After that, it only seems right to leave you with song in question.

I’ve not written anything for a while, partly because it’s taking me ages to write my songs/albums of the year/decade posts.

But why I’m bothering I’m not really sure, as the only stories really worth telling this year have been the release of The Beatles Rock Band and AC/DC, another band who refuse to allow their music to be chunked up and sold as dowloads, overtaking The Beatles as the best selling act of all time. Problem with the music industry’s business model? Not for these guys.

Who said nostalgia ain’t what it used to be?

Abbey Road homage by notsogoodphotography on flickr

At the end of last week Sir Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the world wide web, finally got with the cool kids (well, the vaguely hip middle class intelligentsia) and joined Twitter.

And since then I’ve seen two things that would make him proud that he did (invent the web that is, obviously he shouldn’t be proud that he’s joined Twitter and is being followed by over 12,000 people already but only following 31 in return, like some bald, white male version of Oprah).

First is the marvelous video you can see below. A stop-motion tribute to that classic 60s anthem, Right Said Fred, from which the greatest 2/3 bald gay trio of the 90s took their name. Doesn’t it make you proud to be alive?

Slightly less impressive, but almost as wonderful, is this little YouTube Easter Egg: go to any YouTube video and replace the word ‘watch’ in the URL with ‘warp.swf’. When you do, you’re presented with a graphical representation of where that video sits in the YouTube universe, allowing you to see how it relates to other videos, and from there on to videos that they relate to.

You kind of have to play around with it to see what I mean, though there are a couple of screen-grabs that might help: the one above is the original Lego video and its immediate neighbours, the one below shows what I’d got to after browsing for a few seconds - somehow I’d ended up on a video showing me how to make the sounds for the letters V & W. A sneaky branding exercise by a german car manufacturer perhaps?

Well, what a week that was. Trafigura, Jan Moir and Ian & TFL: three separate incidents, all unrelated other than the fact that, to greater or lesser degrees, mobiles & Twitter played a large part in their being resolved/gaining mainstream coverage.

In the case of Trafigura, Carter-Ruck almost certainly caved more quickly than they would have done otherwise; The Daily Mail was forced to pull advertising from an article which was, let’s be honest, no more horrible than many of the other hateful things they publish on a daily basis; and Ian, the TFL worker, finds himself sitting at home this morning wondering if it was such a clever idea to suggest throwing a customer under a train (with someone actually claiming I helped it hit the big-time. Blimey). Then again, anyone who, in this day & age, thinks it’s cool to wear fingerless gloves and have a pony-tail probably isn’t going to be battering down MENSA’s door demanding membership any time soon.

Many people have written about all of these events already, and with much more insight than I could hope to provide. However, one thing has kept popping into my mind again & again over the last few days: Forrester’s ladder is broken; the ladder is now horizontal, not vertical.

For anyone not familiar with it, the ladder (above) is Forrester’s way of categorising the different types of users of social media. I use it a lot when talking to clients and think that it makes a reasonably complicated topic quite simple to explain. The reason that they chose a ladder is obviously because the idea is that it takes more effort to be a creator than a spectator, hence Creators being at the ladder’s top. And, in the days when creating a web-page, or filming & uploading a video, or even just writing a blog post, took a vague amount of effort, that was a valid metaphor.

But, as we’ve seen over the last week, all you need to be a Creator now is a half-decent camera phone & a Twitter account. This trend can probably be traced back to the London bombings back in 2005, when most of the iconic images came from the camera phones of people trapped in the Tube tunnels, rather than the professional camera crews ‘trapped’ outside, away from the story. But now, with the exponential improvement in the quality of camera phones, especially video ones, and the ease with which Twitter allows someone to ‘upload’ that content, the whole game has changed.

So, to paraphrase Clay Shirky if I may:

So forget about mobiles and Twitter and tweeting and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of instantaneously publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just dropped as close to zero as makes no difference. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is already proving to be vast.

Ladder image by Bohman on flickr

It tastes great within the borders of that country but absolute shite if you take it anywhere else.”

Having met him at Stream 09 I already knew that Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilivy Group, was very entertaining company. I’d also realised that he was a scarily intelligent man with an amazing way with words. And now millions more will as his recent talk from TED, about the difference between real & perceived value,  is up online.

You can view it at the main TED site but to be honest, the quality’s poor and it keeps crashing, So watch it on YouTube instead, and let Google pick up the server costs whilst TED try to remember why they built a video player in the first place.

Pastis by m4tik on flickr

Anyone reading this probably knows that the web is a pretty big deal: Facebook’s the 4th biggest ‘country’ in the world, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, yada, yada, yada. But just to ram the point home, here’s a rather neat little widget (view the original one here) which tracks the expansion of the digiverse in real time.

I still reckon it’s a fad.

Abacus image by ScottieT812 on flickr

Back in the early 90s I remember writing a letter to NME (or it may have been Melody Maker, I can’t quite remember). I was annoyed at the amount of hype they were giving to a couple of new bands, undeservedly I felt. The bands in question were Suede & The Verve (or Verve as they were at the time). I thought these two bands were overrated and that the band that should be getting the attention was Adorable, who I thought deserved to be absolutely huge. As I often say, my predictions are almost always wrong.

The reason I thought this was due to their début single, Sunshine Smile. A splendid mix of fuzzy guitars and a thundering rhythm, the song was a call to arms: it came out in 1992, as shoegazing was starting to wane but before Britpop had hit. In many ways Adorable were a dry run for Oasis - signed to Creation, front-man Piotr Fijalkowski had a knack for giving good quote, although he had both the gob of Liam and the brains of Noel. According to Wikipedia Oasis have quoted Adorable as an influence, and certainly early Oasis singles bear a passing resemblance to Adorable’s sound, which took shoegazing style guitars and added a dose of pop sensibilities & rock tempos.

