Talent imitates, genius steals

We, The Makers

2010-01-06T17:59:38+00:00

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

Over the break I read Cory Doctorow's new novel Makers.

Set, as his books usually are, in the almost-now-just-around-the-corner awesomeness of the near future, it charts the tale of a world where people can make stuff.

It begins at point of inflection, the collapse of an economic system, the birth of another - NEW WORK - and its subsequent tribulations, and features exciting co-created theme park rides, an evil Empire [DisneyWorldThemeParks -the fallen star of his first book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom] and cute goth kids and robots and everything.

But the stars of the book are the fabbers - 3D printers.

I've geeked out about these before - because they change everything, once they work properly, which is one of the key struggles in the book - printers that can print components of themselves, and thus create more printers.

Or indeed, anything else. Like products and that.

Which is very much the theme of Willsh's excellent presentation above.

See - so far the social revolution has mostly restricted itself to media because the tools of content production are easier to democratize, and because of the free distribution platform the web provides.

The radical dentralization of the economics of cultural production have not yet really impacted industrial production much.

Of course there are lots of steps towards co-creation of products - but in essence this is the practice of making the industrial production line flexible enough to mass personalize products and let everyone choose the colours they want - which are then sent through the industrial machine to get made - or the crowdsourcing of ideas for products, which are likewise fed into the machine.

But as Wilsh points out, we are moving towards the technologies necessary for social production.

As I said in my first post about fabbers, when you print your own products in a home nanofactory, you might still be buying branded CAD files, or something like that, which is what happens in Makers, as the IP players like Disney license their IP across yet another platform.

But anything that exists digitally can be copied and distributed at zero cost, and once everyone has a fabber, a new type of industrial revolution seems inevitable.

My Dreams, My Day

2010-01-04T16:55:38+00:00

Today's selection from the Nikon Festival, also brought to my attention via some enterprising auteur's outreach.

Here's what he said:

The video shows what can be created in one's own backyard, as opposed to needing special privileges to VIP locations and celebrities, and the video still follows the festival directions - to show what it is like to be you, with high image quality, originality, and ability to capture Nikon's theme.

Normal posting, whatever that may constitute, will probably resume soon.

Welcome to MMX - it's gonna rock.

Paper Birds

2009-12-30T17:53:55+00:00

Today's selection was brought to my attention by its auteur via a little blog outreach, which is good stuff since the onus is very much to spread your content as far and as wide as you can.

This is what he says about it:

The theme of the video is about the inspiration that can be found in unlikely places and that in giving back / sharing to the world – music is created!

A theme that is appropriate for the holiday season!

Indeed it is. Happy New Year Eve Eve.

Hello World

2009-12-29T08:09:38+00:00

Today's Nikon Festival selection is about Passion Pain Death and Intellectual stimulation, apparently.

Your Future Husband

2009-12-28T15:42:08+00:00

Today's Nikon Festival selection gets points [from me, which count for nothing] for mentioning and avoiding the more obvious tropes of 'alarm clocks snooze' and 'brushing teeth'.

And reminding me of Anchorman a bit.

Tin Man

2009-12-26T16:00:40+00:00

A Boxing Day selection from the Nikon Festival.

Rule of 3

2009-12-23T16:52:46+00:00

Today's celeb studded Nikon Festival selection for you.

Also a bit of a tip for those of you who are in the running. Audience voting is done by clicking the star ratings - everyone can indicate how they score each film.

Then, from the Ts&Cs

Limit: Each rater may rate each Finalist Submission one (1) time during the Audience Award Phase. Multiple ratings received from any person or IP address after the first rating will be void and disqualified in Sponsor’s discretion. Finalists are prohibited from obtaining views or ratings by any fraudulent or inappropriate means, including, without limitation, offering prizes or other inducements to members of the public, as determined by Sponsor in its sole discretion. Finalists scores will be determined by multiplying the number of valid views the Submission received by the average rating (out of five (5) stars) it received (the score).

