Well done if you stopped.

If you are still reading do you ever wonder what makes it so difficult to stop? There seems to be something about the human being that makes us want to consume words – many of us seem to find it hard not to keep on pressing forward, seeking to find out what’s in the next sentence.

Perhaps this is what fuels our addiction to the (streaming) media?

It’s not just words of course. Moving images, and sound too. We watch. We listen. We consume.

In the light of some research on the use of the iPad in the home that our Insight practice is cooking up, I wondered whether we’re getting something wrong.

It took me years to give up watching TV. I still find it hard to pass a newspaper stand. And the constant chitter-chatter of the radio presenter still has an attraction even on a slow news day.

And what have I done? I’ve replaced those streams with others: Twitter, Facebook, email.

Of course, I celebrate the idea that we’ve at least loosened Big Media’s unique hold on our attention.

For a couple of years I worked in a company trying to change the way source information was delivered to consumers.

And, lo and behold, fifteen years later, a really popular app for the iPad is Flipboard – which allows the user to build their own newspaper out of their own Twitter and Facebook feeds – the totally personalised and customised newspaper dreamt of by media futurists for more than 30 years. And with content that may – or may not – be produced by a media professional; content direct from the source.

But what monster have we created? With the iPad, and the commodity-priced tablets that will follow, a way for anyone, including corporations of course, to reach directly into our homes. A way for anyone’s voice – even mine – to reach you.

And there’s the rub. What are we giving up by allowing our valuable time, our valuable headspace to be used up by the sound and fury of others voices?

Isn’t there value too in a bit of peace, a bit of quiet reflection. In staring into space. Listening to our own voices? Why the rush? What are we running away from? What are we scared of?

I know that in this new world we can create and produce too – I’m writing this post aren’t I?

But that is my problem; yours is that you are reading it.

So stop entertaining yourself to death. Why not go and sit quietly? Eat a peach? Ride a bike? And enjoy.

How did this come about? A little under a year ago I decided to enrol on the The Maydays beginners improvised comedy course ‘just to give it a try for a giggle’. It’s not stand up – it’s improvising and creating scenes on the spot, with a limited input from the audience (if any).  I’ve got so sucked into this wonderful art that I am now half way through my fourth course, six live shows down and planning on starting a 10 week improvised singing course in April. It’s provided me with an amazing forum to unleash my creative side and has also provided me with a set of invaluable skills that are not only good on stage, but also in business.

Drawing on my own experiences, there’s four things I’d like to share with you about how my improvised comedy transfers to the workplace in my life.

Confidence.

My confidence has increased massively. I can think of a key example of how this shows. Some time back I was called at short notice to attend what was meant to be an informal meeting with two client contacts in a government department. Upon arrival, I was alerted that the format had changed, and we had 10 people present, from different areas of the government and department of health and that I was expected to lead the meeting from the perspective of the site build. Two years ago, I would have struggled and had a fair bout of nerves trying to present ‘on demand’ to this group of people, however I felt confident, took a deep breath and the meeting was a great success with a wonderfull project being spawned afterwards. I put this down to the many situations posed to me in improv where I have had to ‘jump in the deep end’ either on stage or with people I do not know and had to be confident in my surroundings to be able to perform to the best of my ability.

Creativity.

Improv has inspired and rejuvenated the creative aspect of my mind and has it bubbling like it hasn’t for a long time. I’m much more confident in putting forward ideas for pitch materials, attending brainstorms and getting actively involved. I find I’m thinking differently about how I might present and run workshop style sessions. It’s generally made me think more creatively and made me want to get involved in the more creative activities that happen around me in and around work.

Listening & Trust.

Improv forces you to listen very carefully and trust what you are given. You’re given a set of specific words, themes, locations or circumstances (much like a problem a client may have) and you are forced to respond in a way that acknowledges and builds on the inputs you’ve been given, not reject them. If someone needs a sock, there’s no point giving them a shoe. I know in myself and in my day to day work that I am consciously trying to listen to people more, respond more appropriately, and trust what I’m told, as opposed to responding in an ad hoc or generic manner.

Teamwork and interpersonal skills.

Improv definitely grows your interpersonal skills and builds your ability to function as part of a team. In improv, we refer to this as the ‘group mind’ – which is the idea that if you are closely aligned with the people around you, you will inherently and sub-consciously strive to achieve the same goal. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how massively beneficial this is in the day to day workings in a busy agency!

