Give me something I can write about

From the It's-been-sitting-open-for-a-week-just-write-about-it Department, this great short video called Making Is Connecting from David Gauntlett, Professor of Media and Communications at Westminster University. In it he argues tools that exist to facilitate expression of one's self are inherently more powerful than tools that exist only as an expression of someone else (think the rise of social platforms versus the dominance of 20th century media) as this connects us to the world around us.



Gauntlett backs up his ideas not with the latest digital media thinkers such as Charles Leadbeater or (my hero) Clay Shirky, but with quotes from Ivan Illich, a philosopher from the 1970's, and William Morris, a textile designer from the 1800's. The examples point to something I've been banging on about for quite some time: the rise of social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. are an interesting development, but they are successful due to facilitating expression of self, and conenction with like-minded others.

As I wrote about Posterous last March, tools will continue to rise that make it easier and easier to express yourself, creating content for others to consume in the process. Making is connecting indeed, and as the world gets radically smaller on a daily basis, understanding this becomes ever more crucial.

(found via altnytterfarlig)

All that noise, all that sound

So my agency is on a decent size pitch at the moment, and we were talking about the acceleration of technology over the last three years as it pertains to this particular company. And we were video taping various people saying different things and so I of course being the narcissist I am went off back to my desk and sat running a monologue over and over in my head, trying to think of something clever to say while being able to toss it off as if it was largely off the cuff.

And then when they came to film me I was on a conference call. And then the opportunity was gone because they're in a bit of a rush.

The thing I thought of though, I thought was quite interesting, and it was this: the technological revolution we're going through right now is currently being framed as a change in lifestyle, when what we're really dealing with, on a really fundamental level, is a change in life itself. 20 years ago, many-to-many communication was basically impossible, and even one-to-many was limited to those who could afford to do it, usually requiring a publisher.

Now anyone can, and because there are still more people in the world who knew life without the Internet than there are who only know the Internet, being always connected is deemed a lifestyle and a choice. As that ratio changes however, being disconnected is going to be seen as a lifestyle and what is currently (at least in some circles, not mine) considered an "other" state, will be the norm.

The norm on the rise now is being able to get a message to anyone you want or as many people you want at any time you want. After thousands of years of relative status quo, it's changed over night. Which is why I say the web is young, and why I say we haven't fully grasped all this yet. I could just have a smaller mind than most (it has often been suggested), but sitting and pondering it for a moment kinda blows it to a thousand tiny pieces.

And having said all that, the only thing I can be sure of is I would have wound up on the cutting room floor, with the Creative Director going "Do you really have to do that every time?".

...I suppose I do...

---

Image courtesy of bass nroll, with thanks to compfight.

On the road again

Cover of On The Road

I have had Jack Kerouac's On The Road given to me a gift to keep at least three times. I imagine some combination of traits my friends spotted in me (wannabe-philosopher mixed with restless-and-easily-distracted) focused their attention on this book. When people visit, they remark on the copies that line my shelf:

"You liked it enough to buy it twice?"

"No. I ignored it long enough to be given another."

This is not about that book though. This is about perception (and a little intent).

Your friend and mine Mark Earls referenced a piece from Lynne Truss in the UK's Sunday Times in which she states:

...I like to see what other people are reading on the bus or the train; how far they’ve got; whether they’re enjoying it. It seems to me that such information needs to be public for the good of us all and I’m sad to think of reading in public places ultimately becoming so private...

Lynne was lamenting the arrival of E-Readers and the disappearance of actual book and magazine covers from the parks and cafes and public transport systems of the world, along with the loss of a shared look or a fleeting conversation about the work at hand.

Lynne Truss' worry stems from the removal of social identifiers in public spaces; it seems we don't just judge a book by its cover, but the reader as well. I smile whenever I see another grown-up reading Harry Potter in public, because I remember being consumed by those books and also embarrassed to have them out in public without an 8 year old in sight. We use these things (and clothes, iPods, cars and holidays) to signal via the perceptions we assume others will have. My intent given my office wardrobe today of boho-cardigan and falling apart at the seams (but limited edition John Varvatos-collaboration) Converse sneakers, is to signal something true about myself; unfortunately that truth is little more than the clothing equivalent of the never opened copies of Kerouac's masterpiece, or as I wrote in Everyone 2.0, you're unique.

