This blog was nabbed to provide a space for collecting my writing, but then I thought, why shouldn’t it all go to Perfect Path? so I’m setting that up, but need to make at least one post here to test the autopost settings.
Ta-da!
Curses!
It wasn’t supposed to be like this… an invoice was “supposed” to be paid on Friday and ease some pressure, but that won’t happen till next Friday now – and this week is the turn of the month when a few things fall due.
I had a great week of adventure last week – donations made, micropatronage, albums sold, meals bought for me, all accompanied by great conversation, love and support, thank you all very much.
I mostly enjoy this style of living, but occasionally I still get a cold sweat when it looks like it’s not going to work out the way I want it to and I’m going to have to face some embarrassing loss of face about not being able to keep a commitment. I was having one of those a minute ago, that’s why I’m writing now.
More suggestions welcome. Still open to bits of work as detailed last week (nothing came of this – interesting, don’t know if it’s that people can’t pay that immediately, or they just don’t have stuff for me to do).
Donations & micropatronage do work best for me when direct to my bank – avoiding the paypal clearing cycle.
However, purchasing stuff still helps too.
And just feeding me earns you a well-bent ear.
Will blog, make art, sing, play, tell stories, hold spaces for food
So I’ve done some bits of paid work of late, but the earliest an invoice will be paid is likely to be Friday this week. I also have some lovely micropatron payments due over next weekend, thanks, beautiful people. Nonetheless, that leaves me with a sticky cash situation today. My oyster card is empty and while I’m confident of being able to pay for one more meal today, two is a going to be more than a stretch.
I am committed to not borrowing any money, even for the short-term of the next five days. That has only ever made things worse for me.
I am open to work for cash or immediate upfront payment – the things I do are summarized in the title of this post and explored further here but I’ll take other suggestions within the bounds of legality and decency (though my definition of decency is fairly broad and loose!) and you may have ideas of other things I could do right now that you’d swap cash for immediately.
I am open to gifts, sponsorship and micropatronage (especially if paid direct to my bank (details here), rather than through the sluggish means of paypal).
I’m also open to invitations to breakfast, lunch & supper, subject to me being able to get to you and not kill anyone on the way to breakfast because of low blood sugar…
And then there’s the possibility of making social art together that might encourage immediate cashflow to all involved, whatever that means.
I’m particularly focused on things I can do today and this week, but all other offers are welcome – beyond my commitment to my residency at #C4CC, I have few other calls on my time.
Postcards are still for sale here.
A note for those of you who worry. Thank you, I appreciate your care. I am loving this experience of living completely today and very grateful for the opportunity to do it. If I’d had a massive windfall at any point in the last few months, I’d have missed out on this part of an extraordinary adventure.
Le Web ’10 approaches
Damn, I thought I’d written about this already, but I can’t see it.
I’m really pleased and grateful to have been asked to be an official blogger again at Le Web this year. I’m very much looking forward to spending some time in Paris and to meeting up with the unique mix of European and US people who gather there.
If you’re thinking about coming and haven’t made up your mind yet, you can book here.
This year, I’m more explicitly interested in Creative Collaboration and Social Art. I’m going to be looking at what kinds of collaboration this sort of mega conference actually encourages and I’ll be talking to as many people as possible about what they think of the concept of social art.
I doubt that I’ll be live-blogging sessions, but I’ll be at least doing a round up of interesting things I’ve seen. Of course, twitter will be buzzing and I’ll be taking as many pics as I can. Last year I had a Canon 7d on loan – it was lovely. Anyone want to supply me with something this year in return for much shameless pimping?
I’ll also be trying to understand from my fellow official bloggers how their online lives are maturing. There are a few of us who’ve been playing and working in this space for a long time now. What’s changed? What’s still fundamentally the same? Is there anything new happening or are we all getting a bit stale?
