A Donkey on the Edge

Sois jeune et tais toi

2012-02-03T17:43:32Z

Had company drinks last night and met a nice man from France. I was explaining how my family moved to paris in 1968 and it turns out he was six years old at the time of the summer événements. My family lived in the quiet western suburb of Vaucresson, 10 kilometres from Notre-Dame and as a five-year old trying to get to grips with a new school, a new language and new friends I let the events pass without noticing.

Turns out this guy lived in the Quartier Latin and had barricades on his doorstep! He remembers the sights and smells to this day. The confusion, overturned Renault Dauphines, benches and bins piled high, paving stones pried up for use as projectiles. One of his most vivid memories is students turning the Luxembourg Gardens into open-air debating chambers...

Anyhow, always loved this print, the silhouette in the background doing the censorship is of course the Général de Gaulle who was running the country at the time.

Al Green on 125th Street

2012-01-22T12:57:01Z

OK, call me a lefty ideologue who laps up whatever nonsense the Democrats put out but I've been watching the Romney v. Gingritch thing and I just don't understand how these massively un-presidential types think they have more to offer than President Obama? True, Gingritch played to the "authenticity" megatrend by speaking his mind about his ex-wife's ABC appearance and it's probably this same megatrend that caused South Carolina Republicans to down-grade Romney for his evasiveness around his taxes. But that doesn't make him White House material, not by a mile.

But the point of this post is that I was wondering why this video of President Obama signing Al Green didn't make more of a splash? The President of the United States of America, in the Apollo Theatre on 125th street. The President, in Manhattan, in Harlem, amongst friends, face to face with the Reverend Al Green and singing?!? In tune!?! It was AWESOME! Just made me feel great to see this:-)

11:11:11:2011

2011-11-11T11:11:11Z

This is Fred's letter to Polly, his mum. It was written on the eve of the May 8, 1915 offensive and signed with the words I'm going to do my duty gladly. Fred survived both the offensive and the war and the regimental padre kept the letters, unopened.

In the note, Fred mentions a papal blessing. He may be referring to Pope Benedict XV's Allorché fummo chiamati which was issued on 28 July 1915.

For Clem and Hal who need to get on their decks

2011-08-23T16:24:02Z

Just love this. I'm counting the days til I get my apex 37 so I can go practise sliding (and no doubt seriously injure myself).

Patent absurdity

2011-08-21T21:35:26Z

I feel like I spend a lot of time explaining why not having a commons of arts and sciences is a bad thing that we should try an avoid. I bang on about Sony Bono and Mickey Mouse and the great Dover books that helped crafters and artists in the 70s and I feel like I just can't frame the argument in a sufficiently compelling way.

I've just recently come across a couple of wonderful items. One, the short film embedded above. The other, a Guardian article penned by Richard Stallman in 2005. He uses Victor Hugo to explain how patenting processes can be dangerous:

Here's one example of a hypothetical literary patent:

Claim 1: a communication process that represents, in the mind of a reader, the concept of a character who has been in jail for a long time and becomes bitter towards society and humankind.

Claim 2: a communication process according to claim 1, wherein said character subsequently finds moral redemption through the kindness of another.

Claim 3: a communication process according to claims 1 and 2, wherein said character changes his name during the story.

If such a patent had existed in 1862 when Les Misérables was published, the novel would have infringed all three claims - all these things happened to Jean Valjean in the novel. Hugo could have been sued, and would have lost. The novel could have been prohibited - in effect, censored - by the patent holder.

I went to see Stallman talk at the LSE in 2005 (he was clearly motoring around Europe in anticipation of the vote in the European parliament) and it was like a light-bulb moment. If you get a chance I highly recommend catching one of his talks.

Dear Lovefilm, please fix your VOD proposition.

2011-07-16T12:37:09Z

Dear Lovefilm, thanks for taking the time to compose such a thorough response explaining what you are doing with your customer proposition.

Netflix is on my media center, why aren't you?

Unfortunately, you haven't addressed the core of my question which was to do with the commercial background to your customer experience design. My point is, the way you've approached this you are simply spreading ill will and damaging what is really quite a nice brand.

Lovefilm was built on a great service experience that trumped the video rental store by not relying on trickery, customer inertia and subterfuge to generate revenue.

Not only was Lovefilm a fairer and more transparent offer (and therefore more likely to engage the customer in the longer term) but the range extended far beyond what Blockbuster could hope to stock. You guys were basically, a 5-star service with a market-leading customer proposition.

