No time to go into this in detail right now, but check out the Perfect Path Plodder meets Ms Useful Sounds over on cruel to be kind.

In a rare instance of me podcasting while sitting down, we chat about the upcoming PodcastconUK.

So you all read what I said about the Queen’s Telly Club a few weeks ago (it’s not really the Queen’s and it’s not really a telly club, it’s the Royal Television Society Convention, but I just can’t help myself sometimes).

Well by a secuitous route from there and through the process of me repeatedly opening my big gob about it, I ended up in the meeting room at the Perfect Path Penthouse being interviewed by Kuldip Dhadda from the BBC, filmed by the lovely Jackie who in turn was assisted by Tom.

We covered the *gasp* threat to traditional broadcasting coming from participative media like blogging, podcasting and vlogging. Apparently they’re scared that we’re going to eat their lunch. After we were done it came to me that there was an opportunity here for the parable of the loaves and the fishes, but woe, it was too late. We hung around the corpse of advertising, picking over what we might scrape off the bones. We talked about why I do it (blog & podcast that is) and why it’s popular and makes for more accessible and worthwhile content. And we also took a look at Public Service Broadcasting and I tried to avoid puffing up their egos too much by going on about the BBC being the only player who’s actually doing anything useful in this area and ITV just being crap.

These bits will all be chopped up and mixed in with other contributions from other esteemed commentators (*ahem*) to form four short pieces of video that will be the introduction to debate sessions at the conference.

Sadly I shan’t be able to be at the conference itself as they’re too tight it’s very exclusive and apparently the only guests are kind of those stratospheric guys you and I only dream of meeting…. y’know like Michael Grade. Of course I could *buy* a ticket, but given the current state of the Perfect Path coffers £1700 (plus VAT I shouldn’t be surprised) is a bit on the steep side – though naturally I’m open to sponsorship offers, so if you’ve a couple of grand to spare, plus a little extra for danger money for going in with a podcast wire, you know how to get hold of me hehehe.

tags: television & RTS & RTS2005 & cambridge & new media

God what a geekfest. The upside of today was that I got to hear people more obsessed with media hacking and social software than I am – talking tech. The downside was that personal hygiene isn’t high on the agenda for quite a few members of this community. I came away not sure whether my head was aching from brain-overload or the heady mix of sweaty NTK t-shirts and Asda’s own-brand deodorant.

I got to the venue, at the back of Charing Cross Hospital, more quickly and easily than I thought, so had time to go and stock up on mineral water, which helped with the headache.

Cool stuff I saw/heard about was:

Science Commons – like Creative Commons…only for science.

Openstreetmap – which seems to be gathering momentum, though it still has a lot of usability issues.

Podzilla – using Linux on an iPod with applications including a video player player and a ZXSpectrum emulator.

MythTV – open source PVR

backstage.bbc.co.uk – including new feeds for weather and TV schedules and, I almost forgot, Matthew Somerville’s very excellent ‘diff’ for BBC News frontpage

That’s not to say the other stuff wasn’t cool, but a lot of it just went over my head.

I took some time out in the afternoon (I’m getting on, you know), which turned out to be a great opportunity to sit and chat with the fragrant Gia Milinovich about the cool work she’s doing, and about podcasting and television and all.

I then went in and listened to my final session with a nice summary from Tom Reynolds on how to blog without losing your job, Paul Mutton on Social Network Analysis based on inferences drawn from IRC conversations and Paul Lenz who is following up Who should you vote for? with What shall I read next? (He also threw a novel out into the audience which I caught – I started reading it on the way home…it’s crap)

After which, I really couldn’t take any more and escaped to the relative fresh air of the Fulham Palace Road.

Too late for linking, piccies or tags.

A fine time was had by most last night at the Texas Embassy. Seth Godin gave a very generous speech and question and answer session, with the only proviso that questioners had to wear false long noses as seen on the cover of his latest book “All marketers are liars” (Can you tell he’s in marketing?)

I recorded all of this as well as a brisk trot round to get instant reactions from those of the crowd that didn’t instantly disappear when the great man sat down.

A chance to talk to Lee Wilkins, Gia Milinovich, Helen Keegan, Ed Daniel, Robert Loch and Paul Birch (and lots of others too).

Audio is still being processed but should be up later today – I will put the post-speech chatter in the feed here, but other stuff will be available on the Marketing Soiree wiki page.

[UPDATE: The audio for Seth’s speech and the Q&A session are now available from the wiki page]

tags: seth godin & texas embassy & hugh macleod & marketing

Peter Martin of Junkk.com is blogging. A couple of weeks ago, he hardly knew what a blog was. Then he took his company to Internetworld and while on the stand got talking to Geoff Jones and came and heard my talk on blogging & marketing.

I could tell he got it, but wasn’t sure if he’d actually do it this fast.

He writes, naturally enough, on re-use, re-cycling and anthing else re- he can think of . Go taste, and leave him a comment to let him know who sent you.

Maybe now that RSS has come of age these are past their sell-by date, or maybe it’s just the right time to ride the wave, or maybe they’re not nearly as funny as I think they are.