So, basically, any individual as identified by IP address can only RATE each film once - but the final score is a function of the average rating and the total number of views.

So if your film is in there - you need to be doing everything you can to get people to rate your film - and watch it as many times as possible - every valid view counts towards your score!

So get out there and spread your content.

New York State of Mind

2009-12-22T19:23:35+00:00

Being today's Nikon Festival entry that I have picked because I'm heading back to London from New York tomorrow.

[More disclosure: the winning films will be picked by judges and audience votes - nothing to do with me guv - I'm just pulling a few out here for your delectation]

A Day Through Your Lens

2009-12-21T20:18:45+00:00

I usually avoid talking about anything I've been involved in my 'professional' life here on TIGS - it feels weird.

But this thing we're doing is about to hit phase 2 where there's social voting and that I thought I'd mention it in case you haven't seen it. [Disclosure - I was involved in this]

Sorry.

I shall refrain from any exegetical exposition - I shall simply say that Nikon is currently running a film festival called the Nikon Festival, which is designed to harness the newly social nature of short film, and appeal to a participatory culture of budding film makers.

It is a chance for the brand to celebrate the creativity of the audience and is a form of content generation engine - an idea that creates lots of content for the brand - something that I think is crucial in a post scarcity media environment.

The brief was to capture what a day was like through your lens in 140 seconds or less - the 140 obviously echoing the character limit on twitter, because brevity is the soul of twit.

Ahem.

Ashton made us a film of a day in his life and launched the contest with a tweet to his nearly 4 million followers, which was cool.

Anyway, it's been going brilliantly, thanks for asking, we got over 1000 entries and as of tomorrow, you can begin to vote on the finalists [one prize is being awarded by judges, one by audience vote].

So, since it's Christmas and I shan't be be doing any regular posting, I shall instead silently proffer up one of the films for your festive delectation.

Enjoy and Merry Christmas! Or Holidays, or whatever you prefer.

Provocations for 2010

2009-12-18T15:51:38+00:00

I wrote this thing for the current issue of Strategy Magazine in Canada.

I've written about the problems of prospection before, so I won't labour the caveat except to say that perhaps it's better to think of these as provocations rather than predictions.

Gestures
Banners
The Socialisation of Media
Content
Hyperconnectivity and Transmedia

Something old, some new, mostly borrowed, hardly blue.

You can read the whole thing online or in handy portable document format:

Download 2010 Some Next Big Things - Strategy Mag

[There's a line in section 4 that got a bit distorted in the edit - should read:

So the onus in these spaces that advertisers are paying for has been to communicate what they want to say in a way that is appealing to the audience, but not necessarily to communicate something the audience wants to hear.]

I finish the piece with a transmedia link to this video I posted a while back with some other prognostications about the present.

Yes/No/Maybe?

What do you think?

Xmas BeerSphere Is Today

2009-12-17T19:01:35+00:00

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A quick reminder that Xmas BeerSphere NYC is tonight!

I have a bit of a cold so please be gentle with me.

As per the previous post: 7pm, SuperDive [see above] and the first keg is on me as a thank you to you all.

SuperDive says:

Please note that that the maximum number of people in your party will be limited to the number that was confirmed with your reservation.
All parties must arrive no later than 30 minutes after their reserved time. Entry will otherwise be subject to availability.

Which means that I can guarantee 30 of you entry as long as you get there by 7.30pm at the latest - after that it depends on how busy SuperDive is.

Sorry about that - I didn't realize they were SuperStrict when I made the booking - so if you are planning to come I recommend coming before 7.30pm.

Jingle.

No Rational Content

2009-12-16T21:21:28+00:00

I've been reading a very excellent issue of the Journal of Advertising Research that the lovely Gwen at the ARF sent me.

It's a special issue that concerns itself with a very important question [for those of us in advertising]:

What do we KNOW about advertising?

If this seems to be an obvious question, ask yourself to define clearly what advertising is, and exactly how it works, in all cases.