Just like everyone else.

I have friends (they shall remain nameless because I love them dearly) who have taken great pleasure in displaying tomes they have conquered in the name of enlightenment. These friends drew more pleasure from others seeing they had read (or at least bought) the appropriate books than perhaps they did from the work itself. On The Road is a book a selection of my friends feel I am supposed to have read, and as anyone who knows me will tell you, something someone says I am supposed to do instantly defaults to the thing I am least likely to do. Their intent is to help me appear a culturally astute and well-rounded individual; my intent is the equally pretentious attempt to thumb my nose at convention simply for the sake of it.

Now, my favourite magazine is British GQ as its collection of columnists is a veritable who's who of the UK's newspapers. They are regularly funny and insightful and it pains me when the publisher stoops to putting a scantily clad woman on the front cover, partly because the writing is better than that suggests but also because I then feel the need to explain to others, much as the joke about Playboy goes, "I read it for the articles." Perception reveals, or so we would assume, intent. Perception is also said to be reality, and so given the option of tangling with the looks I imagine women might give me on the subway in the mornings, I opt for Wired and instead leave Heidi Klum in her various states of undress on my coffee table for next Sunday (sorry dear, you know how it is).

Back to the Kindle, on one hand I like where we're heading as I could potentially just read A.A. Gill's column without wondering if someone's nipple is slipping out on the other side for the rest of the train to see.

On the other hand I'm envisioning a birthday not too long from now, where a gift arrives as a download along with a note "Didn't see it in your "Read Items" list on Amazon and thought to myself David is supposed to have read books like this!!"

The identifiers are perhaps moving out of the physical world in some ways, I doubt however this will have much impact on the intentions we have for everyone else's lives.

Everyone wants to be the man at the top (Commented on "Howard Lindzon")

The conversation taking place around the web about Digital Strangelove is truly blowing my mind. All I wanted to do was move the conversation forward a little, the fact so many people have taken the time to work through it, comment on it, think about it and share it means the absolute world, and it's great getting to visit a bunch of new blogs and engage with different audiences I would never have had the chance to find out about.

Below is a response I wrote to one post in particular on Howard Lindzon's blog to an anonymous comment that had said (and I paraphrase) "The ultimate goal is to give people what they NEED", to which I responded:

"Name" - appreciate your thoughts. And for saying I was smart, I wish my high school teachers could see! ;]

I would suggest the ultimate goal is not to give people anything, except for an easier way to spread their own message. It is entirely unquantifiable, but I would love to know how many people with no prior experience just had a stab at recording some music because of how easy it was to use Garage Band.

At the end of the day, I don't think you should aim to give your customer something meaningful, you should create an environment where they can give something meaningful to you. To use the Apple/Microsoft example, MS is launching a campaign for Win7 based around having listened to its users, whereas I believe it is arguable Apple's platform tries to facilitate being able to listen to each other. A subtle but crucial difference.

Now, off to find a cushy job in a Think Tank!

(Written, for the record, on a PC. With a Mac to my left.)

Originally posted as a comment
by David Gillespie
on Howard Lindzon using DISQUS.

The Think Tank comment was due to a wry observation on the part of the poster than I had taken so many slides to say something they thought was blatantly obvious. Maybe they're right, though other comments had come in stating how concise it was.

Each to their own.

I need something to believe in

For the last month or so, I have locked myself away on weekends and any week night I had free, which I made most nights, in order to get a dump of informatino out of my head. I feel like last year I had or at the very least made the time to get it all down ona  regular basis via this blog. This year there's been a bit more going on, and trying to stay on top of it all, "all" being the job that pays me, the thing that I love and this place where I do my thinking, let alone whatever may happen in my personal life has been a bit much to digest.

So sometime in September I got a big stack of Post-It notes, a Sharpie and a glass of wine, and went to town, covering my loungeroom with notes, ideas, thoughts and pieces of things I was thinking. After that I left it for a few days, then came back and organised it into a flow that made sense. Then it was a case of pulling it all into a presentation that said everything I wanted in as few words as possible. I've perhaps wound up a little more verbose than I ahd in mind, but I feel like I've arrived in a place where I can say "Yes, this right now is the summation of everything I'm thinking and feeling about this space."