So there it is – my four key takings from Impovised Comedy and how it can benefit you in your working life (and your personal life?). If you think this is cool, and want to learn more about the awesomeness that is improv, there’s a few places online I reccomend:

• Check out Peter Day’s ‘‘What can business leaders learn from rock musicians and improvisational comedians?’ Radio 4 show. There’s some fascinating insights in there and I highly recommend that people have a listen. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p944k
• Contact The Maydays – they run business workshops as well as general improvised comedy courses
• Ping me a question, via email or twitter or come to one of my improv gigs (also listed on my twitter account)

I’d be keen to hear if anyone out there has any experience of improv, or has an ‘extra curricular’ passion that whilst not immediately obvious, benefits the work they do on a day to day basis?

I look forward to hearing from you!

Matt

For a few days before Christmas, deep within the NixonMcInnes Skunkworks, a band of elves were busy developing something special based upon some newly released Wordpress functionality. Behold, our new plugin, Sentimeter!

At the end of December Wordpress 2.9 was released with newly added support for comment metadata. We though it would be great to build a plugin that utilized this new feature and it also happened that a client of ours needed a plugin that that used comment meta data, everyone is a winner.

The resulting plugin is called Sentimeter. In the words of Steve the plugins main author (and lead developer here at Nizomk):

This plugin allows users to express sentiments (a la getsatisfaction.com, e.g. happy, neutral, outraged etc.) through the WordPress commenting system. Users can also associate their comment with a pre-defined ‘topic’. Overall sentiment, and comment topics, can be viewed as pie charts in the admin system, within a user-defined date range. Additionally, comments (along with their sentiment, and topic, if specified) can be exported as a CSV for further offline analysis.

You will need to update your templates a bit to utilize the plugin but it is written in the traditional Wordpress ‘loop’ style so it should slot in easily. Check out the plugin homepage for the detailed instructions. As the blurb says, the admin panel allows you to view how your users are feeling via a couple of pie charts, these are rendered in pure HTML using the fantastic gRaphaël javascript library.

We still have a bit of work to do to make the plugin easily customizable (which is still possible if you dont mind getting your hands a little dirty) so look out for updates in the near future. In the meantime, grab the code from here, follow these instructions to install the plugin and get Sentimetering!

As a heavy Twitter user, what I find interesting is the increasing use of the platform for these outcries. I also use Facebook regularly, but didn’t once see any evidence of outrage within my group of friends, or even acknowledgment of the above cases; I follow about the same number of people in Twitter that I have friends on Facebook, and both groups contain a mix of media-aware, socially-savvy and generally opinionated people, but there must be something about the Twitter mechanic that leads itself to outrage, (worth noting however that Facebook houses an anti Jan Moir group with over 35 thousand members).

Now, the point of this post is not to:

a) question whether Moir, Morbin or Gill were right or wrong

b) label or condemn those who took part in the online outrages that followed

c) wonder if Facebook is underused as a moral platform.

I simply find it interesting and slightly saddening that the above cases are generally unpleasant affairs for all involved. These cases grab headlines and can obscure the amazing power of Twitter in cases such as Trafigura. Some would argue that the resignation of Ian Morbin is a good thing, and as a long time user of the tube I agreed with the outrage, but with such potential for collaboration and conversation, is finger-pointing the best use of social media?

Wikipedia determines Herd behavior as “how individuals in a group can act together without planned direction”, and I wonder how true this is on Twitter? Is the quick-thinking required by micro-blogging leading users to make rash judgments and act in a manner similar to those closest? When the AA Gill review came to light, there would have been no set goal or decision, but there was a precedent from the Moir and Morbin cases. Did users see a hot topic for outrage and use the amazingly effective tool they had to hand to carry out a job? For the most part I would assume that people were genuinely outraged that he was so proudly talking about the killing of a primate, but I would love to see a more scientific study into the reasoning behind the reactions of the wider group.

As we enter a world of ubiquitous media, where your opinions last forever and there is a social layer to all that we do, what is the logical conclusion for these outrages? If you’re able to form an opinion, express it via a selection of platforms, and influence others not just when they’re logging on but throughout their daily lives, that is a phenomenal amount of power. On the flipside, for the target of such outrage living in an environment of always-on technology, what can they expect on the receiving end of such power? I don’t propose that we begin to curtail our online opinions, but as those involved in online we should be mindful of the increasing power of crowds, and what that means when they’re unhappy.

I realise this isn’t the usual topic we blog about on the NM site, but I had a wonderful experience doing some overseas work earlier in the year in Africa and I wanted to share my story with the world and I thought a blog would be a great way to do this.

Back in February I had the opportunity to spend 2 weeks at an orphanage in rural Ghana, West Africa.