See?

It's tricky this business of ours. That's what makes it so interesting.

[PS> If you don't have some kind of model of how you think advertising and brands and that works - go and think about if for a while , because this is important.

If you don't have some idea HOW and WHY things WORK, how can you hope to make things that do?

If you don't have some model in your head about how putting pieces of content into media [without even getting into the more complex world we live in now] can create business value for companies, by which mechanism this process happens, commercially, culturally and psychologically...well you should.

And then you need to recognize that no one model will hold true for everything:

No single theory or group of theories can explain it all, because advertisements work in such different ways. There is no point in looking for an overall theory.[1]

[1] Nevill Darby, quoted in Advertising Frameworks, Giep Franzen, Brand New Brand Thinking

- which makes things ever trickier...

So maybe go get this issue of the JAR and start there.]

[That was quite an extended parenthesis wasn't it? This one is much shorter.]

One of the research papers I really enjoyed was from measurement masters Les Binet [DDB Matrix] and Peter Fields [my measurement mentor].

It highlights some of the findings from a meta-analysis they undertook for the IPA in the UK, using the IPA DataBANK, which holds all the winning papers for the IPA Effectiveness Awards [one of the few awards which focuses exclusively on the business results of advertising].

The IPA Effectiveness Awards are recognised by agencies and clients as Adlands most rigorous awards scheme because entrants have to prove to a jury of experienced clients that their communications strategies have worked in hard business terms. These awards are open worldwide to agencies, media owners and advertisers.

The analysis looked at 880 winning papers and tried to draw some general conclusions about what seems to correlate strongly with business success.

The paper is called:

Empirical Generalizations about Advertising Campaign Success

You really should read it.

A couple of points they highlight:

"Campaigns that aim to reduce price sensitivity are more effective than campaigns that aim to increase sales or market share."

"Campaigns that focus on customer acquisition are far more effective than campaigns that focus on loyalty."

[Whilst they don't mention this there is an obvious reason for this - loyalty campaigns are forced to compete with direct experience of the customer, whereas acquisition campaigns are not.]

"Campaigns that have the stated aim of getting the brand and the marketing talked about are particularly effective."

But probably my favorite bit is the bit I put up top. With the exception of direct response advertising, which seems to work better with rational messages:

"The most effective advertisements of all are those with little or no rational content." Les Binet/Peter Field

I especially love this because it validates something I posited in a previous post:

"This effect, where commercial grammar overrules social grammar when both are employed is detailed in Predictably Irrational - it further supports Feldwick's view below in the sense that specific product messages would frame communication as commercial and therefore negate the development of social relationship building, or brand preference.

This is probably contentious, but it suggests that if you attempt to employ any rational messaging in brand building communication, you might well be shooting your brand in the foot". From Social Gravity and the Value of Free new emphasis]

So this piece of research, if we hold it to be valid and that, alongside Feldwick's paper, requires those who still hold on to things like Reasons to Believe and USPs to have a good hard think.

I'm not saying this is the answer or anything, but it does really need thinking about.

As Mr Feldwick has pointed out, most advertising professionals will intuitively agree, but in practice we find it really hard to accept that this is how things work, and so default to doing the opposite.

Kindly, the ARF have granted me permission to the post the research paper here.

Enjoy.

Download BINET & Field IPA DATABANK Empirical Generalizations about Advertising Campaign Success.

And the winning piece of culture is....

2009-12-14T21:27:51+00:00

Culture is one of the those tricky words isn't it?

[ Actually, I find all words quite tricky - they squirm and wriggle and writhe, squeezing different 'meaning' into different 'contexts'...but eventually you have to let it go, once you accept there is no fixed 'meaning' to any of the noises we make beyond what I think it means and what you understand it to - assuming everything is in inverted commas is just easier.]

When I asked for pieces of culture I wasn't really sure what I would get, but that was the point - to offer something to you, dear reader, and to get some of your interests in return, which can then be shared and so on.