So why make a mess of your online offer?

You need to stop explaining how content owners set pricing and new releases cost more and mensch up a bit and design an offer that shields the customer from the greed and foul-play of Big Copyright. The video-on-demand offer needs to give the same ubiquitous access to content the Disk-to-home service does and needs to avoid becoming a 'two tier' experience.

Some suggestions:

Lose the multiple price points. The more price points you have the more you feel desperate like a cheap hotel that charges for wi-fi
Offer Lovefilm at a single price-point: say £10.75/month gets you unlimited streaming access to the entire film library
Avoid using the word "package". Packages are all about making life easier and more profitable for distributors and not about getting the customer a better experience. Lovefilm shouldn't be like one of those satellite television brands that forces people to buy 300 channels they don't want just so they can see the football
Lovefilm could be a quality proposition that has "members" and membership gets you into the club (and what a club, where else can I get Russ Meyer, Godard and Die Hard 4 delivered to my door at a moment's notice?)

If you absolutely can't monetise without premiumising new releases, then distribute them through a completely different channel ("Amazon Hot Stuff" or something) so it doesn't dilute the Lovefilm proposition.

From a brand-building point of view, I really hope your research shows that for film-lovers, media quality and the range of the library trump newness in the long run. The movie industry just doesn't release enough good blockbusters to sustain a genuinely high-quality "all new, all of the time" proposition and after all, your logo says it all: "Love Film".

Thanks for your support and please do keep up this fantastic service.

Versailles part deux...

2011-07-01T06:58:11Z

OK so just a quickie as I take in Today on R4...

I haven't read the story on the NYT site yet but by the sound of it, the maid who accused DSK of rape collected a bunch of cash payments from some hoods doing time in a New York jail.

So I get it that a hotel maid on minimum wage benefits from some extra cash. But...

What benefit did the small-time crims get from the sting operation?
How did a bunch of dealers know to pick DSK or indeed what hotel he'd be staying at?
If the crims had no motive for the sting, who did?

If was Agatha Christie I'd have to say Christine Lagarde looked like a good candidate:-)

Talk about intrigue...

Are TV shows the latest social objects?

2011-06-30T11:05:24Z

I worked on a project called "Fanbases" last year, a project to build a publishing hub that would allow brands to place themselves in the centre of relevant, fan-driven conversations.

At its core, the idea seemed a good one as there is a genuine energy in fan-generated content (just look at fanfic and slash for starters). So in the end, Fanbases never got off the ground but a host of new services are popping up to tap into the same drive to participate in the conversation around the film and television shows we love.

The TV-lover app space is getting very crowded with apps for most IPTV players like Netflix and Hulu as well as apps for networks and pc platform plugins but most of these apps focus on content delivery and asset management, not the raw thrill of loving Dr House and the hunger of wanting more more more. Two close competitors IntoNow and Miso in particular are tapping into just that. These services allow users to "check in" to content and then comment, rate and like around it.

Both the apps have really rich, deep iPhone interfaces. To be honest I can't really call a winner on that front. For us European folk, the iTunes store has made the decision for us, as IntoNow is US-only. They've also made the decision to handle sign-up through the mobile device (or the UK website has the account creation filtered out) so no way to test the multichannel experience.

I've played with Miso and it works really well. It's fully gamified, with levels, badges, groups, points and kudos all factored in. Creating a record for a new movie unlocks the ability to edit film and TV descriptions and this earned superuser access certainly felt like a proper reward for the time I had invested in the system.

As well as the usual check-in mechanics, Miso also hosts polls allowing users to vote on content detail. The example above comes from the US version of Masterchef and allows participants to vote for their favourite team member.

Will all of this catch on? Well, a good sign of potential success is when developers start making mashups with your service and Miso has just been mashed up with the Plex IPTV platform. That means LG television owners get Miso built-in and it means the whole XBMC community getting in on the fun. A sign of good things to come.

I do have one question I can't seem to find an answer to. Thanks to the smartfone, Twitter now fits into people's lives so unintrusively and so compellingly that tweeting while watching television has become huge. How huge? Wimbledon gets 30,000 tweets a week and most of the other top-ten shows are pulling more than 10,000 tweets per week (Source tvgenius.net).

So my question is this, who will win? A service that wraps microblogging interaction seamlessly around the customer's own experiences or a service that creates a compelling social interaction in a silo?