Obviously Adorable weren’t huge. They hit the top end of the Indie Charts a few times, with Sunshine Smile as well as the equally excellent singles Homeboy & Sistine Chapel Ceiling. Unfortunately their (excellent) debut album, Against Perfection, failed to do much business at all, and after releasing another, much weaker second album, they split in 1994. By then of course both Suede & The Verve had been surpassed by the meteoric rise of Oasis and whilst my 17 year old self was probably wrong, Adorable certainly left some amazing tracks for us to remember them by.

Subshine smile by fdecomite on flickr

One of the best things I saw at Stream 09 was a video by Yossi Vardi, the Israeli tech-legend who co-hosts the event with WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell. It’s a spoof of the excellent Kobe Bryant Nike viral and got a big laugh when he showed it on the last night.

The Kobe video has racked up a few million views so far, with many of them certainly coming as a result of people watching the video more than once, as they try to work out whether it’s been doctored or not. What’s interesting about the video, other than trying to work out whether he really has just jumped over a car, is that it was another example of a type of video that has become more & more popular.

The video above was an ad that Levis drove viral, showing people supposedly leaping into pairs of jeans. Whilst it’s gained a lot of acclaim, I personally feel that it’s a rather weak imitation of the Ray Ban Never Hide video, which gained huge exposure due to the fact that it seems to show a guy catching sunglasses on his face that are thrown at him as he drives along in a car. What I particularly love about Never Hide is that although there is no sign of any branding, the final shots show the back window of the car with the words ‘never hide’ written on it in dirt. A search for ‘never hide’ at the time the video was released, led you to Ray Ban’s site. Genius.

Of course these sort of viral cons don’t just have to show people catching things, or jumping into or over them. The people at Quiksilver caused a wave of attention when they released a video which looked like people surfing on a river in a major city, on waves caused by dropping dynamite into the river.

Despite the fact that all of these videos appear to be manipulated in some way or another, you can create even more impact with something that people don’t believe, but which is actually true. The TFL Do The Test video I worked on whilst at Altogether generated a lot of views because people rewound the video, as they didn’t believe that the two pieces of film shown were one & the same. They were, and that’s probably why it even made it onto network TV in the US. Who said you need to trick the public to cause a stir?

I’ve just got back from 3 days at an event called Stream 09. It was organised by WPP, Mindshare’s parent company and was, quite simply, brilliant. Billed as an unconference it’s essentially a group of about 200 people who are invited to spend a few days discussing interesting things at a venue on the coast of Greece, just outside Athens. The attendees ranged from scientists to technicians to engineers to venture capitalists to journalists to magicians, and it really was a fascinating few days, as well as a lot of fun.

On the first night they held what was dubbed as The Gadgethon: essentially this was a Dragon’s Den scenario where people had to showcase the latest gadgets they had come across. There was also a section where people presented ideas for gadgets that haven’t actually been invented yet - I won that section with a device called Walk & Talk; I’m not going to try to explain it here, but ping me if you want the details. I have a feeling it’s unlikely to be going into production any time soon.

Anyway, the first section was won by a guy called Miles, who presented a really bloody cool iPhone app called Sonifi. It basically allows people to remix, mash-up & generally muck around with tracks just by doing things like tapping the screen & shaking the phone. Nice.

The tune that you can hear in that demo of Sonifi is Rose Of Jericho by BT which is, quite simply, what I believe is known in the trade as an absolute f*cking tune. It starts off with some vaguely alien sounding bleeps & blips, with a rather ominous drum ticking away in the back. After not too long it all builds up before rocketing in with an absolutely storming bass. I would imagine it would sound rather fabulous in a club - it sounded pretty damn good in a meeting room in a Club Med.

The photo at the top is of the wall of Polaroid photos taken by the guys at Stream. Can you spot me? If you were there, can you spot yourself? It was taken by Guido Van Nispen who took a load of amazing photos there. Thanks to him, thanks to Yossi Vardi & everyone at WPP for organising such a great event and thanks to everyone who attended for making it so interesting. Here’s hoping I’m invited back next year.

I’m currently watching season 1 of Mad Menon DVD. I never managed to quite get into it when it was on TV and so decided to give it a second chance. Whilst I’m reserving judgement on it until I’ve finished the box-set, what I can’t argue with is the fact that it is incredibly cool.

From the smart suits (Don Draper has to be the biggest style icon of the last couple of years) to the constant cocktails and cigarettes (because drinking and smoking are, I’m afraid, cool - just not clever) - it’s all just feels so perfectly slick. A feeling that is only enhanced by the rather lovely theme tune, ‘A Beautiful Mine’ by Rjd2.

It’s a perfect slice of the sort of instrumental hip-pop that RJD2 does so well. All chilled beats & sweet strings it sounds perfectly retro and utterly current, all at the same time, reminding me of the soundtracks that David Holmes put together for Ocean’s 11 & its sequels.

Whilst I don’t know Magnificent City Instrumentals, the album A Beautiful Mine is taken from, if it’s anywhere as good as Rjd2’s début Deadringer, it’s probably worth picking up. Whilst you decide whether or not to pick it up, why not enjoy the full version of the track that got me talking about it.

Mad Men image by ericalm on flickr via the rather cool Mad Men Yourself.