Only Dead Fish

...Which Is Nice

Looks like I've made it into Campaign's 'Best of the Blogs' this week (for this). Alongside Jason who I'm happy to report has resumed posting after too long an absence. Welcome back Huff!

You've Got To Be In It To Win It

"I believe that unless one interacts with and plays with the leading technology of the age, it is impossible to dream the big dreams, and difficult to create an environment in which creative individuals will feel at home."

From Tom Glocer, the CEO of Reuters. I've written before about the benefits of organisations (and individuals within organisations) adopting new ways of working using the new social software tools, and also the potential hazards of that in a big organisation where there is the possibility that you can be perceived as not spending enough time on your 'real' job. Tom Glocer has experienced this on a grander scale, and he's written very eloquently about it here - I urge you to read it.

HT to

Speechless Without Writers

I love the whole series of these which have been produced to support the ongoing WGA dispute. The website and video channel not only show actors, directors and writers coming together in solidarity in support of the WGA, it brings a whole new angle to industrial disputes...

Innovation, Ideas, Simplicity

Skelliewag is a site for 'Bloggers, webmasters, and web workers' and it's uncommonly good. It's sort of about ideas, productivity, innovation, writing, blogging, and creativity (including 'The Top 20 Ways to come up with Amazing Ideas') but the posts are typically rather splendid. My own favourites are:

110+ resources for creative minds
Little Words, Big Meaning, on saying more with less
and Time is Something You Make

HT to

Fish Buys Beer

It has been known (some would say fairly infrequently) for me to get the beers in. It has even been known (some would say very infrequently) for me to get lots of beers in. Well, Faris is organising a crimbo Beersphere for Tuesday the 4th and as it's the season of good will and all that I've suggested to him that I sponsor the evening and so drinks are on me (OK, OK, strictly speaking on my company not me). So please make the most of this momentous occasion - I'd love to see you all there for a christmas beer or two (or three). 7PM, Commercial Tavern.

Fighting Crime With Ones and Zeros

This video is not new but I saw it for the first time yesterday (in a cab of all places) and kind of liked it. It's an IBM promo done by OgilvyOne about how data architecture and management have transformed how the NYPD fight crime. It was, according to the Commissioner, a "classic case of a big organisation not knowing what it knows" but it's also a surprisingly human story, and a great case study of how effective data flow can change the fundamentals of how an organisation works. Strangely, embed is disabled on You Tube (isn't that annoying when they do that?) so have sourced it from somewhere else...

Kerry's Mix

My friend (and aspiring DJ) Kerry has put together a mix which you can download as a podcast here. She describes it as "A musical journey from ska to disco with a side order of soul". Says Kerry: "I cracked open a bottle of beaujolais and unleashed myself upon the decks last night. The mix is the kind I'd reckon Larry Levan would've done if he was still alive. And couldn't mix. Or use pitch control properly. Or the crossfader."

Kerry is of-course under-selling herself. And the tracklist is eclectic but rather good (from what little I know):

Ian Dury & The Blockheads - Wake Up and Make Love With Me
Yarborough & Peoples - Don't Stop the Music
4 Hero feat J.Davey - Take My Time
Inner Life - Make It Last Forever
The Rebirth - Evil Vibrations
Evelyn Champagne King - I Don't Know If It's Right
DJ Day - A Place To Go
Pharcyde - Runnin Away (Jay Dee Extended Mix)
Joe Dukie & DJ Fitchie - Seconds
Michael Jackson feat Eve - Butterflies
Marvin Gaye - A Funky Space Reincarnation
Trussel - Love Injection
Reel People - Can't Stop
Wings - Let Em In

Check it out here. The i-tunes link is here

The Reality of Virtual Worlds

For anyone doubting that virtual worlds are here to stay (and that the internet is 'evolving into three dimensions'), read this excellent piece by Victor Keegan in The Guardian, which includes these nine rather astounding factoids:

• Entropia Universe, the Swedish virtual world had a turnover of $365m last year and is about to be floated on the stock market
• Habbo Hotel has 80 million members (bigger than the UK population), and 7 million regular users (about the population of London)
• Gartner research predicts that in a few years time 80% of all broadband users will have an avatar
• China is currently investing $30 Billion dollars in a 100 square kilometre site that will house the infrastructure (server farms, electricity, transport logistics etc) to host nine or ten virtual worlds, each of them capable of supporting over 150 million avatars. The underlying strategy of why they are doing this is 'strictly economic'.
• In South Korea, 43% of the population are already members of the virtual space Cyworld, a penetration level which means that every consumer brand wants a presence there. 300,000 business already offer over 500,000 virtual items for sale.
• It's not just about Second Life - there are already over 50 virtual worlds competing for supremacy (featured in more detail in Dan's excellent post, and here's one he did about 15 more which are in development)
• Corey Bridges, co-founder and exec producer of Multiverse (a company that provides virtual worlds for others and charges only when they make a profit), believes that virtual worlds will be bigger than the entire entertainment industry is now. "Virtual worlds are instantaneous while Facebook is timelagged" he says.
• Corporations including BP, IBM and Diageo are already using virtual worlds to enable remote working and hold meetings saving hundreds of thousands of pounds in travel and employee time. IBM already has 5,000 people working virtually and is exloring ways of making different worlds inter-operable. Diageo has reported that 90% of employees who took part in virtual meetings thought it better than similar real life occasions.
• Virtual Worlds are helping science, by enabling scientific, academic and technology communities dispersed around the world to work better together. The UK National Physical Laboratory has recently backed the launch of 'Nanotechnology Island' in Second Life to serve just such a purpose.

Image courtesy

Stop The War

Advertising and media planning is still littered with military analogies. We 'launch campaigns', 'battle' for attention. We talk about 'target' audiences, 'hits', 'strike rates', 'impacts'. We base our thinking on 'strategies', we deploy 'tactics'. We desire 'captive' audiences. Using this kind of language now seems to define the association between the brand and it's audience in all the wrong ways. If we are ever going to change the relationship that advertising has with people, shouldn't we change the language?

Image courtesy

The Dark Side of Social Media

David Byrne (yes, that David Byrne), on 'social hateworking':

"It seems to me that this was inevitable. Once you have the existence of social networking sites you have to take the bad with the good. While it might be nice to think that they are a place to meet “friends” and like minded folks, it is just as likely to be a place to make enemies, engage in gossip, spread rumors, scratch and claw. These are a big part of social life in the real world, and to think that the online world would just be about nice stuff and making friends, well…"