Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

This is a Viral

This is a viral.

Or at least its compelling content that I sent around, hence a viral.

I hate it when people ask for a "viral" - just produce good content and human beings are inclined to and enjoy sharing.

Warning: This is quite graphic

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The Wire

Forgive me if you are a Twitter buddy as you will have seen my total and absolute addiction and ODing on the HBO show The Wire over the past 3-4 weeks, but I needed to share my total and absolute adoration of this show to anyone of you out there who are unlucky enough not to have seen it.

It's hard to know where to start with The Wire.

First up, it is a classic in the making - a profoundly moving and insightful tome about modern urban America. Through its multi-layered and nuanced approach, you get deeper and deeper into the lives of characters from drug-dealers, to dock-workers and the Baltimore Police Department. And as the stories and the lives become more entwined, so too do your emotions. What's right and wrong, who's good and who's bad all start to merge together leaving you emotionally drained, excited and often very angry while and after watching it. Its hard to know where your anger is directed to, I guess its towards what the characters often call, The System or The Game.

In the words of the might Charlie Brooker: "it's just fucking brilliant, this show is so good it could literally could fart in my face and I'd still love it."



PS. If you are a girl the eye-candy is fantastic - two of the best looking Brits that I have seen for a long, long time. Dominic West as Jimmy McNulty and Idris Elba as the super-cool Stringer Bell.

Hat-tip to fellow addict Dan Germain for the Brooker YouTube clip.

Obvious Mission Statement

Been doing some thinking about Mission Statements recently. I just dislike the phrase Mission Statement - they seem so 90s somehow. In the movie Jerry Mcguire, Cruise is adamant that he is not writing "a memo, its a Mission Statement."

Is there a better phrase than Mission Statement do you think?

At the moment I prefer simply the word "Ambition" or maybe "Vision"

The most interesting Mission Statement/Vision/Ambition that I have come across recently belongs to the folks at Obvious:

Hi, we’re Obvious™. Our goal is to create interesting things that matter to the world.

Short and sweet and to the point.

The founder of Obvious is Evan Williams. His is an interesting story: Evan co-founded Pyra Labs and set up Blogger to help the team coordinating their effort in building software. Along the way, Evan figured out that Blogger was actually more useful than the software that they were developing, and then he ditched the original idea and went with Blogger, which was eventually acquired by Google. Evan believes in this "stumbled upon" process so strongly that he founded “Obvious”, with the mission to “create interesting things that matter to the world” by productizing the “stumble upon” process.  BTW, Twitter is a direct result of “Obvious”

I love the attitude of “You Don’t Have To Know What You Are Doing, As Long As You Have The Capability And The Willingness To Try Hard” but I also really liked the neat articulation of their company's philosophy.

The YouTube "Creative Inspiration" Question

Creative inspiration is hard to come by I know that.

What did we do before YouTube?

Only Dead Fish posted about this brilliant Lastminute.com ad. I loved it - thought that it was funny, smart, made me smile and made me think about Lastminute in a new way.

But isn't it just the same idea as this?

The UK policeman plays the US janitor role, but essentially its exactly the same idea.

Does it matter??

The US version was not an ad. The UK version has a clever twist in the tail and promotes a brand.

I guess that I am trying to work out how far you can get away with an ad "inspired by..." a YouTube clip.

Hmmm.

Where are the girls?

This has been something that Beeker and I chatted about a while ago in regards to what we ended up calling "Lady Bloggers". I was lamenting the fact that there just did not seem to be very many of them.

Something seems to be going wrong somewhere:

• iMedia Connection 2008: 2 day long conference on future of our industry. c 30 speakers, not a single girl
• WOM Conference 2008: 1 day long conference on Advocacy and Word of Mouth, c 20 speakers - me + 1 other woman
• Clio Awards 2008: 20 judges, I was the only girl.

What is going on?

It seems to be more than simply a lack of Lady Bloggers, it is actually more to do with the profile  of women in our industry in general.

I am genuinely interested in why there aren't more women talking and judging at events like this.

