Weirdly beautiful paintings on abandoned aircraft

“The Boneyard Project: Return Trip.” Displayed at The Pima Air & Space Museum in Arizona, more than 30 artists participated including BAST, Colin Chilag, Crash, Daze, Daniel Martin Diaz, Tristan Easton, Jameson Ellis, Ron English, Erik Foss, Mark Kostabi, Lisa Lebofsky, Alex Markwith and Walter Robinson. To learn more on the Boneyard Project check out their website.

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The Sex Pistols, digital sensors and the Girl Guides of America.

Why we need to make new technology as acceptable as 1970’s Punk. Scary at first but strangely comforting when familiar.

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The current landscape;

  1. The social web has matured past the point of no return.
  2. Improvements to common tasks are regular occurrences.

The dilemma

  • Large sections of the population not on board with point one.
  • Same group therefore missing the benefits of point two
  • Complicated by current trend to avoid reasoned debate in favour of belligerent statementing

A recent incident with the Girl Guides in America highlighted the ever growing conflicts between those who get our new speed of change and those blinked to it. The worst part? we are losing the power to debate the ground in-between. A generation of reality shows appears to have tutored people in conflict arguments rather than debating skills.

Anyway back to Punk. The speed of musical change in the late 1970’s meant that the mainstream got a fair few years to come to terms with the Sex Pistols and The Clash and except change had indeed happened. But in terms of technology, its like Dubstep in 2004 emerging from a South London underground scene. But before the UK mainstream got it, in a few short years the Americans were exporting it back to the UK. Change just got dumped on the masses in the shape of Britney Spears remixes.

The beauty of human ingenuity paired with internet capabilities means that constant change is now our norm. Unless we embrace some bizarre Pol Pot style year zero experiment we need to communicate the benefits of rapid change to a wider group of the population. This takes me back to the Girl Guides of America. Links below for full story. But to summarise; 11 year old Girl Scout adds to her door to door selling of cookies by setting up PayPal account and selling online. great idea you’d have thought, well yes, The Girl Guides at first congratulated the girl on her resourcefulness, but then changed tack and slapped the poor girl down saying that the internet was not a place for a Girl Guide to learn life skills (!) and she would be ‘..much safer..’ selling door to door. You can imagine the scale of  the resulting social media storm. It was both loud and unfortunately generally lacking in any form of debate, just shouted statements. Maybe not quite as diametric as the American assault rifle ‘debate’ but still pretty entrenched into unstoppable force meets immovable object territory.

New opportunities driven by new technology are going to appear more often. This will benefit the parts of society attuned to accepting the positive benefits of rapid change.

Our challenge is to communicate the wider benefits of constant improvement, The web has happened, social change is exciting, scary and not a little fun. Rather than just focus on the thing that is causing the current moment of change. We have big chunks of society who still need bringing onboard to the realities of a mobile based, mature tech world. It is a responsibility of those developing new tech that what they have in their hands is not just a shiny new object, but a potential weapon of diversion. 

Compared to the 1970’s we are much more tolerant of differences in musical styles. Its no longer a subject for broadcast bans or Government intervention. But we appear to becoming more intolerant of those who are not on ‘our’ technological level. This is why I say there is a huge responsibility for those brands with the power to communicate across social demographic groups to explain a wider message. This is a narrative that development means change (and change is good).  

Any brand in any market adapts to the forces around it. The wonder of our current situation is that adaption can and will happen fantastically fast. To repeat myself, the imperative is not to leave chunks of our society behind, entrenched in a refusal to adapt, like an American style second amendment position, violently opposed to change however logical or beneficial.