Rather than tell a deep story about my trip, I thought I would highlight the main observations I made during the trip, documenting a little of what I was able to experience. I hope it provides an enjoyable read..

Travelling there

It took a 7 hour flight to get to Ghana, then a days travelling to get from Accra (the capital) up to Sekyere. A long old trip! From Accra we caught a coach to Kumasi, and from Kumasi had to catch a ‘tro tro’ to get to
the village. A ‘tro tro’ is essentially a ragged out old vehicle with too many people squeezed in, often with no doors and little of a windscreen, quite often with an individual hanging off the side. Quite a hair raising experience on those roads I tell you.

Location

I was staying at an orphanage based in Sekyere, a medium size farming village in Rural Ghana, about an hour or so’s drive from Kumasi, which is Ghana’s second largest city. The village consists of one main road (or dirt track) that
stretches the length of the village, with shacks, huts and the early stages of brick structures strewn out to the left and right of the main road. Running water and electricity are present for some, but are limited and the reliability varies.

The orphanage

The name of the orphanage is Revelelation’s Children’s Home. It is a small orphanage, run by a man, Nana, and his wife, Margaret. There are 15 children, half of them disabled and the orphanage is run very much as an extended family as opposed to an institute. What this essentially means is that all children at the orphanage have their names registered as children of Nana and Margaret and all are treated equal, as family. The orphanage is essentially a largish, old building, with 5 rooms: 4 bedrooms and one main living area. Bedrooms are sparse, with an old bed and a sheet per child,  and the living area consists of an old wooden couch/chair and a coffee table.

Outside the orphanage the grounds are used to grow food such as casava or coco-yam and chickens run free until a
time comes that they are to be used (for celebrations, or sale). The toilet is outside the orphanage and up a little track and is essentially a toilet sitting over a deep hole in the ground. You do need to watch out for the bugs hitting your bum cheeks.

The villagers

Upon first arrival I was very nervous. Everyone looks (well, stares) at you and are very, very intrigued. After all, my friend and I where the only white people for miles around, certainly only in the village. Indeed, we had one little girl run away crying and it’s only after we found out it was because she had never seen a white man before.

The locals call you ‘Bruni’ which means ‘white person’ – and the children in particular like to sing ‘oh bruni, oh boobuni’ – which means white man amongst black man. They are very sweet and call out Bruni and jump around as soon as they spot you, even from a distance..

We had to meet the local village chief on arrival, who, even though he speaks English, had to have a translator present – it’s tradition apparently that he speaks in his local tongue when greeting visitors.

We also met the local police chief, which left some to be desired I have to say. A glass eyed, scarred man, working out of a shack and spending the most of day sitting on a bench. Not sure how quick to the mark he would be if there was a crisis, but he was friendly all the same.

After a few days, word had quickly spread that there was 2 bruni’s in the village, and before we knew it people left right and centre were telling us ‘I like you’ and wanting to shake our hands. Very endearing, though also somewhat nerve-racking when most of the time they have a bush knife in the other hand.

Local cuisine

The food is probably the strangest I have eaten anywhere. It’s quite a stodgy diet, usually of rice or yam (which is a kind of peanut mush ball) accompanied with ground plantain leaves mixed with a fiery chilli and lots of oil to dip it in. Plantain, cassava, coco yam and rice are typical daily food, most of which are farmed from the surrounding lands.

The food doesn’t stop there though. One evening, on a foggy night driving back from the medical centre through the bush we felt a thud beneath the car. Nana ran out of the car and came back a moment later with a huge grin on his face and a large animal in his hands. He had run over a huge bush rat which he exclaimed is a delicacy and is worth more than a live chicken locally. I then spent the rest of the evening watching Junior and Sarfu (the two older boys) skin and prepare this rat. The following day I had it in a hot stew – it was delicious!

The children

The children are, quite simply, adorable. They are a real mix of ages, from different backgrounds with different reasons for being at the orphanage. Some simply have parents that have passed away, other have a more worrying background of being cast out due to beliefs in witchcraft and other tribal beliefs. A shame.

One thing that was clear and apparent was the generosity, willingness to learn, and sheer playfulness of the children. They all want to go to school, they all want to learn and they all work – very, very hard. Outside of school, the older children cook and wash the clothes for the household as well as farming and tilling the grounds. They support each other as a family unit. The other obvious thing is that children are children – wherever in the world you are. They love to play, tease and have fun. I was gobsmacked at how happy these children are given the fact they don’t have an ounce of what children have here in the western world – a leaf could be taken out of their books when it comes to acceptance, humility and happiness.