There are still a few edges I need to round out, and some great questions posed by friends whose feedback I've sought. I'm looking forward though to being able to think about something else, I feel like while I've had this deck coming together I haven't had space to think about anything else. I'm looking forward to your feedback too - call it perhaps the Gospel According to David, it is once again a testament to my innate desire to follow interesting lines of thought, regardless of whether they're "right". I feel lucky to be able to experiment publicly with thoughts, and I love it when the readers of this blog come back at me with an opposing point of view. In a few days when I post it up, I hope you'll do just that.

---

Imagine courtesy of jannalauren, with thanks to compfight.

We off that

While looking at Katie Chatfield's blog last night and thinking about the various ways I'd like to be like her when I grow up (I'm sure she'd say she'd like to be like her when she grows up too), I stumbled back across a post she'd made in May of this year on "done". I liked it so much at the time I printed it out and stuck it on the glass door to my office, though I'm not sure anyone else got it (complete aside, taking the time to turn something in bits into atoms surely has to be the most you can like something, ever).

Re-blogged below for the sake of further cementing its awesome-ness, here it is in full:

Something I preach and rarely practice is the importance of just doing, and not waiting for perfect because perfect never happens. My musical self, all nerves and insecurity, decided to make good on threats to be less hypocritical, and found once it started it was actually fine and better than expected.

Done is the engine of more, and the important thing is to have done it, not talked about it. If Nike's slogan had been "Just practice and be ready to do it at some point", then odds are they wouldn't be the rock star brand that they are.

The point of done is not to finish, but to get other things done. Amen.

(and we're done!)

You were always on my mind

In a meeting yesterday as I sat dreaming up ideas to make my wealthy clients even more money, someone blurted out "We need to ensure they stay top of mind" which I didn't like at all. It sits alongside "the big idea" and "single-minded proposition" as a decidedly 20th century approach, and the reality is none of the brands people really want to be have anything to do with being top of mind.

The top-of-mind approach in fact is a challenger brand's mentality. If you aspire to be top of mind you're clearly not winning in your category, and you're likely spending a good deal of time and energy just trying to compete. It's the same as making a case for a piece of work focused around time with brand, while never pausing to consider just how much time is spent without.

The trick to both of those things is that the brands that are really thought of as top of mind, the Apples and Nikes and what have you, aren't top of mind at all. In fact if they were to become top of mind, it would be a step back in some ways.

Those brands transcend any notion of "mind" and instead ingrain themselves in culture. I don't just think of Apple when I'm shopping, and I don't just think of Nike when I see someone run. They are the brands everyone else wants to be because nobody pauses to think about them.

So don't bother with top of mind. Save that for the guys in second place, they don't know any better anyway.

--

image courtesy of Esparta with thanks to compfight.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/218/482348262_b97ed473c1_m.jpg

I've got big ideas, I'm out of control (Commented on "A VC")

Fred Wilson has an interesting short piece up this morning on failure. After reading it, I left the following comment:

I was doing a review of a (young but brilliant) guy on my team recently, and as we were discussing the feedback he said to me "You know, the thing I worry about more than anything is making mistakes."

I looked at him blankly and said "That is like fretting that the sun might come up tomorrow. Guess what? It's going to happen! Don't worry about making mistakes, worry about things you can actually have a positive impact on. If you spend your time worrying about the possibility of mistakes you're not going to get anything done."

Now, being Australian (living in Canada atm), there's a fair amount of a "no worries" attitude that is ingrained in us, but Fred I think you hit on something really crucial about the States - the fact that success is rewarded and if you fail you are encouraged to give it another go; as fortunate as I feel to be from Australia we don't have the latter as part of our psyche. I've benefited from tremendously from growing up in Hong Kong among other places, and I think a willingness to get it wrong is one of the best things any society can have in its DNA.

It's probably also the reason I'm a long way from home right now :)

Originally posted as a comment
by davidgillespie
on A VC using DISQUS.

Now, I adore Australia and it will always be home. We do have an odd relationship with success and failure though, born no doubt from a myriad of cultural sources others I'm sure have written long and eloquently about, and which I don't want to get into right now. Instead I'll just say, as I did the other day when someone asked me what this blog was about, I said "big ideas".