Open-source manufacturing gets real

2011-06-10T19:11:16Z

Invert the polarity of the neutron flow! from Morten Hjerde on Vimeo.

Wow this is so cool my friend Morten in Norway has started designing and manufacturing a portable light-source capable of sampling the colour of ambient light and projecting a constant or strobe source with a temperature range well in excess of the traditional CTO to CTB range.

And the coolest part is the whole project is open. If you don't want to buy it from him, you can download the CAD details and schematics and get your friend in China to build it for you instead.

I quite fancy having a go in the garage tho... Read all about it

Mornington Crescent

2011-05-29T10:57:52Z

Hal never ceases to surprise me. The other morning he corners me and demands we play his new game he's just invented. He spends at least 15 minutes explaining what dots mean and how you rub random bits out with your finger and that impacts your performance and the points out the final destination stop. First person to get there wins but the point of the game is random and is just about drawing interesting shapes, arguing about the rules and just generally enjoying the delightful complexity of the thing.

He's 5 so I dread to think what's next:-)

Vorpin and Aphrodite

2011-05-28T16:10:14Z

Welcome Venus Flytraps, meet Vorpin and Aphrodite. Extra credit for identifying which child named which flytrap. And yes, Hal is determined to stuff as many bugs as possible in there.

The candy coloured clown they call The Sandman

2011-05-16T12:38:07Z

I quoted from Blue Velvet the other day and got blank stares.

Am I getting old? Surely the In Dreams moment is a monument to something forever. Just watched it again on YouTube, I'd forgotten how the characters move slowly while Frank lip-syncs.

All the more weird as Isabella Rossellini has just been heard through the door "Mommy loves you" and we see her wander slowly into the shot as the guy she was with climbs up on the arm of the sofa and freezes.

So I thought I'd learn this on the guitar, Dm and G13 are giving me a bit of finger ache but will get there eventually(G13 in particular seems to made no sense and I can't get it to sound like anything). Roy makes it look so easy:-)

The Dude in typography

2011-05-13T19:32:13Z

The Big Lebowski Typography from Koos Dekker on Vimeo.

Wow, just love this (thanks @zeroinfluencer) and with Nicki bagging herself a copy of After Effects I really want to try it. Would be fantastic for presentations...

Filed under things I didn't know about the Royal Mail

2011-05-12T16:12:12Z

Wow, it's a voyage of discovery... Turns out the post office (RMG for royal mail group) runs a ginormous logistics operation in the Netherlands (it's called G.L.S.)

Reading the website reminded me of the back of Asterix et Cleopatre, a book with an epic list of huge numbers on the back (14 litres of Indian ink, 30 brushes, 62 pencils, 1 hard pencil, 27 eraser, 1984 sheets of paper, 16 typewriter ribbons, 2 typewriters and 67 litres of beer etc.) but anyway you like it, the post office surprises once you start looking at the group's performance.

So, the figures:

GLS has 14,500 employees
Handles over 1 million parcels a day
Has network of 667 depots
29 central transhipment points
16,000 delivery vehicles
1,700 long distance trucks
It has 220,000 customers in 34 states across Europe

Now THATS what I call a logistics business:-)

Unbelievable recruitment crazy nonsense

2011-04-27T17:16:28Z

Recruiters continue to amaze me. This just came through on a list I follow.

This is an entry level role for a new client of ours based in East London, £25k...You will be working across mobile, web and tv platforms, being involved from early concepting stages to final implementation stages...

OK fair enough, sounds like a great entry-level gig. The money is a bit junior but the opportunity is genuine, sounds like a good deal.

...Our client strives for the highest quality of work, and you will be expected to deliver innovative, detailed work that delights users as well as making commercial sense ... Producing innovative interface designs and specifications from a functional and technological perspective...

Hang on... you're a junior looking for mentoring, opportunity and a challenge but now you're going to deliver the highest quality work from the get-go? Right off you're going to be making specs and top-quality designs?

The right person for this role will need to be able to hit the ground running... you will need to make confident design decisions and run with them, and be able to effectively communicate this over to clients...

OK, I give up. I'm fresh out of college but I'm supposed to hit the ground running? I mean fuck off you've got to be kidding!?! And to round it off you'll be using your extensive stakeholder management skills to present to clients?

To be honest, it's great a company is willing to take a punt on an exciting junior but this sounds like a company with no in-house UX experience trying to pick up a one-man middleweight design resource for the price of a bar of soap.

Unbelievable.