Podcasts

Bizarre Car Crash in Chelsea

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carcrashtv_0001OK, so those of you who’ve been waiting for more video can be temporarily sated with this 1 minute (9.5MB) clip which I shot while walking down the Kings Road yesterday afternoon.

What is bizarre is the angle at which the car had gone through the window of Cafe Nero. It was difficult to imagine that it had been going so fast up the side street, but that’s the only direction it can have been coming from unless it was spinning out of control in which case you’d expect more collateral damage to other traffic.

My favourite bit is all the mobile-phone wielding bypassers doing their thing for citizen journalism!

Just in case you thought Chelsea was boring these days.

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What I've Been Doing

Happy Birthday Perfect Path

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photo by amatern on flickr.comToday marks the first anniversary of the inaugural posting on Perfect Path. And though I know one shouldn’t anthropomorphise blogs (it really freaks them out apparently, well the more sensitive ones anyway) I think it’s worth celebrating. It feels kind of strange – it took me a while to find my voice I think, but now it feels like home and I’m glad to have had this place to reflect on how Perfect Path Consulting has grown and I’ve grown with it.

Soon after starting this blog, I went along to Blogwalk IV and then KM Europe where I met so many of the people who’ve been part of my mental landscape this year. I had the opportunity to see what it was like to work full-time on projects and not blog about it but also times when I’ve been able to be completely open about what I’m doing or thinking. This has also been the place where I became one of the UK’s first (and arguably among the best) podcasters – I say arguably because whenever I say I’m among the best people argue with me! I’ve videoblogged once and no doubt will do it again. And my wiki provided me with an entry into the glamourous world of event management.

I’m also now on the brink of doing some exciting and entirely blog-centric work where before it was a small part of what I was doing, but trying to encourage people to use. Now most people I meet know what a blog is and are interested in how they might use them, rather than how they might avoid using them.

So happy birthday Perfect Path and many happy returns of the day!

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Photo note: the chaps in this photo have nothing to do with me – I assume that they are friends of amatern, but it was the funniest picture I could find on Flickr with the tag birthday and a CC attribution licence.

Podcasts

Luchtime Chat at Our Social World

Our Social WorldSo on Friday lunchtime I took a stroll around the room and spoke to various participants about their mid-point views of the day (~35 mins, 16MB). I tarried rather too long around the reality-distortion field that is Ben Hammersley’s aura (not sure whether it’s a projection of his personality or one of the utility items on his utili-kilt).

Sadly I missed the opportunity to let Johnnie Moore explain his spider in a jam jar simile or to quiz Geoff on the lack of women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds as these seem to have been the main points of focus in the post-conference blogosphere analysis.

In rough order of appearance you will hear:

Geoff Jones, Suzanne Collins, Marcus ? from the FT, David Morgan, Ash Rattan, Dave Barker, Peter Wainman, Taron Maberry, Paul Goodison, Steve Price, Alistair Shrimpton, Euan Semple, Jem Stone, Ben Hammersley, Suw Charman, Meelis Kuusberg, Simon Phipps, Tony Hammond, Julian Bond, Chris Bose and Andrew Martin
(who didn’t seem to mind at all when I called him Chris at the end!)

Thanks Everyone!

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What I've Seen

Yes, I was young once too y’know!

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stud01 stud02

“Ha ha ha ha, oh god, put them away you’re so sad”. That’s the reaction these get from my kids, so I thought I’d share them with a wider, more mature audience.

Yes, folks this is Mr Perfect Path twenty-one years ago, just having left home and disappeared off to the Guildford School of Acting. That haircut was the one after the Phil Oakey comb-over effort and before the standard actor’s short back and sides. Yes that’s a collarless grandad shirt, and yes that’s a grubby gabardine mac with shoplifters pockets, ideal for threatening all and sundry with impromptu acts of indecent exposure. Ahh the cheap nights at Cinderella Rockerfellas that that NUS card got me into.

A note to younger readers: If you’re under 21 (ie you weren’t born when these were taken) I really don’t want to know, OK? Just leave me in blissful ignorance that I’m old enough to be your father.

A note to older readers: Point me (and the rest of the Perfect Path gang) to pictures of you at that time, the more gorgeous the mullets or bubble perms, the better – bonus points for Buggles-style specs.

What I think

Bring me sunshine, in your smile

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eric and ernie
Over on the podcasters mailing list Mark Czajka asks about selling podcasts. I’ve been talking to people about this sort of thing recently too.

It came to me in mid-bite of my apple this morning, as I contemplated another day in London in the 80s*, that selling content is like selling sunshine.

Nobody tries to actually sell sunshine directly – that would be stupid and, under some jurisdictions, doubtless illegal. Here in the UK, we’d have to give the deckchair-hire surfer-dudes each a combined visible light, heat and UV-meter, get them to take readings regularly, and then go round busting people for more cash when the clouds disappeared (but we could also probably get away with paying them even less as they get free sunshine as a perk of the job!).

But do you doubt that there is money to be made if you have access to sunshine? Those deckchair-hire dudes are just a tiny part of the sunshine economy, and the benefits are open to anyone who lives in a seaside town in the summer. You make money by doing anything that enhances the sunshine experience, helps people get to the sunshine in the first place or helps them yakk about it for the next six months till they get their next dose.

Sunshine is free, it wants to be free but it can also bring you customers and put them in the mood to spend their money. And that’s what damned fine writing, sounds & pictures should aspire to do too.

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* I mean 80-something fahrenheit, of course, the time machine to take me back to my youth still has some kinks that need ironing out before I can spend a whole day there. btw dexys send hugs (except kevin, he’s in a mood ‘cos I told him what happened to princess di).

Podcasts

Act Naturally

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ppvb050827OK, so it’s back to first post and suck time. Almost one year into this blog and you get your first opportunity to see me in moving pictures. Having been interviewed by the beeb already this week, I guess I’ve just got the bug, I’ve got to be in front of a camera daahlink.

In this opening episode, Lloyd gets to find out that he looks like sh*t, that his eyebrows look like hairy caterpillars and he has Austin Powers teeth. He also finds the one face that he should never, ever, pull in public, unless he wants to be shot.

Maybe this will be a one off, maybe it will continue – you’ll have to keep tuning in to see.

Also, I don’t know if all of this will work at all in a blogpost, so be patient with me, luvs. [update: ok, it works for me in IE, but Firefox insists on treating it as a text file. Tell me gently what I’m doing wrong, please. Ta.]

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What I've Been Doing

Perfect Path Pontification Probed

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RTS Interview 01So 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.

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I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.