"Are they the right ideas?"

I laughed and said "That my friend, was never the point."

So, here's to the big ideas today. Wherever they lead us.

Intent = stuff white people like

"People have a really good  ability to see through you projects on the Internet that are just done to try and make you famous."



Great quote. This is why I bang on about INTENT!

Watch this Google talk, from Christian Lander, author of brilliant blog Stuff White People Like.

Treetop Barbie

On the subway this morning I was watching the below TED talk by Nalini Nadkarni on her work as an ecologist, studying life in the canopies of rainforests. It's a great talk which i recommend you check out, my favourite part though was her institution's appropriation of every girl's favourite doll, Barbie.

They buy them from thrift stores and other cheap outlets then hand-sew costumes for them and send them out. They're also available for purchase which makes me wish I had cousins who were young enough to get one for!

A few thoughts:

• I love the appropriation of a classic symbol, recast with new meaning in this day and age


• Is this brand-jacking? Maybe, but not in a way that casts the original in a bad light


• If I were Mattel I would be all over this. Nalini's group send a booklet out with each Barbie on the work they do, Mattel could release a whole line of eco-warrior Barbie, created entirely from renewable materials in a series of different guises. Sea-Rescue Barbie, Treetop Barbie...Ivory Coast Barbie? (ouch!)

I'm wondering about other campaigns, brands, products, services, whatever. Major symbols like Barbie that can be given new purpose in an eco-aware age. There's a lot of chatter right now on how green issues will be cast aside as people just try to hang on to their homes, I'm hoping initiatives like this might manage to keep it front of mind for people.



This post is also a special dedicatuion to Alex White, one of my best friends and a tireless eco-warrior himself. He gets married to an extraodinary woman (hi Fern!) tomorrow, a wedding I am sadly not in Australia for. Mate, I love you to absolute pieces and am sorry I can't be there to share your special day. I cannot wait to hear about it, watch the videos and catch up when I'm back home at the end of the year.

Value + Hope

In a former life I gave a presentation to the sales team of a company. I was reminded of it after reading this quote from Seth:

What marketers sell is hope.

Hope was part of the thrust of the presentation I gave, the other was value. We would raise hopes, set a price on those raised hopes, and then afterwards the customer decided whether or not they got value. My point was (and is) the seller mitigates value by adjusting the level of hope in the buyer - the price point is almost irrelevant (ok it's not, but humour me here).

So I agree with Seth, marketers sell hope. But once money exchanges hands, hope transforms into value - either good or bad. Hope isn't ever received by the buyer, and if one really wants to get into semantics, you could argue hope never actually existed with the seller in the first place.

There's a link here somewhere to Schrödinger's cat, though I can't quite wrap my head around it. Anyone want to have a go?

Oh, and the (not very good)  presentation is below.

[slideshare id=377623&doc=offsite-prez-1209392828328284-8&w=425]

Thank you to the three people still reading for indulging me :)

Create more value than you capture

Anyone who has been with me for a while (thanks for sticking around, even though the posts have been fewer and further between while I get settled somewhere marginally south of the North Pole) knows I am an avid reader of Fred Wilson's AVC blog. While catching up on his pieces, he had a quote in one post from Tim O'Reilly which I liked so much I stuck up on the door of my office:

[caption id="attachment_587" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Create more value than you capture"][/caption]

That struck a chord with me, and reminded me of a piece I posted back in September on treating people's contact details as a new currency, something to be traded in exchange for value. I believe companies need to offer great value in order for my permission to contact me, and for the most part people are far too flippant in this space.



Create more value than you capture. Make it worth me putting in my email address, deliver more entertainment than seems reasonable for my $10. What I'm really saying is show me you value my attention even if the only thing you get out of it is your message being heard. That tells me you believe what you have to offer is worth something, and hopefully more than what you're asking me to give up in exchange.

Go read Tim O'Reilly's piece that the quote is from, entitled Work On Stuff That Matters. There is no better way to start your day.

Do you see what I see?