I was a bit surprised that I only received one recombinant entry, considering my predisposition for such, and although it's great - The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody - it's not today's winner.

Other honorable mentions go to:

Contra Culture Up Up Down Down

Juicy Info Culture and Trends Magazine

Why would the janitor lie?

Why We Travel

Found AV Poems

Eyewriter

But I've decided to send the prize to CapC for the TED talk :

Devdutt Pattanaik: East vs. West -- the myths that mystify -

a fragment of culture that is itself cultural exegesis, using the differences in core myths to unravel the routes of clashing cultures - it seems to be the most 'appropriate' entry.

[CapC please ping me your address]

Devdutt references some very similar points to some of the things I was saying in this paper about brands as modern myths - so I found it very interesting.

"Depending on the context, depending on the outcome, choose your paradigm"

"Understand that you live in the subjective truth, and so does everyone else."

Xmas BeerSphere NYC

2009-12-10T21:48:18+00:00

Christmas approaches and the end of the decade comes into view, leaving many people thinking about what they did and what they will do.

So to interrupt this introspection, BeerSphere NYC is back for a SUPER SPECIAL XMAS EDITION.

This year has felt transitional - but then every year does - and, as it draws to a close, now seems a good time to gently remind people that there are lots of nice, smart people in and around our industry that like a drink.

There are lots of very keen super smart young people who understand that the internet isn't a channel its a whole new set of rules, some fresh out of VCU and Miami, looking for the cracks in the hiring freezes to get their first pop at re-inventing the second oldest profession.

There are some really awesome grown ups who are fun and wise and kind and willing to help with a chat, and sometimes know about jobs and that.

Hopefully a few of both will come next week and then they can hang out and have a nice time.

[But don't do anything lame like turn up with resumes - that would be really uncool.]

This SUPER SPECIAL XMAS BEERSPHERE is sponsored by TIGS - Merry Christmas and thank you for your time and attention and comments and votes and everything.

[I'm buying a keg so you can all come and drink strong continental lager, until it runs out.]

[If you want to do keg stands [whatever they are] that's your prerogative.]

Details:

WHAT: Super Special Xmas BEERSPHERE

WHEN: THURSDAY DECEMBER 17th 7pm onwards

WHERE: Superdive - 200 Avenue A between 12th and 13th

WHY: Because it's fun

See you there, if you come.

Chief Culture Officer

2009-12-09T16:47:57+00:00

Earlier this year I was delighted to receive an unbound pre-print copy of Grant McCracken's new book: Chief Culture Officer - for reasons best known to Grant he decided to solicit a blurb from me.

[Isn't it awesome that blurb is a real word?]

Here's what I said:

“In Chief Culture Officer, Grant McCracken highlights the increasing importance of cultural understanding for brands that wish to remain relevant—and profitable—in the protean flux of the modern marketplace, as he carves out a new role for the 21st century corporation.
The best marketers can hope for is to create something that resonates so strongly it becomes part of our cultural fabric. This book is an indispensable tool for achieving that goal.”

And I stand by it.

[Especially the bit about the protean flux of the modern marketplace - I liked that, despite the tautology.]

Grant's brilliant and he's pulled together some great ideas, frameworks and case studies - you should go read it - and then see if you don't want to become Chief Culture Officer.

[I may change my job title.]

Being a modern and social book it has a Ning to go along with it.

So - since I got a copy free in exchange for blurbing [real world status uncertain but definitely used] it only seems fair that I buy one for one of YOU.

So - in order to win a copy of Chief Culture Officer by Grant McCracken - please leave me a comment with a link to an interesting fragment of culture - the one I like most gets the book.

Deadline is, oh, say the end of the week.

Being Nice and Social

2009-12-08T17:09:07+00:00

Whilst in London I took the opportunity to 'gatecrash' a Yuletide Tea with the IPA Socialites.