Oh and I might get to a party or two 🙂
Control again
I got an e-mail today saying:
“I am part of the web development team for XXXX where we are constantly trying to improve the http://www.XXXXX.com site’s user experience. Part of this improvement involves meeting our users’ expectations when they are referred to XXXXX.com from other websites. To achieve this we are trying to ensure that all inbound links to our site point to a page that is relevant and useful to the visitor and that the link has anchor text that accurately describes the page it is linking to.
On this page of your site https://perfectpath.co.uk/XXXX you have a link to XXXXX.com. To help us improve the usability of our site it would be greatly appreciated if you could change the link so that it has the following anchor text and links to the following page.”
No.
This is my blog. If you don’t understand that as an answer, then you’re not qualified to be in any web development team imho.
There are two parts to it:
1. My – I write it and keep it tidy. I write whenever and whatever I like. I update things if I think there’s some value in doing so. I don’t work for you just because I linked to your site. Content on my site doesn’t get updated just because you decide to reorganise your site. If you break your own links or are engaging in some SEO shenanigans, it’s really not my problem.
2. Blog – the web is not an extension of your content management system, it’s a place where I write on the internet, for myself and for people I know. I didn’t link to you for your benefit, I linked to you because I thought it might be useful to my readers at that time. I’m highly dubious that anyone will look at that post very much, the value to people who read this blog has deteriorated over time anyway. Yes there are interesting things in my archives, but my post linking to you isn’t one of them, it was just a “Here’s what I did today” post.
I can’t say much more without going into details that would reveal who the e-mail came from. Gah!
Integration rather than compromise
I was talking a while ago about compromise in the context of concentrating on social art and being a social artist – recognising that I had to do this, it was no good going back and compromising with other work because I’d only end up back here again trying to find an answer.
I am at the moment though just starting a few new things that at first glance look a bit more like standard social media consulting assignments.
Am I compromising? I don’t think so, I prefer to see it as integrating art and commerce, making something new. I can’t guarantee I’ll get it right, but I’m having a go.
I think I’ve seen where I needed to make a shift – to move from avoiding the bits of social media consulting work that I’m qualified to do, but which aren’t obviously social art towards taking more of an artistic approach to clients and prospects who ask for advice.
One of the first lessons in consulting I got was “Always reframe. Never take any assignment as given” So I’m now committing to taking on assignments with the caveat that I will always turn them into some sort of social art. That I will talk about them in those terms, I will reframe briefs and open them up to the network. After all, my perceived value most of the time is that I am part of a large network (although along with that sometimes comes some confusion over network dynamics, talk of influentials, etc)
Obviously this has to be in collaboration with the client. I don’t want to keep the process hidden from them but neither can I simply expose every brief wantonly to everyone I know. But I think it’s important to show people how we work, showing by example how to engage with a network as well as telling them what they should do.
Do as I say *and* as I do.
The Social Art of Travelling across the USA
Hmmm… that feels like a big title for something important. Well I suppose it is. In a way it’s what I’m thinking about all the time – how might I repeat the adventure of last March? Do I want to? (yes) Why do I want to? How to do it differently? What do I want to keep? What to I want to avoid?
And answering all those questions feel like issues of control. And what I learned last year is that what’s interesting in this space is what happens when you let go of control. What happens when you simply put yourself in a place with a few rules and structures ie where you can have only minimal control over what happens next? What happens when you willingly conspire with yourself to create an adventure where you end up in a hotel room in New York, writing on your blog that you don’t know where you’re going to stay in 3 days time when you arrive in New Orleans? What do you learn? What can you do differently if you come across this situation again.
Where’s the wisdom literature about this? Well it turns out that the great spiritual works boil down to life being a journey into the unknown and how you deal with the pitfalls along the way – but they do it at a very abstract level. There are principles in there that are useful, about staying in the moment, letting the process (God, the Tao, Flying Spaghetti Monster) happen, letting the universal power do it’s work and getting out of the way, surrendering to that power.