The local schools and children’s approach to schooling

I spent a couple of days at the local school (we had to walk the children each day) and met the teachers. It’s amazing! The response you get saying good morning to a class of 60 children is quite impressive. They leave early for school, usually before 7.30 and are back for 3pm. The day is similar to ours, lessons, lunch, lessons, home. The main difference is the infrastructure they are taught in and the subjects. I have to say when helping some children with maths homework I was struggling myself.

The culture/religion/social observations

In my eyes, the culture was one of a very old, developing country, though on the brink of change. Ghana is a model country by African terms, with peaceful, democratic elections taking place and (recently) free schooling for all primary age children (the problem is access to it).

Late one night we heard lots of chanting and drums – this went on for hours and hours. We found out later it was a religious (Christian) ceremony. It’s an interesting combination of Christian beliefs and traditional African rituals.

Another thing I noticed as I travelled around, was the occasional white marquee being set up for what looked like a wedding. As the time passed I realised these are for post funeral gatherings. They celebrate the life of an individual with a huge party when a person passes away and go to great lengths to advertise the celebration party of a passing person.

Hygiene

Hygiene varies depending on where you are, the plot of land you are given by the chief (that is how homes are allocated) and what your approach as an individual is to personal hygiene. We saw some areas, particularly near the cities that were awful, and others not so bad. One huge problem they have is plastic. All water and packaging comes in either plastic bags or similar – these are sold roadside, and dropped after use. They are everywhere. I spent three whole days clearing up just the plastic bits from around the orphanage grounds – but it comes back so quickly. There is no rubbish collection.

Malaria

Malaria is rife in the area – we spoke to one missionary that said he had caught malaria 3 times in the past 2 months. One evening we noticed that one of the smaller children, Adjunem, was very quiet. He went to sleep very early (whereas normally you can’t keep him quiet) and I was concerned. We checked him, and he was very hot, and we couldn’t wake him. Unfortunately, Margaret and Nana weren’t aware of the severity purely because they aren’t educated enough to spot these problems. We told them something was wrong and insisted on taking him to the next village to get to the medical centre. Upon arrival, a very strict women took two looks at him, confirmed his symptoms and said ‘Malaria’.

A cocktail of 4 types of medicine and a suppository later and the boy was back on his feat saying our names – all in 10 minutes! That must have been some drug cocktail.

The nearest city – Kumasi

Kumasi is the nearest city to Sekyere, it takes an hour or two by tro tro to get to and is a completely different experience. Away from the tranquillity and bush knives of the country side there is a massively overcrowded and busy city. This really was a completely different world.

Kumasi is home to the largest market in West Africa and indeed it is like a labyrinth. Turn after turn of markets stalls, cooking foods, fabrics, rice, bartering and homelessness. Thank goodness we had Nana to guide us else we would have surely got lost. Earlier, we had agreed to purchase the children new school clothes and some much needed covers for the old sofa they had and this was main reason for coming to the city. We walked in and out of dusty alleys, eyes everywhere, past a bush rat outdoor kitchen with literally hundreds of these things being cooked until we came to an opening in a wall where a little fabric workshop was busy bustling away. It was here we selected and placed an order for the school uniforms and for seat covers from a sweet old tailor with purple lips. Within the week the tailor came to the orphanage with everything as requested for the children. Happy days.

What I took from the experience

Sure, a visit to a small orphanage in Ghana isn’t going to change the world, but it gave me an opportunity to experience first hand a lift style that has always fascinated me and provided me with an opportunity to make a small difference to a wonderful set of individuals that I now have ongoing contact with.

There is much, much more I could talk about, perhaps in another blog post. If you’d like to hear more, let me know.
I hope very much Ghana continues to develop as an emerging nation in Africa and I very much look forward to my next visit early next year.

I’m keen to hear of similar experiences others may have had – have you done any overseas volunteer work? How did you find it? Would you go back?

Thanks for reading.

The Brighton and Hove business awards 2009 are with us and we’re super proud to sponsor the awards website for the sixth year running. We’re working with our lovely friends at Midnight PR, who are taking on the mammoth responsibilities of organising just about everything else (EEEEK)

I love being part of the unique business community in Brighton, the awards give us a chance to celebrate the special stuff that goes on all around us, that we just don’t see every day

Last year we sponsored “The most awesome use of digital media award”. The award went to the guys at Locomatrix for their cool GPS based gaming platform

Their slogan is “Jumpers-for-goalposts for the Wii generation, bringing gaming back outside”

They came up with an innovative gaming system that turns your whole body (using your GPS location) into the gaming device instead of your thumbs or how wildly you wave your limbs like on the Wii – although is not limited just to this! It can incorporate any of these traditional gaming interactions to create a unique gaming experience that takes you out into the real world. In the words of Brüno – Fantastiche!

