plum blossoms, 60cm x 120cm

fish 7, 150cm x 120cm

more fish, 150cm x 120cm

fish 6, 150cm x 120cm

The V&A have a whole load of educational/interesting talks, courses and so on. Myself and Neil Mendoza hosted a chat about our work, and a workshop session where we built a microcontroller-powered bodypopping bear. More pictures at the V&A’s flickr site.

concept

execution

Another year, another Oxford & Cambridge Goat Race. Lots of media coverage this year, nationals, web, press, etc,  and a great turn out – over 900 people. Lots of learnings for next year too. If you’d like to join in and do an activity, sell something, make something, perform or otherwise entertain for next year’s race, contact me on info@thegoatrace.org

Photo from Manic Street Preacher

Here’s the official blurb from Anne and Simeon:

Now that the dust (/mud) has settled and both goats have had time to reflect on their performances, we are thrilled to announce that the 2010 Oxford & Cambridge Goat Race has raised almost £3,400 for Spitalfields City Farm!

With a bumper crowd of around 900 of you lovely lot, we made just a whisker shy of £3,000 just from tickets and bets alone. A further total of £400 was kindly donated by all of the folks at Tete-a-Tea, Delamere Dairy, Billy Goats Stuff, Bruncheon Club and Emma, our facepainter. Thanks also to Abelha Cachaca for sponsoring the after-party, allowing the fun to carry on late into the night.

Huge thanks again to our extended Goat Race family who helped us make all of this possible: Cookie & Nicky for designs and sock monkeys, Ben ‘Pigsnoots’ Pearce for his tunes, Paul Stephany for his felt hatted bet taking, Charles Owen and Dave Huggins for chipping in on the gates when things got hectic, and Caroline at Delamere Dairy for her help with PR.

Simeon, Ant and Anne.

Record turnout! Photo from McTumshie

Twitter is markedly different however, for the simple reason:

Twitter is *only* really useful if you use it *very* frequently. Thus, responsible and disciplined use of Twitter in a work context is almost impossble.

The same is not true of any other social media stuff. Blogs have deep and interesting articles that can be found and read at any time that I choose. If I miss my friend who I haven’t seen in a year, I can see pics of what they’ve been up to on Facebook. I can open MSN Messenger when it suits me, have a live conversation, then close the app.

However, Twitter’s only function is shallow, asynchronous conversation.
It’s the same as what kids have been doing for ages – leaving MSN group conversation windows open all day and just dropping in and out over the course of a day.

You know when you first started blogging, and you only really “got it” when people started linking to you and commenting on your stuff? The “Eureka” moment for Twitter comes when you start to have conversations/responses over short (sub 1 hour) timespans.

What is so bad about this then?

If your job honestly depends on really timely information, this is fine.

Examples – journalist, ambulance dispatcher, guy sailing a boat heading rapidly towards Tower Bridge. Maybe someone running a very time sensitive online PR campaign, but I have not seen any campaigns that would justify this.

If your job involves thinking at all, Twitter is simply just another huge distraction. Not just when you are using it, but it nags your brain from your subconscious whilst you are trying to concentrate deeply on something else. Enough has been written on this, and I quote from Neil (Only Dead Fish) paraphrasing Jon Steel’s Perfect Pitch:

“our modern obsession with speed and ‘always on’ connectivity reduces our ability to concentrate on the task in hand. Even if our thoughts are not already interrupted, our minds are constantly ready to be, resulting in a loss of focus.”

On top of this, there just isn’t anything terribly good on Twitter. I can’t hand-on-heart pretend it’s a help at all to my job, despite all the brightest and best of the comms and tech indusry being on it.

Put it this way, look at Stephen Fry’s Twitter. He is arguably the most funny, articulate and intelligent person on this planet, but his Twitter feed basically contains utterdrivel.

I also follow the Mashable guy with the scary super close up face photo. Mashable is a great blog and resource – but dripping it out as links over 24 hours simply does not make it any better for most people!

Solutions:
a) ditch Twitter
b) total Twitter discipline. Check/refresh Twitter only at certain scheduled times, e.g. on the hour.

Conclusion
Twitter is quite fun, but for most of us, it isn’t useful on a day-to-day basis, and I strongly suspect that prolonged (and therefore necessarily frequent) usage erodes your basic ability to concentrate on tasks which require actual thinking.

In other words, I am the Daily Mail and I am calling cancer on this one.

Aside from their mouths opening, their faces don’t even register each crisp going in, or the flavour of it. They’re thinking about work, people they fancy, what to wear tonight – everything apart from eating crisps.

We’ve all done this – snacking on total auto-pilot until we get a mild surprise when we look down and see that most of the bag is gone. This is a bad thing generally, because not appreciating what we consume causes over-consumption in many ways.

So here is my take on Snack Zen, which you should try the next time you get a bag of your favourite snacks – crisps, sweets, wasabi peas,organic chocolate covered blackcurrants, whatever.

It is a 5 minute Zen Snack food exercise which will make you happier, more relaxed, more mindful, more giving, less wasteful and hence greener.