[Lovely it was too -high tea with scones and clotted cream and everything - and very nice to see everyone.]

This reminded me that I hadn't posted the collective fruits of our labors - what we came together to do - which was to continue the conversations of social type stuff beyond the static dead tree format of the IPA Social Media Futures report.

And so to that.

Some very nice smart people got together and had a think about this thing we currently call social media and how it might be approached by our industry.

Up top is a video version of Be Nice or Leave - my introduction to social engagement thing, that has been finding its way back into my inbox and onto the web a lot recently - and since I never posted it, I thought I would.

Here is a deck the Neil wrote which introduce the conversational sparks:

Neil Perkin's presentation from IPA Social Oct 09

And here, for your reading pleasure, are the full length iterations

Robin then responded with some thoughts of his own about our advertising-centric approach and, of course, the perennial question of who is best placed to do what - which I append here as a relevant continuation of the conversation.

Feel free to comment - that's very much the idea.

Pop is Short for Popular

2009-12-03T00:24:38+00:00

Whilst I was in London last week I popped into the the Tate Modern and experienced the awesome Pop Life exhibition.

It's dead good - and not just because some of the rooms are 18+ only [always a good sign].

[Dear FCC - this is an unsolicited endorsement. I just thought it was good. I bought a ticket and everything.]

One of my favorite pieces was created just for the show - a music video, shot by McG, conceived and styled by Murakami, starring Kirsten Dunst, for the song Turning Japanese [I think I'm turning Japanese] by The Vapors.

[It's not online yet but you can see some shots from it here - kawaii!]

There's some really interesting exegesis about Warhol and his approach to business as art.

Recently I got asked some questions about Warhol and so I did a bit of research so I wouldn't look too stupid.

He was a branding genius, he turned himself into a brand very consciously, decades before social media somehow got Julia Allison a role in a Sony TV commercial.

He wasn't doing this just to appease his childhood insecurities [although that was probably part of it].

It was because he approached art as a business:

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. - A Warhol

In his book - The Philosophy of Andy Warhol - he makes the branding point even more explicitly.

He talks about being jealous of

'Levi and Strauss. I wish I could invent something like blue jeans. Something to be remembered for. Something mass.'

This i think is awesome - art not for the elite but for everyone - but also very commercially minded.

It's echoed in a quote from Posh Spice - who said she wanted to be 'as famous as persil' - as Bullmore pointed out ages ago. Packaged goods brands are more famous than any celebrity will ever be.

Let's return to the 18+ room.

In 1991, Jeff Koons wrote a letter to Italian porn star turned politician [only in Italy - although if Jenna Jameson ran...] Cicciolina and invited her to make some art with him.

During the making of this art - which consists of idealised and very graphic images and sculptures of them having sex as a kind of postlapsarian Adam and Eve - they fell in love and got married and created a very compelling myth around the artworks.

Now - whilst Koons was famous in the 80s, after this he became really very famous indeed.

[There are few things guaranteed to create headlines around the world, but this has to come very close.]

And then he also happened to become the most expensive living artist in the world at auction.

All the POPular artists featured - especially Damien Hirst - understood that the value any work of art is entirely socially created - it only has value because we agree that it does.

Which means that the entire art industry is predicated on a very simple value equation:

People will pay more for something they have heard of.

Correspondingly, the more people have heard of the artist, and his work, the more it is worth.

So the business of art is fame, to become popular, to make itself famous, to create brands.

As you may have guessed, I think this mechanism underlies a lot of culture, and advertising and that.

Running Up / London Massive

2009-11-24T12:25:22+00:00

Despite what my friend [and fellow contender] Iain referred to as my 'shameless whoring' ,

[or what I considered 'very conservative campaigning', which is perhaps a reflection of how living in America can alter your perceptions of promotion],

I didn't win the British Interactive Media Award for Best Blog.

*Sad Face*

But I did come second and therefore Ran Up, which is completely awesome - thank you all so much.