Whether its a Girl Guide selling cookies or someone writing music, traditional procedures exist. But we now have increased abilities to find and implement smarter solutions to the processes at hand. What becomes dangerous for society is not a new song or type of cookie sale but the misunderstanding of why it had to be ‘new’

1 http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/02/06/is-the-girl-scouts-actively-discouraging-girls-from-using-technology/

2 http://cset.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/files/documents/publications/Osborne-Establishing%20the%20Norms%20of%20Scientific%20Argumentation.pdf 

& http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781444361506.wbiems121/abstract;jsessionid=14AB71E7EA088FFFFF7EDC009C579678.d03t03?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

3 http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3262089/history-of-dubstep-beyond-lies-the-wub

4 http://yearzerodoc.com/

5 http://www.steamfeed.com/social-media-fail-girlscouts-crush-girl/

6 http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/01/16/gun-debate-what-makes-gun-assault-rifle/

7 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/msnbc-airs-sandy-hook-fathers-416977

8 http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13213/

9 http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-bbc-bans-the-sex-pistols-quotgod-save-the-queenquot

10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Order_Act_1994

11 http://home.nra.org/#

Superbowl Vs The ads (in real time)

This is good, a real time look at social media chatter about the ads during the Superbowl this weekend. http://brandbowl2013.com seen via 

“Welcome to Brand Bowl 2013, the social showdown between advertisements showcased on the biggest sports stage in the world ... the almighty Super Bowl. The idea was originally conceived by Mullen in partnership with Radian6. But this year, the competition’s fifth in existence, we’re taking it over with our friends from Pointslocal. ”
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Strange abandoned Disneyland-a-like

Film by Catherine Hyland on Vimeo

Wonderland from catherine Hyland on Vimeo.

The Chinese give up on an attempt to build a knock-off Disneyland and leave the half built buildings to the farmers they had tried to kick-off the land in the first place. Also good photoset of it at The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/see-chinas-wonderland-an-abandoned-fake-disneyland-photos/2011/12/13/gIQA5vDAsO_blog.html

Simple is best.

I do like a simple chart. This from  on Smart Insights pretty much does in one page what others take a whole deck to explain.

The caption for this chart is; "..It’s almost a year ago since we created our blueprint for content marketing infographic – and with so much conversation now around the converging of digital and ‘off-line’ media, the proliferation of mobile and the increasing popularity of marketers talking about paid, owned and earned media we wanted to update our blueprint for 2013.."

Why did you call your agency 'Wibble Fish' ?

http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/design/2013/1/taxonomy_of_advertising_agency_names.jpg

A very handy, cut out and keep guide to agency names, By Rob & Joe, seen at The Inspiration Room. This chart should be first port of call for any start-up. Best advice, take a really, really long step back before you choose.

My best was 'Hicklin Slade & Partners' sounded solid even when there was only 3 of us in my front room, but even better when there was 90 of us in an office opposite Nike Town. My worst? 'Passion' not least because there are a ton of creative agencies called similar AND a stack of porn suppliers, still, kept our bank amused when we named the account; Give me passion, as our clients finance departments had to make all references to what sounded like an escort service!

Post Linkedin, the battle for your professional profile.

Choice can be a cruel option. A few years ago an online professional profile meant Linkedin. Now due to the success of the latter we have loads of options. But do you go for one of the flasher new boys or stick with the increasingly spamy Linkedin? tough call, because most peps recruiting/booking gigs go to Linkedin as first port of call.

I have been trying out a couple of the new ones recently. Vizify looks great and is a doddle to set up. Maybe a bit too style over content, but I do like the look of it. Upmo is more Linkedin-a-like currently a bit buggy and some features are in 'coming soon' mode. It does feature a 'score'  number, but a bit like Klout its debatable as to how valuable that may be.

Data nerd alert

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This is just awesome. ALL the news broadcasts of 30 top news gathers since 2009 in one place. Fully searcable with instant results. Shows what is being said (and NOT said) about key subjects across the world.

"..The Internet Archive, a giant aggregator and digitizer of data, now includes all the television news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels. The collection includes more than 1000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs..."

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, told TheNew York Times that his company, based in Richmond, CA, “wants to collect all the books, music and video that has ever been produced by humans.”