- – - – - – - z e n – s n a c k i n g – - – - – - -

One should take a bag of one’s favourite snacks, and go to a quiet place, like a park bench, a hotel reception, or the corner of an old man pub.

Do not think about work, or watch people, or admire poster ads. Simply sit and prepare to give this 5 minutes of your life to snacking.

When one eats the snack food, one should attempt to focus completely on the mouth sensations of the snack. Taste, texture, moving it around with the teeth and tongue.

One should not think at all, or analyse, but just concentrate on the feelings from your mouth of eating and tasting the snack. If thoughts arise, just let them drift away, and continue eating slowly.

Initially one will find that one is able to eat only 1-3 crisps before the thoughts wander completely and one must “snap back” to the snack food. Try it if you don’t believe me.

If one has worries or doubts – like having to get back to the office, or what to do about some person who’s conflicting with us, let these thoughts go and re-focus on the snacks. Right at this moment, all the other concerns are just illusions in the head.

When one can get through half a bag without daydreaming or worrying about the past and future, that is significant progress. The heart rate will be lower and one feels very chilled and ‘at peace’ with things.

Eventually, after maybe months of practice, one can go through a whole bag of snacks in 5-10 minutes, all the while staying completely in the zone. A similar sensation is found sports, playing music, or making or appreciating art: being totally engaged in the now.

- – - – - – - b e n e f i t s – o f – z e n – s n a c k i n g – - – - – - -

You can leave the office feeling stressed and tired, and come back in 10 minutes feeling refreshed, calm and able to treat problems with a clear head. You’ll regain your sense of perspective, because you know that these problems can’t control your emotions and that by simply focusing on the present, they disappear.

(My personal favourite zen-out snack is Frazzles, by the way.)

One such person is Richard Watson at trend lab Now And Next. I haven’t ever met or spoken to him, but basically, he makes massive and not entirely serious graphs with somewhat arbitrary y-axises for a laugh, which makes him absolutely sound in my book.

He’s the guy who did that way cool Trend Blend tube map you might have seen. Anyhow here’s his latest, an Extinction Timeline, showing what ideas and things will die out, and when. I like it, don’t understand the reasoning behind some of it, which I suppose makes you want to talk more about it.

I got 99 wolves, but the bitch ain’t one.

This has really given me the motivation to do more art-related stuff, rather than my usual blend of tackiness and utility.

More pictures and info here. Link to the Guggenheim here.

So it’s rare that I get really really excited about a bit of marketing, but I can honestly say this is the most interesting thing I’ve seen for a while. Forget RadioHead (who let you download their whole album for any price you choose), Soulja Boy is where it’s at.

Link to the YouTube video here

The product, the person and marketing are so intertwined that you feel like think the whole thing is campaign for something else completely.

Every single trick that you’ve ever heard in a marketing brainstorm, he’s done.

His album is titled as a URL – souljaboytellem.com .

His URL is an entire social networking site.

He leaves nothing to chance with what he wants people to do – his music video shows teens watching his music video on their mobile phones, and then imitating the dance.

On his YouTube channel – (which has over 100 videos of various content, all with 5, 6, and 7 figure view counts) – he highlights related content on YouTube, like the Barney Remix, or a comedian spoofing his lyrics.

There are more imitations and remixes of anything I’ve ever seen including Lion King, Sponge Bob, and loads of earnest dance videos. Lots of these remixes have millions of views. I kind of wish Asi would pull some YouTube stats on this guy, as I am pretty sure Soulja Boy now rules YouTube.

I watched one of his interviews – before he was signed, he would upload his demo tracks to file sharing networks, and misleadingly title them as the newest 50 Cent track he knew everyone would be looking for. Evil genius.

He’s also got shedloads of merchandise – the music videos all feature distinctive branded gear that you buy from the website, and he has any number of bits of mobile content you can buy.

As you’d expect, he’s on every social network, with shedloads of authentic content on each one, and he even has all gear, and the dance, at Meez (avatar site for teens). Here’s me doing the dance.

Plus, the greatest meme of all – he writes his name on the outside of his shades, using Tipp-Ex.

Today I found out that my blog is the 12th on the list of Advertising Young Minds Ranking List. It’s a global ranking for blogs about advertising for people under 27.

It’s been put together by Daniel at AdStructure. It’s nice that people I’d consider friends are also on the list, and it is a good way of bringing together like-minded people. I also commend Daniel on actually putting this all together, as he’s clearly a smart guy and this took time and effort.

With all respect to everyone involved though, I find it to be a bit silly, and it represents the side of blogging that I find distasteful.

If you want to bring people together I would much rather see it done:

- over something they enjoy like BeerSphere
- for a worthy cause, like AllDayBuffet

My problem with a rank parade is that it doesn’t add any additional value, other than to inflate egos and cause resentment.

We don’t need more standardized ranking and testing for 7 year olds at school, we don’t need too much pre-testing and ranking of ad scamps, and we don’t need more ranking parades of bloggers. No offence intended to anyone, I just find this all a bit gross. I think cultural differences between the UK and US are probably significant here.