The Stage: Jimmy Savile is to return to screens in a new UKTV show celebrating Jim’ll Fix It, as part of the broadcaster’s £15 million investment in new commissions for 2007.
And: BBC2 is bringing back Swap Shop for a special seasonal edition featuring the original presenters including Noel Edmonds, Keith Chegwin, Maggie Philbin, and John Craven.
I trundled up to York on Sunday evening (thumbs down to GNER for their wireless not working, thumbs up to Best Western Hotels whose wifi was not only working in my room and all over the hotel, but was free too). I was there to cover, in blog form, an I&DeA conference on Rural Excellence.
I’m currently selling this service as “Rich Records” and Mark Hucker, one of the agency’s most forward-thinking senior managers (thanks for the fiver, Mark) asked me to use their communities of practice software to pull together something for people to talk about during and after the event. Since the CoP stuff had difficulty embedding video initially (it’s OK now) I put up a wordpress blog to run in parallel so that people could see everything together – which means that you can go and have a look yourselves without having to go through the registration with I&DeA. Of course, if you have a real interest in rural issues or other areas that the agency deals with, I’d recommend signing up with them anyway, but for the casual visitor go look at the blog for now (until I get asked to take it down).
Anyway, another thrill of the two days was to get to meet and interview Prof. Heinz Wolff childhood hero from his time on Young Scientists of the Year (shockingly little of this show survives on the interweb) and The Great Egg Race. Prof. Wolff gave us an entertaining after-dinner speech on the need for greater risk-taking in society (including some potentially hair-smouldering pyrotechnics) and then he addressed the main conference talkign about using traditional aspects of rural society to solve 21st Century urban problems. I particularly liked the idea of using old ladies to staff call centres – “Oh, yes Uncle Harry had that problem too, and do you know what we did with him? Well…”
After everyone else had gone home on Tuesday evening, came the least-planned, but most heart-warming bit. I made a last-minute arrangement with the author of Knitting Yoghurt, whom some of you will recognise from her blog and whom I haven’t seen for 20 years, to dash across from York to deepest West Yorkshire for an evening of Yorkshire Pudding… meat-free toad in the hole, getting to know her delightful children (a discussion on which was the toad and which the hole and an exploration of German vocabulary for fruits and vegetables) and then sitting by the fire and reminiscing over a lovely cup of tea. In the morning, after meeting the assembled playmobil folk, I had to get on a train at 10.50 to be back in London, but it was a lovely, spontaneous thing to do – clearly those red pants are working.
Gia says “Typing ‘a href’ is not a creative act.” after her run in with Maryam Scoble.
I disagree. Typing ‘a href’ is *the* new creative act that makes all of this possible. Without links we just have nodes – we need both to make the network – the best bloggers have always been the ones who write amazing stuff *and* link to amazing stuff.
We’re playing the old game when we discriminate between different types of creativity. Shall I throw a tantrum because I didn’t get a round of applause for the amount of carbon dioxide and methane that my body has created today?
In my experience, demanding credit is a much less satisfying use of my time than just making more stuff that I think is cool.
I think we need to scale down our expectations of link-love a lot and be satisfied with the offline credit that we do get. It’s still great for me when people I’ve never met say “oh you’re at Perfect Path” or I hear someone go “there was this guy making bottles of Stormhoek explode” and I can say “yeah, that was me”. It’s taken a while, but there are now people saying “We’ve seen that you can do this stuff, have a large wodge of cash for doing it for us”.
Anyway I think Maryam’s way more pissed off with Robert than with Gia – time for some offline credit building activities I think – someone in her comments has already suggested the Aristophanean solution.
So it’s a fortnight since I saw the first bloggers screening of Hallam Foe, a film by David Mackenzie (softly spoken, but clearly a bull-headed Taurus underneath). I said on the night that I don’t like talking about a movie straight after watching it, but this is ridiculous!
We were asked not to review it but I will say It’s a gorgeous movie experience. So what has stayed with me for two weeks? I think foremost the that this is about taking the first steps in the life-long process of growing up, the paradox of growing up in a world where there are no grown-ups – or else that growing up means finding out that grown-ups aren’t all that grown up themselves. I was really glad that Hallam didn’t emerge from his rite of passage “a man”, grown up and finished, able to take on the world.
I also saw it about being apart from the city and it’s people, while being a part of the city. Also that despite moving from fabulous countryside to a fabulous city, he still takes himself with him – the tree house becomes a clock tower, his mother (literally) becomes his boss (Sophia Miles….droool), his father and stepmother’s relationship is replicate in his boss and her lover blah blah blah.
But I digress into reviewer, which I’m not. I was most fascinated by how my fellow bloggers found their own experience of adolescence in the film. Of course I did the same, but I’m going into details here. What do you think I am, some kind of exhibitionist?
Go see the Hallam Foe production blog by Colin Kennedy and the nascent flickr photostream. And if you’re that way inclined, check out the myspaces for Hallam, Kate and Verity
On 1 August 1994, the Audit Commission moved back into 1 Vincent Square after a refurbishment. It was also the day that I started working there and I was comforted in my newbieness by the fact that no-one else really knew where anything was either…
[pause while I shudder at the fact that this is all twelve years ago]
Well, the Commission moved down to Millbank a couple of years ago and No 1 has stood empty for a long time, but now it’s being done up again, I have no clue for what purpose. So, when I passed down Regency Street, I pressed my nose and my cameraphone up against the window of what used to be Publications (the site of so much feverish activity, now still and dusty) and love the fact that you can see right through to the front without all the clutter in between.
I’ve been advised by several people that I need to be more exciting… or something. I think what people see is inconsistency – they know I’m a pesky imp inside, but the outside tends to be a little more subdued.
It was suggested some time ago, that a little gesture I might make to myself would be to have some red underpants. No I don’t really understand it either, but I’m open to suggestions and so, albeit after a little while – OK 2 months – of procrastination, I headed this morning to Marks & Spencer’s flagship Marble Arch store and found me a pair of red boxers.
Co-incidentally, it’s coming up to the anniversary of that whole G-Room shower gel/shampoo thing so for those of you who’ve missed seeing me naked, I present to you today, The Man in Red (Pants) with music by the man in black.
Hugh says Dotcom was about ‘taking’. Web 2.0 is about ‘giving’
Yup
Dotcom was about taking the piss.
Web 2.0 is about giving the piss away.
Just easing myself back into blogging on my own behalf.
I feel the need to recognise publically that *this* is a Cat Blog
They came! Lovely lovely moo cards.
I’m just thrilled. If you haven’t seen them yet go look at moo.com.
I paid for this batch of 100 – US$19.99 which translated to £10.84. They came nicely packaged with a postage cost of £1.27 so even with a couple of duds they still work out at less than 10p each. Fantastic.
I’m just not sure that I want to give them away….
Note to self: Cut back on the similes or make sure you explain them fully.
What I said was:
“Blogs are *like* having your own newspaper”
“Podcasts are *like* having your own radio station”
“Videoblogs are *like* having your own TV station”
I’m not a newspaper publisher, I don’t make radio, I don’t make TV – they are all similar, but fundamentally different. I use comparison with those things to help you understand what it is that I really do. To try and put it in context for you.
It’s like saying (uh-oh here we go again) “Frogs legs are *like* chicken” – it prepares you a little for what’s coming, but you shouldn’t send them back just because you’d formed a mental picture of a family-size KFC bucket.
Perfect Path 