*Big Grin*

So, to celebrate appropriately [i.e. in Britain], I'm going to be supping generic lagers in the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, near Goodge Street Station [in London - map here] this Thursday [Nov 26th] from about 7pm

[possibly a bit earlier since I'm on 'vacation' - Happy Thanksgiving!]

[it's a Samuel Smith pub and therefore doesn't carry brand name beer].

I'm not sure it's quite a Beersphere [I'm planning a big Xmas one in Dec - more to come on that later], perhaps more of a Beer Hemisphere.

Ahem.

So, if you're about and fancy a pint, first round is on me.

PLOT: Data is Beautiful

2009-11-13T23:09:20+00:00

My mate Lisa just spent her maternity leave [CONGRATS!] conceiving an idea, spawned by many hours staring at ugly data.

boring meetings = interesting ideas
Lisa Prince, a strategist at Wieden+Kennedy, sat in many meetings staring at data. Sometimes her mind would wander. She started to notice that by squinting a little the data began to transform into something quite beautiful.
When strategist Lisa met art director, Nicholla, x met y and they had the idea to transform data into beautiful pieces of wearable art.

So Lisa asked her lovely husband - APRINCE - to design the site, and jewelry designer Hannah Havana [is that your real name? I have just realised that names that rhyme are awesome] to make the jewelry come true.

PLOT is the result - a data viz jewelry company, created in association with W&K London, that believes:

Data is Beautiful!

If you have seen the piece about data viz Noah and I wrote a while back for Contagious - Ways of Seeing - you'll know we agree.

Those of you interested in data and how it effects marketing and that would also do well having a read of Matt's President's Prize winning IPA Excellence Diploma Thesis:

Data is Our Future: Welcome to the Age of Infomagination. DOWNLOAD MY PAPER HERE.

More Mind Tonic

2009-11-11T17:42:38+00:00

Mind Tonic Issue 2 - featuring the lovely and awesome Jess from Contagious' thoughts on Radiohead and how awesome they are at being a band of the web, and Retail In Action's thoughts on the new shopper, as well as the usual fragments of inspiring culture - is now available.

Download it from here as an ecofriendly pdf.

Meta-Semiotics (Awesome Youtube Composition)

2009-11-09T21:14:45+00:00

[via - where you may also find the full lyrics]

This piece of recombinant awesomesness is just beautiful - and, importantly I think, NOT A REMIX.

See, recombinant compositions began as remixes, this is true. But increasingly I have come to think that recombinance is not the same as remixing and this is a lovely example of why.

This composition - and it is a composition - is created from fragments of culture, but is not a remix of any of the pieces.

It is rather something new, created from existing pieces.

[Of course, every new piece of culture is created from others, because culture is inherently recombinant.]

The difference, as I've said before, lies in the level of complexity - the signs being deployed have previously been deployed, and that deployment is being incorporated into the composition.

This is what's known as meta-semotics: a secondary sign, where such is considered to be of a different quality than the meaning of a word in language. The reference of the one [secondary] sign is to another [primary] sign.

[You can argue, of course, that words are in some ways the same, that every word has the weight of all its uses built into its cultural meaning, but nevermind that for now.]

The power of using cultural units that have been deployed before comes from their density - they already have a large number of hypertextual meanings associated to them, which can then be leveraged, acknowledged, pushed back against, in the composition.

The title - The Golden Age of Video - that author Ricardo Autobahn gives his pieces alludes to these allusions.

So recombinance lets you say a lot with a little.

Snuggie Inside

2009-11-06T15:30:20+00:00

Thanks to my mate Thomas I got to go to the Halloweezer gig last week at the Hammerstein ballroom.

This was highly awesome - the crowd was all in costume and some people were invited up on stage to help the band out of their costumes: a liminal space if ever I saw one - costumes allow for more fluid identities and roll reversals, hence the audience becomes the performer and that.

One of the bits I particularly enjoyed would probably have not had the same effect for anyone else there.