And then there’s movies. A much more socially acceptable way of exploring these ideas in the 21st Century than reading the Bible 🙂 Pretty much everything is a Hero’s Journey, but some are more literally about a journey than others. Frankie and I asked on twitter the other day for favourite examples. We got:
Wild at Heart
Easy Rider
Apocalypse Now
Road to Perdition
The Odyssey
O Brother, Where Art Thou.
Jason & the Argonauts
39 Steps
North by NW
Africa United
Two-Lane Blacktop
Butch Cassidy & Sundance Kid
Midnight Run
The Blues Brothers
Kings of the Road
Paris, Texas
Thelma & Louise
Just a random Friday afternoon selection – chuck some more in – when we’ve got a fuller list and an idea of which are most useful, I’ll run some screenings/conversations to explore this idea a bit further.
Umm… so why might this be important beyond simply making something beautiful?
Well, consider you’re an established FMCG brand for example. You know you want something like the Old Spice campaign. You buy the *theory* that you should be involving customers and engaging them beyond a 2010 version of a caption-writing contest, but you also know that this means ceding some control.
Yes, the C-word again. It’s what freaks the bejaysus out of people in businesses like that – we’ve all seen it: they want to do the new cool thing, they want to play in this space, but they sit at the edge of the playground afraid to join in.
But what if there was a safe way of doing it, of practicing it in such a way that you could bring it into your every day work – mightn’t that be a way of sliding along the spectrum towards real engagement? What if you didn’t have to do it at all, but you could just hear the story of someone else doing it, not in a packaged, polished, rationalised case study after the dust had settled, what if you could watch the people doing it in real time (and maybe join in and give them a hand if you had something they needed)?
Maybe?
My passport expires tomorrow
Yikes!
When I got this, 25th October 2010 seemed a very very long time away. It was still a massive novelty to be saying 2000-and-something and being in the noughties, let alone considering the second decade of the 21st Century.
I can’t remember why I renewed it when I did. But I’m guessing that it was something to do with my then impending 10th wedding anniversary (yes folks, in a couple of weeks it’ll be 20 years since I got married!) – I think we went to Paris for the day. I certainly had no idea at that point, what the next 10 years would hold: that I’d no longer be married, that I’d be self-unemployed for the majority of the time, that I’d have lost about 80lbs in weight, I’d have grown a beard and that we’d have a Tory-ish government again by now.
Or that popping over to Paris would have become so ordinary for me. I mean, I’m not over there every weekend, but every time I go, it feels more like a commuter trip than the big expedition it once was.
I’ll be in Paris at the beginning of December again for LeWeb (I’m an official blogger again – proper post about that coming up soon) and although I’m excited about being there, my focus for adventure is on gadding about the UK and then zipping across the USA – kinda beyond the wildest dreams of Lloyd Davis, aged 35, Information Manager for the Best Value Inspection Service at the Audit Commission, married for 10 years, two children, comfy home in Surrey…
Mind you, that Lloyd may have winced at the price of a passport renewal, but he knew where the money was coming from and he knew he’d have it in time for the trip. Excitement and adventure do come at a price 🙂
Facebook misuse of “via”
This has been bothering me for a while but I only really understood it when I just used it (Life Lesson #348).
Facebook has a kind of retweeting function so if you see something that someone else has linked to and you want to share it, the person whose feed you saw it in gets some automatic credit. Good.
I’ve only seen it so far in other people’s streams as Monkey McNutz via Chicken Crazoffsky: OMG this video makes me pee in my pants!
When both parties are a friend of mine then it can be confusing (if you don’t know the form). Who saw it first? Who’s refacebooking whom?
Then I saw it a few times where Monkey McNutz was clearly retweeting people who aren’t in my friends list people I’ve never heard of like Duckface Dibble.