It’s all going on here in Brighton. I wonder what will be on the table this year – something equally cool I hope!

If you think you’ve got what it takes why not enter your company? Its very easy on our lovely Wordpress site at www.bahbas.org.uk remember the awards entries close on the 30th July though so don’t hang around too long

If you don’t want to enter your company, get your posh pointy shoes out and book a table – we’ll see you there

VideoPress is a well thought through offering from Automattic (the company supporting the awesome blogging platform that is WordPress) that allows bloggers on WordPress.com to quickly and easily upload and share HD video content online. It streamlines the create-upload-transcode-embed workflow that bloggers currently endure. I want one!

What particularly excites our design and build team is that the underlying infrastructure of VideoPress has been released under the GPL as an open source framework that, with a little bit of tweaking here and there, will turn any WordPress MU system into a video-streaming mega machine!

We have used video embedding and sharing in projects developed in-house by our design and build team for Stannah Stairlifts and Cooperative Finantial Services blog and it does bring a website to life. You can read more about it here.

Other discussions we have had internally pop to mind: what about the benefits of seeding the video on social hubs like YouTube or Vimeo once the video is online? It would be great if VideoPress seeded the video to these networks automatically bringing more visibility to our content (hmm, sounds like an opportunity!).

We can’t wait to take it out for a spin and use it on our next video-blog.

What do you think!?

We were pleased to relaunch the Good With Money blog for Co-Operative Financial Services on Monday. Coinciding with a refresh of the main corporate site, the blog gives CFS a platform from which it can engage visitors in conversations around it’s ethical stance and the projects that are supported by its unique funding structure.

We initially launched a single issue blog last year, dedicated to showcasing CFS’ commitment to Microfinance. It told the story of Belma, a bank employee returning to her native Bosnia to see the impact CFS funding is having within local communities. As a pilot project this site gave CFS an insight into the advantage of using a fast, flexible platform to share stories in an informal way. Customer response via comments was fairly positive, and as the banking crisis hit, highlighted the benefits of providing an open channel for dialogue with the bank – a real point of difference within the industry.

This first foray into blogging created an internal appetite to showcase more campaigns, like those against Toxic Fuels or financing renewable energy , and also publish regular news content to create and sustain a dialogue with the various communities of interest. Populating a site of this nature and nurturing the community is a considerable and important task and CFS has made the commitment to the blog’s success by putting dedicated resource into place. We’re looking forward to seeing how this community grows and develops and continuing to help CFS demonstrate how they truly are ‘good with money‘.

When lone blogger Jason Roe posted that he’d got the Ryan Air website to display a flight price of 0.00, he probably didn’t realise he’d end up featured on the Times Online within a week.

But, thanks to a vitriolic and profane response by (a now confirmed) Ryan Air employee, bloggers everywhere have been linking to Jason’s blog.

The result? The number and influence of sites talking about this means that now a Google search for ‘Ryan Air’ brings up the Times Online at number five.

Whether Ryan Air care about this is doubtful, given their official response denouncing ‘idiot’ and ‘lunatic’ bloggers – but it is a great example of the potential effect on brand image when you go about engaging in the conversation in the wrong way.

A polite, or even grateful response might not have got the same coverage (given everyone’s love of a juicy story), but at least it wouldn’t have further cemented the company’s ‘bullish’ (and that’s being polite) image.

On a more positive note, Radio 4’s today programme announced that this year’s George Orwell prize for political writing is featuring a category for political blogs.

It’s a great public endorsement of the medium and recognition of the people behind it as credible writers (rather than idiots or lunatics!).

About time too – as Evan Davis asked this morning – if Orwell was still around today, might he be a blogger?

To mark the release of the new animated movie Coraline, written and directed by Henry Selick, he of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach fame, based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean,  Laika comissioned ad agency Weiden+Kennedy’s Portland studio to come up with a marketing solution with the brief to “Reinvent the way you market a movie.”

They came up with a lot of wonderous stuff, not least the stuff they sent out to bloggers. Instead of, this from personal experience as a recipient, a bunch of hurredly photocopied press releases and crappily presented CD-ROMs filled with useless junk, they sent forth these absolutely exquisite handmade boxes to online influencers, filled with original artifacts from the film itself. Absolute treasures!

How could you not say a good word about these?

(via Drawn!)