[caption id="attachment_573" align="alignright" width="259" caption="Like I said...perspective..."][/caption]

As I walked through snow to Union Station yesterday, counting the number of beaches I used to live near that I’m not currently spending time on, it occurred to me that marketing is so often just a matter of perspective. We say and do things in order to alter someone else’s perspective. To manipulate, maybe, but there’s a point of view people attempt to get across; the more successfully you alter someone’s perspective, the more compelling your message is going to be.

My friend Michael has a fun twist on this, he calls it CVS2BVS – Current View of the Situation to a Better View of the Situation. CVSBVS (everybody now…), CVS2BVS. Once you move to from the current view of the situation to the better view of the situation, the improved position becomes the current one, and you’re free to figure out what the even better vantage point to be in is.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote “Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. Once he has achieved the BVS, he can never go back to the previous CVS. Once perspective is altered, it is permanent.

I was thinking about all of this as I walked through the snow, aware of how warm I actually found it. And I smiled as I realised that less than a month ago I could not conceive of hearing it was -5 degrees, and be glad it had actually warmed up.

It is, after all, simply a matter of perspective.

Strategy | Intent | Persistence (and tigers and bears OH MY!)

Digital strategy is a business decision, not a marketing decision. That doesn't mean your marketing team shouldn't be in the room, it means everyone else should be there with them.

Julian Cole wrote a piece a few months back saying "Don't trust an agency with your digital strategy." It does then beg the question (if I may, for a moment, speak client-side) "Then whom shall I trust in your festering cesspool of sharks, narcissists and hopeless egomaniacs?

Good question.

A single unit needs to own a company's strategy, and they need to be able to talk about each channel with authority. That sounds like a no-brainer I know, so I'm going to put this out there and see how it feels: you won't find it anywhere where the last name of an ad giant from yester-year hangs their name on the front door. That isn't because they don't have intelligent folk from all disciplines working for them, that is because their business models and internal practices will not permit the structural changes required to achieve genuine innovation and next-generation creativity for their client's businesses, let alone their own.

If anyone is hearing that for the first time, I promise I'm not the first.

I can't say I know all of the answers, or even any of them. But not enough people are asking the question. Or questions; you can phrase them in a myriad of ways, let's maybe start with something like this: why does Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne now have four people in its planning department, none of them digital natives? Tim, who worked there as a member of the planning team up until a week ago, had this to say:

I’ve been arguing for a long time now that as product, advertising, sales and service, all get closer together, advertising agencies really need to become creative marketing consultancies...some drastic restructuring needs to take place.

Drastic restructuring then did take place, though perhaps not along the lines he was thinking.

David Armano has talked about a move away from the silver bullet, much like Tim has. I took a personality test recently that told me I rated close to 0 when it came to perfectionism, but was a polar opposite when it came to creativity and a love of thinking. Call me biased (I won't argue), but that sounds like something very different to where we're currently at, and given that test it is no wonder I'm a fan of this new direction. I'm also a fan of offering substance, something advertising doesn't do very well at all.

I've talked a lot about intent, and I think this chart speaks to the heart of the same thing I'm on about. It is also the same thing Seth Godin means when he says the following:

Persistence isn't using the same tactics over and over. That's just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

My friend Michael Hewitt-Gleeson calls it SDNT: Start Do Notice Think.

I call it intent, and when I talk about it, I talk about constanty refining the work we're doing to ensure the outcome is matching the intent; if it isn't we change it until it is.

Intent is at the heart of everything we do, and the group that owns your strategy should have it etched onto their brains, directing nothing less than strategy that delivers the intended result tomorrow better than it did today. Starting here I'm advocating a move away from the single-minded proposition to the statement of intent; it is fluid and flexible, and it ensures the goal is forever just over the horizon. It will keep you and your organisation passionate and motivated and restless.

And that is how it should be.

Calling Social Media Out

I've had enough. I'm done with social media and I'm calling you, you and particularly YOU out on it. I'm nailing it to the wall for the crock that it is. UGC was the first to cop it, social media is next.

I'm looking at what Jules is doing with The Population, my friend Matt's work with DP Dialogue, whoever else is out there. Yes, we have the Beersphere tonight, yes I blog, vlog, put music on MySpace, I comment, bookmark with del.icio.us, I use compfight to search Flickr for Creative Commons-licensed imagery, I discover new music via Last.fm and Pandora, and I Twitter. I do all that, and I'm telling you right now social media will be, in the great history of the web, hell in the great history of the next three years (if that long), the 2.0 equivalent of Pets.com.