So here’s the problem: I read “Monkey McNutz via Chicken Crazoffsky: OMG! ” as “Monkey says, by way of Chicken … OMG etc.” which doesn’t really make sense. It’s like Monkey is using Chicken as a ventriloquists dummy – whereas actually it’s the other way round. This message is coming to you from Chicken via Monkey (cos you might not know Chicken at all)
I think it’s something about the placement of the via clause – if it were at the end of the link (or whatever is being shared) then it would make sense, because it’s more obviously an attribution – but having it in the Name field drives me McNutz.
See? You don’t see, do you, it’s just me, isn’t it…? sorry.
Getting people to do stuff
I was prompted to write about this by a twitter exchange this morning. Sophia Looney from Lambeth Council was wondering about getting some help around data visualisation for reporting. “Heh” I chuckled to myself, “you mean the kind of thing the Audit Commission used to do so well before it let its brightest creative minds drift away…?”
But bitter cynicism aside, the question is: where are the data viz people who might be willing to contribute to something like this? How could the offer be made more attractive? Who’s already doing something or something closely related? I’m out of the loop on so much of this – my instincts are to ask Emma Mulqueeny, Thayer Prime, Paul Clarke, Dominic Campbell, Robert Brook.
My (probably ignorant, please put me straight) prejudice is that there are specialists giving time to being clever in the storage layer and the analysis layer, but they are having to act as talented amateurs in the presentation layer and that the whole thing is being led from a technical point of view. I hope this isn’t true any more and I’m just out of date, but I think there’s more value to be found in working out what stories local and central government want to tell and then seeing how they can be told with interesting combinations of open data. Regardless of the technology invoived, what is the story you want to tell and how can it be supported by data?
It may be that there’s a project to run at #C4CC on this – bringing together council performance & policy people with Higher Ed data viz folk like this chap and the open data crowd. I’m happy to facilitate something, let me know.
More generally, it got me thinking about how to articulate what I think is important to remember about crowdsourcing and getting people to do stuff… for free.
There’s a common theme in articles about the web: “There are people out there, doing stuff… for free!” Now, mostly this is in the context of someone writing or producing a mainstream media piece that’s actually saying “There are people out there doing what I trained for years to do and get paid moderately well for, but they do it for free – how long will it be before the people who pay me decide they can get a better deal elsewhere?” or for the less self-aware “Ha ha! Look at those suckers! They do all this, for nothing!”
I’ve seen many, many conference presentations, pointing to crowdsourcing such as Wikipedia and saying “Look, there are people out there doing stuff… for free! Maybe you could do something like this, and massively reduce your costs” Well, maybe, but it’s not as simple as it sounds.
I want to add that we don’t know much really about how the social and economic dynamics of the web work. It’s still relatively new and even those of us who’ve been immersed in it for more than 10 years would be wise to acknowledge from time to time that it’s a vastly complex and always evolving subject. So when you hear anyone say “this is the way the web works” take it with a pinch of salt and substitute with “this is a way that I think the web works”
So this is my favourite theory about crowdsourcing. It’s not about complete selflessness, the people who contribute are not just giving stuff away, they are building something together. They’re making stone soup. To put it in more economic terms it’s the demand-side supplying itself (I first heard this from Doc Searls at LesBlogs in 2005) Why do they do it?
Because, when you want something done and when you have a way of connecting with a very large and diverse group of people it’s far easier and quicker to do it yourselves than it is to wait for a corporation or government to do it for you.
Key phrase: “when you want something done”. If I want something done, and I think I have something to offer, and I think it’s interesting, and I think there are enough other people who are going to contribute similarly, and I think our joint effort is safe from short-sighted people who might exploit it, then I might chuck something in the pot. A lot of ifs in that sentence.
The other bit that often gets ignored is that it does cost something. It’s tempting to think that it all comes for free, because the contributors are giving of themselves freely. Again, not quite. Yes, it costs massively less, but someone has to pay for whatever infrastructure is required for the job. They may be small costs and a long way away, but they are there.
Perfect Path 