She Says is an interesting organization that was started by Laura Jordan Bambach and Alessandra Lariu from Glue. They are aiming to help create a connected network of females to help address this issue. While they started She Says with a view about addressing the disparity of female digital creatives, I actually think that it is a much bigger problem than simply a creative one and one that needs to be sorted.

I guess my question is that, are women just less good and managing and promoting their own "brand" so to speak so that they are less high profile and known generally than their male counterparts? Is is that men are better at public speaking stuff like this? Do people just get onto the circuit and then stay on it and these are more likely to be men?

Opening this up to the Lady Bloggers (as well as the Boy Bloggers) - amomgst others Katie,  Angus,  Nicola, Lady Geek, Catch Up Lady, Beeker...

London tube - late again

Given that that we are almost a decade into the 21st century, why on earth are London Underground so proud that they are: "...Moving Into The 21st Century."
Shouldn't they be there already?

We-Think: we are what we share

Sometimes you read a book and it just connects with you.

I remember years ago getting that feeling when I read The Cluetrain Manifesto for the first time and loved the thought that: "All markets are conversations" - simple genius!

I had the same feeling with Charlie Leadbetter's We-Think.

If you haven't read it,  buy a copy now or download the first chapters from his site.

It's great stuff, really well-written and persuasive. Full of analogies and examples, it is one of the best Web 2.0 tracts that I have read.  It is also an example of collaborative creativity as it was developed together with 257 We Think wiki-users, who provided fresh insights and obersvations and corroborated stories.

"The web matters because it allows more people to share ideas with more people in more ways...at its root most creativity is collaborative; it is not usually the product of a lone individuals flash of insight...our capacity for collaborative creativity will become even more powerful because the opportunities to engage are expanding...the generation who have grown up with these ideas will have as their motto: We think, therefore we are."

The central premise of "WE ARE WHAT WE SHARE" is spot on.

In the 20th century we were judged as individuals by what we owned, our material possessions.

In 21st century we will be judged both on what we produce and what we share.

"We are what we share" as it is through the recognition and esteem of others whose opinion that we value which ensures that the prorogation of ideas continue.

I was fascinated by chapter 2 in which Leadbetter explores the origin of We-Think: he describes it a peculiar mixture of the academic, the hippie, the peasant and the geek. Have a read and see if you agree.

And if you work in the comms world and don't know the story about the origins of the civil war between Apple and (as was then known) Micro-soft, have a read about the Home Brew Computer Club, you should educate yourself fast.

Just brilliant.

You've probably gathered by now, I really enjoyed this book. In fact I think that it's a must-read actually.

I would be really interested in any thoughts from other people who have read We-Think or maybe seen Charles talk at TED etc.

My Starbucks order

Love the fact that the consumer  (me!) is in control:

"One tall soy milk sugar free vanilla latte no foam to go please"

What is your regular Starbucks order?

Kids Company - Camila Batmanghelidjh

Camila has been a bit of a personal heroine of mine for a while now.  We live  close to the estates in and around Peckham where Camila and Kids Company (which she founded in 1996) do most of their youth out-reach work.

Kids Company has gone into some of the most deprived areas of London and made a genuine movement of social change. Working with what she calls "lone children", children with effectively no functioning parent, Camila has inspired and empowered a generation.  It was really eye-opening talking to her about the kids that she works with.  She talked about Maslows hierarchy of needs and the fact that the majority of families that she works with are functioning at the most basic Survival level -  worrying about paying the rent, if the bailiffs are on their way and whether their kids will be stabbed when they play outside. 

I am interested in VCCP becoming a partner to Kids Company - offering financial support, but also providing work opportunities. One of the things that Camila was talking about was the fact that these kids need to have the opportunities to engage with a wider social and working world outside of their estates. We talked about offering kids the chance to come and do work experience in VCCP. I think its a brilliant idea. When we pitched the School Food Trust we had two teenagers from a Comprehensive in Deptford working with us on the  pitch, it helped to keep us creatively and strategically honest and they provided a constant stream of brilliant ideas.  They were also the people that we used to do research with other kids as we felt that teenagers open up much more honestly with other teenagers.  They helped us win the pitch no doubt about it.

I'd be interested to know if any other agencies do something like this either with Kids Company or other organizations like  Kids Company.