And here is why.

First, we have to agree on something. You can choose to disagree, and I welcome that, but my stance is this: the web is inherently social. Not for everyone, particularly not for older generations, but from me back to the babies it is inherently, indiscriminately, and unavoidably social.

Next, we have to agree that the web is young. The web is still figuring out what it is, what it wants to be. You know movies? The name comes, need I remind you, from moving pictures. Photos that seemed to come to life, truth 24 times a second. Web 1.0 was moving pictures, we're now in the Talkies. Imagine if film had stalled when talkies came along and we suddenly found the actors had horrible voices?

That is where we are; social media is "the talkies" of the Internet.

Social media isn't anything special, it is just the Internet in its current form. All media is social - Julian says this himself. It is a period that will forever be known as a time where it became as easy to create content as it was to consume it. THAT is the important part of what is going on.

Not Web 2.0, not new media, not digital media, not post-media and certainly not social media. If all media is social, media must be inherently social and if we agree the web is inherently social then the Internet is, my friends, just a collection of media (we need to separate that idea from the business of media). We have created a new taxonomy in an attempt to somehow describe the "otherness" of this new space, which is itself not a recent development; we've separated movies and TV for years even though they showed us essentially the same thing (like FM radio and Pandora do now). Watching video online is no different, and soon we won't treat it like it is.

In fact, thank God (or Dawkins for the atheists) we're rapidly coming back around to a place where we're not stuck on discussions of platforms and mediums; there will only be one platform where everyone produces and, once again, content will be king. That platform is the Internet, and, dear client folk, if someone comes to you with a digital strategy that does not have a focus on creating 1-to-1 connections in your audience, then run for the hills. But do not be caught up in the myth of social media, that is just the interwebs as we know it.

As Iain Tait said much more succinctly than I, digital is not a thing anymore.

Now, let's talk about something interesting for a change.

**Update** I got the name of Matt's social media company wrong as he points out below. Apologies to him and the good people at De Pasquale.

How simple is Web 2.0?

I like making sure we draw lines between simple and accessible, but could Web 2.0 really be as easily explained as this?



The only fault I'm thinking is the x100 - connections are still one to one, just on a mass scale.

Image courtesy of my mate Alex - if anyone knows the original source please let me know so I can give proper credit.

**Update** Turns out I thought the image must have come from someone other than Alex, when it did in fact originate with him. This is not because I thought him not capable of extraodinarily insightful cartoons, more so because, much like Jesus having walked the Earth, the idea deities occasionally walk among us is somewhat hard to believe. There you go. Alex White, genius personified!

Three of the best for Marketers

My friend Matt put up a great post - The Ten Best Marketing Tips Ever. I'm not crazy about all of them, but these three are gems:

1. Make your customer service truly remarkable. No, seriously, you don’t understand. Not good. Not brilliant: remarkable.


2. Find time to get active in your industry association. Offer to be secretary and do an amazing job. Do extra stuff that no one wants to do and do it really well. You’ll be a captain of industry in six months.


3. Engage your customers properly, start conversations with them online and offline (you know, like, when they’re in your store) and do it because you want to, not because it’s the latest fad. Smile like you mean it.

Some thoughts:

• Remarkable is such a good idea, and so under the radar still. Take it, eat it for breakfast. Own it. Be it.


• I was telling my new friend Lisa, there's always an opportunity to be a thought-leader, and she's reaching out to small businesses on Queensland's Sunshine Coast and making a really positive impact by just being good. If you're in that area and need a hand, get in touch with her.


• Passion counts for more than degrees and experience and networks combined. Full stop. Look at my friend Jules for proof of that.


• Matt references Gary Vee's brilliant talk from the Web 2.0 conference, which is required reading watching if you're a reader here ("Stop watching fucking Lost!"). The other great insight from that talk is (and I'm paraphrasing) "Listening is one thing, giving a shit is a whole other thing."

OK. Go enjoy the weekend.

Love & Marketing

So it seems Bob Dylan isn't the most obvious place for a lot of people when it comes to great marketing quotes and thinking, I however think there are few better places to start (and let's face it, it's a hell of a lot more fun than mining the books everybody else is looking at.