Whatever. They made me laugh as I made them. Take the idea, riff on it, if you like. I release them under the usual creative commons by-nc-sa licence so you can put them on t-shirts, postcards, mugs, posters, pocket-patches, whatever you like, just tell folk where you got it, don’t try to make a buck out of them (without asking first) and pass them on in the same spirit as they’re given – you can get jpegs of each on my photostream at flickr and a pdf with all three from here.

UPDATE: The podchef made one of his own already. Not only that, but there’s a t-shirt too!

UPDATE II: If you can’t be RSS-ed to do it yourself, you can always purchase a ready-made print/t-shirt/mug/postcard

NB: due to the current exchange rate and shipping costs purchases in US$ might be prohibitively high. This weekend probably isn’t the best time to remind my American readers that if only their ancestors had done what they were told and paid their taxes, they could still be British and it’d be easer for them to buy British and therefore they would be much happier all round 😉

tags: rss & fun

I’m very sad.

I just love acronyms and when I realised that Blogging – a real conversation, the NMK event yesterday, could be reduced to Barc, I was inordinately pleased. Small things.

I shall write more on this today, but I wanted to let you know that I’ve made a wiki page available to capture a record of the event. Deirdre also supplied me with a delegate list on which I have begun the wikification process. I encourage you to embroider and embellish as you see fit, but please don’t be rude about those who booked but couldn’t make it.

If you were there and have written something about it, please link from the wiki. If you have photos, please link to them from the wiki. If you have audio, and it’s better than mine or you shot some video, please link to it from the wiki.

Oh yes and if you happen to be Mike Beeston or Adriana Cronin-Lukas, I’m happy to host your powerpoint presentation if you mail it to me, or you can…link to it from the wiki.

tags: BARC-050628 & blogging & London

True connie-sewers of the podcasting art will already be subscribed to http://www.perfectpath.co.uk/psc/index.xml in both their newsreaders and their podcatchers and will therefore be savouring the dulcet tones of Andrew Webster, Executive Director of Social Services for the London Borough of Lambeth over on Public Service Conversations.

For the rest of you – geddover there now and lap it up – it’s good, nutritious stuff, even if I did make it myself.

tags: public service conversations & podcasting

Some time about 15 years ago, I spent way too much time creating fractal images on my mono-monitored, 10MB hard-disk 286 PC, using BASIC I think, or maybe Turbo C. It took a long time to do those calculations and showing a Mandelbrot set at anything like an interesting level of definition could require an overnight run to complete. My wife used to tell me off, because if you left a computer on overnight, it would probably catch fire.

OK. For some reason I was reminded of this when I found something with which I could lose an equivalent amount of time doing something cool, but senseless.

I don’t know when it happened, but the satellite images for Google Maps went global. OK, so some areas are not very hi-res, but it just feels so cool to zoom in and out, particularly to zoom out and drag and drop your way from London to Seattle in a couple of clicks. It’s like you can pick up the world and roll it round (and it scrolls – well horizontally at least, you can’t flip over the North Pole yet).

This is the Perfect Path Penthouse.

A great antidote to the summer heat is the air-conditioned peace of an art gallery.

This week, I’ve done more in two days than in the past six months I think. Yesterday, I saw the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly. There are some gems but a couple of rooms had the air of an overcrowded art fair – unfortunately I can’t find a list of works online and couldn’t be arsed to fork out 3.50 for a paper one. So I’ll just say Teddy Bears, Swimming Pools and a giant Domino woman, that huge drawing of a rock and . I’m dead cultured me.

Today, I popped down to the Tate Modern for the Frida Kahlo exhibition. Wow. It’s still very busy (I think it only opened last week or something) and by the end I was getting a little prickly with the Japanese schoolgirls pressing their noses up against everything to have the absolutely closest look and other people absently wandering into me. Back to the art. It was really nice to see so much of her work. I guess I’d only seen the self-portraits with monkeys and suchlike before. I was ashamed to admit that I had no idea that she was married to Diego Rivera, let alone that she had an affair with Trotsky! What I found most fascinating was to see bits of the early 20th Century European and North American avant-garde (elements of surrealism, cubism, expressionism) through Mexican eyes, with a Latin American vibe. Favourites were the wedding portrait dramatically over-emphasising the contrast between Rivera’s huge frame and her petite self in a huge dress – love the little feet poking out. Also the self portrait that was part of a pair (with Rivera) for Sigmund Firestone in 1940 (the copy above doesn’t give you the yellowness of the yellow background, or the detail of the amazing braiding in her hair).

And afterwards it started to rain. There was thunder and lightning but it was over by the time I got home. I’d have liked a go at a wineresque thundercast. Maybe there’ll be more – it’s still hot.

tags: art & Royal Academy & Summer Exhibition & Tate Modern
Frida Kahlo & Gnomedex2005

Oh boy, and right now as I finish writing, the Gillmor Gang, live from Gnomedex is coming out of my speakers (well it will be when they get the mics working!). Coolest.