Allow me to explain.

The last time I saw Weezer play was in 1994 -

[Oh Lord can it really have been 15 years? Wowzer. Weezer are like an old band now.

{Kottke pointed out a while ago that listening to, say, Nirvana's Nevermind album today is the same as someone listening to Terry Jack's Seasons In The Sun (1974) in the year 1991}]

- they had just released their first album

[now known as the Blue album and still worth listening to if you don't have it].

When I saw them play Rivers Cuomo was in crutches because he had just undergone surgery to lengthen one of his legs.

[It was whilst recuperating from this apparently very painful surgery that he wrote the much darker [and always difficult] second album Pinkerton, which bombed when released but has steadily gained admiration and sales ever since.]

So it gave me a particular kind of joy to see a trampoline on stage, which Rivers would use to to leap up onto the drum kit and back again.

The video infomercial above promoting the new album shows the band pimping the Snuggie - and you can get Weezer branded Snuggies when you buy the new album, which is awesome.

It has more than 5000 comments on youtube - I suspect, in part, because, you guessed it, it is culturally recombinent.

Every Vote Counts (So Please Vote for Me)

2009-10-29T19:21:32+00:00

A nice chap called Alistair just emailed me to let me know that TIGS has been selected [by public vote] as a finalist in the British Interactive Media Association Awards for Best Blog.

Gosh. Since I'm guessing you probably read this if you nominated me - THANK YOU!

I really appreciate it. It's awesome to be a finalist.

But it would be even more awesome to win so if I could beg your indulgence again - the finalists are being put to a public vote....so...

Could you click over to their website and vote?

By the way - I love you. And I think you are very attractive. I've always thought that, I just haven't said anything because I'm shy.

Thanks!

This Place

2009-10-27T21:39:37+00:00

The world isn't simple.

It really isn't. At all. It's massively complex, or complicated, or whatever.

There aren't just two sides to every story, there's an infinite number of sides, and an infinite number of permutations of at least 7 different stories.

There aren't any right answers - we need to put that idea down right now - it's not like this country is right and the other is wrong, in, say, some conflict.

In fact, we don't even know what right and wrong might really mean, not just in that moral relativism way that different cultures have different value systems and that, but also because usually situations are so confused that idea of there being a right and wrong doesn't really make sense.

Beliefs simplify the complex - they reify 'right' and 'wrong', they demark actions into a specific contextual classes.

But even with such things place, stuff can still be really confusing.

Pretty much people agree that killing people is bad, except under certain conditions, when its not.

And that's with killing people, which is pretty black and white.

With climate change - hoo boy is that complex [or complicated, or whatever]

This Place 09 is a side project from a couple of nice plannery people in the UK.

They want to delegates at the Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference that, while the issue is complex, people feel very strongly that something needs to be DONE, and that their voices should be heard.

So they are compiling tweets on the topic into a book for the delegates. People nominate places that are or will be effected by the changing climate, to remind the delegates that this is about real places, and real people.

The issue will remain complex, but the twitter format will at least keep things short.

Tankard Tales

2009-10-23T19:16:56+01:00

I met the legend that is Paul Coleman on the 20th July 2006 - we both went to a talk Russell gave at W&K, and I went for a beer with him after.

I know the specifics of this meeting because he blogged about it [don't you love the internet?].

Paul now works at W&K - perhaps the seeds were sown that very day, who knows - and his wonderful blog is about, well, mostly about his understated but mind blowing observations on life [not about planning or ads and that] - which is why he is a founding and lifetime member of the plannersphere.

Paul sent his ceramic tankard around the world, using that self same blogging planning nice peopleing community.

I received it from Age, who got it from Lauren, and it traveled all the way from Australia to New York.

I had it for a while.

Then I took it to Toronto, where we gave a speech together.

Then I took it to dinner, where Dino had if for a bit.

And finally I handed it over to Jason.

Who took to it well...

- and then passed it on to Gareth in SF...where the story continues...