be irrepressible

Found out about this via Rishi's blog. You'll see the little widget over there on the left, underneath the "about me" thing. It publishes little bits of content that have been censored elsewhere. This is a good thing, I think.

paper view

Lots of things about paper have been popping up around the interwebs recently. Russell's written some really interesting stuff about turning digital things into real, physical things. Then there's the newspaper that the Really Interesting Group did. It was called Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008. Looked really interesting to me. I buy into the post-digitalness of it, I think. Still, I haven't seen a copy, so I can't really comment. But then Rishi wasn't particularly keen. Thanks to a tweet from Kristian, I saw Clay Shirky's take on newspapers and the business models they are trying to use online. Which is to say that they are trying to transfer old business models to a space where they can't work. There's this PSFK interview with Jonah Bloom about why Advertising Age have pulled an issue in March. And may consider doing more in future. And, lastly, another PSFK interview with Nick Bilton, editor in the New York Times research and development lab. Which sounds like a great job. "Paper is just a device," he says. Which goes back to something Shirky has said, in the post mentioned and elsewhere. To paraphrase, we need journalism, not newspapers. And there's no simple transition from business model A to model B. It's more like business models A to Z. Or maybe it was one to 100. I can't remember. And all of this is probably a long-winded, non-committal and aggregated way of saying: paper. It's the future of some things, and the past of others. If I was to hazard an unpolished thought, I'd say something like this. Paper: it's one of the future faces of distributed personality. It could be a mass audience thing, or a more intimate thing. But it might work better in future as the vehicle of individual expression rather than that of an institution of some kind. Which could also be completely wrong. Ho hum.

three, no four, interesting things

Ian "Crack Unit" Tait blogging about the trend for brands trying to cash in on the idea of collaborating and sharing. Keep reading up the page to see the mini-storm and the interesting qualifications he made. (For my money, the T-Mobile ad leaves me a bit cold. Can't help feeling that it will take the fun out of flashmobs forever more. That said, plenty of people I know love it.) Faris writing about advertising as distributed content. You know when someone says something you're thinking? That's how this felt. And Stephen Fry blogging about Twitter etiquette. Oh, and Matt Jones of Dopplr reviewed at the PSFK Good Ideas Salon (wish I could have afforded a ticket) talking about good ideas for mobile. Feeling pretty interested by Dopplr recently, no doubt helped along by sight of Rishi's Dopplr annual report. Don't know what on earth the thread could be, but all of these things feel connected in some way. Any ideas? (Pic courtesy of this person.)

extra-curricular

If you're by any chance braving London's West End to go Christmas shopping over the next couple of weeks, stop by the Covent Garden Piazza if you can. The SpinVox Wishing Well will be there for the next couple of weeks. It's a collaboration between voice-to-text company SpinVox and design communications agency Freestate - the idea being that passers-by call in their wishes which will then appear as text in real time on the walls of the Well. As a member of 26, I was invited to write some of the several hundred pre-loaded wishes that appeared when the Wishing Well first launched (cheers Rishi). Very fun and quite a striking thing, don't you agree? You can read more about it here or here.

"the bengal tiger of advertising"

As the second in a loose series of posts about the power of good writing, here's something I picked up on via Mike and Rish. There have been plenty of occasions when a designer has said to me, "I'd love you to drop some really powerful copy in here," as they pointed to their latest product. And there have been plenty of clients who rewrite things as they want to say them, rather than thinking the feeling they want to leave the reader with. Bah. And Shoreditch-based Sell Sell perfectly capture the inevitable sense of frustration that creates. It's a craft, and it's under threat. Over to David Ogilvy to sign off. He said, "Most good copywriters fall into two categories. Poets. And killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end. If you are both killer and poet, you get rich." So respect your copywriter. He/she may write you a love poem. Or kill you. Or, if they are great, both. Later this week I'll attempt to blog about something a bit more nebulous: writing to be interesting and writing to persuade.