at the thought of hosting it all. Still, it turned into coffee mornings, which are a lot more pleasant.

How's that? Anyone got anything worse?

it says nothing

I'm fairly tolerant of silly beliefs. Well, I'm not tolerant, but I'm normally too lazy to get indignant. But this book takes the cake. Or the biscuit. Or something. It doesn't just posit one obviously untrue thing - astrology - but it combines it with another - the idea that days have colours and this somehow has something to do with who you are. Incredible.

I actually looked the at colorstrology website just to check this wasn't all a joke. I discovered very oppresive use of flash animation and some choice mumbo-jumbo, but I also realised that the whole thing is sponsored by Pantone. (They alert you to this fact on the launch page and warn you that the content on the site 'is for entertainment purposes only'. So don't base your life on your birth colour and then sue them when it doesn't work out.)

You could see why they'd think this book would be a clever idea - except it makes them look like completely vapid new age idiots, rather than smart colour theorists.

Personally I will be buying my colours from someone else from now on.

(And I'm still not entirely convinced it's not an elaborate hoax.)

Strangely all the pages I flicked through listed only positive qualities. But presumably there must be some in there that say something like - Dirty Grey - Slow. Ugly. Weak. Otherwise the world would be full of only splendid, persistent people.

(By the way, aren't digital cameras marvelous? Once upon a time I would have to have bought this book in order to make fun of it. Not any more).

Mind you. Don't these things rather remind you of a typical brand values statement? There's the same limited universe of positive attributes, which end up signifying not much.

dumb, crass, stupid, sexist lavazza

I'm posting this in the hope that someone at Lavazza or the agency that's responsible for this "First Class Espresso Experience" campaign will do some sort of buzz monitoring and find it via Google or something and it'll turn up in a report associated with the words dumb, crass, sexist, stupid. Which when you think about it, as more brands do active internet monitoring, is a nice way of doing consumer activism.

The more links there are to it, the more likely they are to find it - so if you hate this kind of stuff, do your bit.

how frequent?

The parental warning on King Kong seems to describe the average day at work: "contains frightening elements, moderate violence and frequent peril"

Book tag

There's now a book tag going around, like the Musical Baton. Cup Of Java tagged me, which is nice, but I'm now starting to worry the whole thing's getting a bit spammy so I'm not going to pass it on.

Anyway, it's a good opportunity for me to demonstrate what a Philistine I am...

Total number of books owned:

Couple of thousand? Most of them products of living in Portland for five years - Portland's the place where second hand books go to die.

The Last Book I Bought:

Not The End Of The World by Christopher Brookmyre. Not really started this yet, but at the moment I'm reading a new Brookmyre every three or four days. You can race through them, they're funny and clever and full of explosions and shootings.

Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me:

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Imaginative, funny scifi. And the best scifi writers are like the best planners - they draw all kinds of random threads together, they imagine possible futures and they tell compelling stories.

The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. I get the sense that Tutfte isn't that nice a bloke. And his stance on PowerPoint is ridiculous and over-simplistic (which is ironic given his stance on the presentation of information) but he makes the most gorgeous books ever. And they're full of wisdom and provocation.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. As with the Stephenson, except when you're dead bored, stuck at Schiphol, you can sometimes pretend you're a character in this.

Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers. Brilliant book. I've read this dozens of times. About a murder at a British advertising agency in the 20s or 30s. Blustery account guys. Dilettante copywriters. Irritating clients. Drugs. They're all in here. Nothing changes.

egregious empowerment

'Empowers' is one of those words that you see too often. An especially bad example from AdAge's website :

"Welcome to Adage.com.
For access to our website, please login or register. Registration is free and empowers you with up-to-the-minute breaking news from the most authoritive source covering the Advertising Industry"

teen machine

ToysRUs have also invented this rather ungainly jargon - teentronics. Presumably they mean the kind of surly electronics which only work when they want to. Ha ha.