There's a short piece below expanding on why I think "You can't be wise and in love at the same time" is a great marketing idea.



Also check out:



Love Jones (fast forward to 5:20)

And The HughTrain Manifesto...

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="The Hughtrain Manifesto"][/caption]

A open letter to Stephen Conroy

Many international readers will not be familiar with the goings on of the Australian political landscape. Back in January I wrote about some unfortunate measures Australia's recently-elected Government was planning to introduce, suffice to say our elected officials are engaged in a well-meaning but ill-informed program of censoring the access Australians have to the Internet. While looking in to the issue I've come to learn I reside in what is by law the most heavily censored Westernised nation, something I find rather ironic considering Sex & The City ran free-to-air here while it was confined to cable State-side.

Regardless, I have written an open letter to Stephen Conroy, the honourable member behind the intiative. Let it be known his intentions are good, but in practice his methodology is flawed, and imposing unnecessary (not to mention ineffective) rules upon the lives of ordinary Australians will achieve few, if any, of the aims of the program.

To read my letter to Mr. Conroy, please head on over to Marketing Magazine. If you feel as strongly as I do, please also visit Keep Your Filter Off Our Internet to learn how you can get involved.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Stephen Conroy is Nuts


• Australia Joins China In Censoring The Internet


• No Clean Feed - Internet Censorship in Australia


• Testing times


• Australia plans tough web rules


• Support fades for Australian net censorship


• Oz admits $85m p0rn filtering FAIL


• Australian Government fails again on Internet Censorship


• Australian Government Equates Freedom Of Speech To Liking Kiddie Porn

Stories ripe for the telling

About 6 months ago a wave of posts flooded the blogosphere with the phrase "context is king". I was convinced I'd started it, only I couldn't find the post (turns out I'd written "candour is king", which is different, but still fairly royal, particularly in social media). Regardless, I was thinking about this last night, particularly in light of the story-telling frame of mind I'm in at the moment.

Jeremy, one of the other Account Directors at IE needed to traipse out into Central Victoria in order to get earrings for his wife from a fantastic jeweler, Lisa Kennedy who lives in a small town called Maldon. It struck 5pm, and with the kind of look I his eye that only those who know Jeremy will recognise, he said "Do you want to go on a road trip tonight?"

Off we set along a highway I hadn't travelled down in the three years I've been living in Melbourne passing town after town that were clearly now the by-products of progress; closed shops could be spotted from the highway, better days clearly visible from a distance of 10 or 15 years.

Anyway, I digress. We got the earrings from Lisa (who is fantastic) and then headed up to a lookout the locals know as the Rock of Ages (I'm promised it has nothing to do with the Def Leppard song, I'm sceptical none the less).

[caption id="attachment_432" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="The view from the Rock of Ages in Maldon, Victoria"][/caption]

(It was incredible to be standing there just a couple hours after leaving work, to think most nights are spent a home with a glass of wine and old episodes of The West Wing, which in itself isn't all that bad, but you get the point.)

Anyway, we stopped off in a pizzeria in Castlemain for dinner on the way back. It was called Capone's Pizza and had such delicacies on the menu as the Bonnie and Clybe (we had this, I may never feel right about pizza again) and Mugsy's Meatballs (we didn't have this, I am OK with that). While Jeremy and I remarked on various things about the place that stood out as being vastly different from our inner-city Melbourne haunts, the thing that struck me most was the front counter which was covered with certificates of hospitality training the staff had undertaken.

[caption id="attachment_433" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Capone's was the kinda joint tryin'a do goodin a no good woild..."][/caption]

5 or 6 of the certificates were from the one family, two or three were from another. Jeremy and I talked about how you would never see that in Melbourne, these kinds of certificates displayed proudly. In addition, to have so much of one family's story tied up in the place, there was something really nice about that. It got me thinking about the conversations I'm having about story-telling right now, and telling a story your audience wants to hear versus the one you feel like telling. That is rarely what we feel like doing, but there's a story here about the Cutlers of Maldon I'd like to know.

Maybe remarkable isn't as far from the every day as we think it is, maybe it's just not the story we want to tell all the time.