Hat tip: 43 Folders and a particular day.   Better quality video.

Writing lessons: 1) Subvert existing forms, 2) (sometimes) less really is more.

Related posts on this blog: 1) Airtoons, 2) Cute airport animation, 3) Oblique marketing strategies (and online too).

Technorati Tags: Happiness, cartoons, airports, subway, instructions, Oblique Strategies, Stefan Sagmeister, TED

A friendly reader sent me this lovely quote from a promotional email for an e-commerce company.

“Using the Intelligent Energy-Saving 6-Way Mains Panel prevents wasted energy and can save you between an impressive £100 up to an astonishing £700 over the panel’s estimated 15-year minimum lifespan - and is recommended by PC Pro and the Energy Saving Trust.

This energy-efficient 6-way mains panel even comes fully equipped with a power surge protector which can wreck an entire system and prove very costly, as well as a phone/modem splitter to make your life even easier.”

So, they want us to spend £24.95 to buy a product that will wreck an entire system and prove very costly. Yeah, right!

Writing lesson: proofread web copy.

Related posts on this blog: Why good writers (occasionally) produce bad copy?

Technorati Tags: Writing, mistakes, copywriting, marketing

There’s a nice post on MakeYouGoHmm.com that lists 49 jump starts if you’re staring at a blank screen trying to think of a blog post. Some of his suggestions have worked for me: reviewing a book, for example. I’d add the following:

1. Your obvious is your talent. Find something that you do everyday that may not be obvious to other people and write about that.
2. Lists provoke thoughts. For me, at least, taking a topic and then writing a list seems to generate new ideas that hadn’t occurred to me before.
3. Ask why. Pick a topic and speculate on why it happens.
4. Ask how. Ditto but how!
5. Interview someone.
6. Start a campaign. Find something objectionable (in my case lazy writing) and keep citing examples of it until change occurs.
7. Find a role model. Who writes well? Who do you admire? Praise them. The media is full of negative stories but it’s your blog, so write a positive one.
8. Expand on someone else’s idea. The blogosphere is a conversation. Take something (with attribution) and add your own original thoughts. Like this post.
9. Cartoons. Sketches, diagrams. Anything that makes your point without words. (See my previous post ‘A picture is worth a thousand words‘).
10. Build on a phrase. Sometimes a small phrase pops into my head and it inspires a whole article. Listen to your inner voice.

Technorati Tags: Writer’s block, blogging, writing, inspiration

Someone sent me a document today. It was a piece of marketing collateral designed to show the benefits of a news feed service that companies could put on their website and generate (they hope) more organic search traffic on Google. Interspersed with the list of benefits were short quotes from customers saying how much the service had helped.

While I’m a little dubious about the cost-effectiveness of the service and the untransparent way in which these stories are generated, there’s nothing wrong with this approach to marketing. In fact, I write this kind of piece regularly.

The example of poor, poor taste came about halfway through. One customer, an ecommerce site that sells products for babies, is quoted as saying:

“Jordan’s miscarriage story generated £896 of revenue on its own” - [Customer name deleted]

Is it just me, or is this appalling bad taste? Am I alone in thinking that these people have no shame?

I am proud of the work I do and proud to be part of the marketing profession, albeit in a semi-detached way, but I felt a bit grubby when I read this.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, poor taste, yuck

From Both Hips is a new play by the author of the film Intermission. It’s very funny and very well written. (Full disclosure: my wife is directing it.) Here are the details - I urge everyone to buy ten tickets for every performance.

From Both Hips, by Mark O?Rowe.

31 July - 18 August

The Old Red Lion Theatre

418 St. John Street, Islington, London

Box office 020 7837 7816

See cast list

More information on the C Company website.

I’m a fan of Moleskine notebooks. I use one as a journal. I also use a slim Filofax as a notebook. I thought I had all the angles covered, but I last week I saw someone using a Moleskine in a new way - in portrait mode across the bottom of a laptop keyboard.  I thought it was very cool - a way to get the best mix of analogue and digital.

Technorati Tags: Moleskine, notebook, GTD

I’ve finally got my home cinema set up. Here’s the line-up:

• Samsung 40″ 1080p LCD TV. Very nice screen. Has a PC input as well as two HDMI ports.
• Hush Media Centre PC. It runs Windows Vista Ultimate. It came with an HD sound card and a Hauppauge twin-input video capture card and a graphics card with an HDMI output (although I use the VGA port instead because my TV had one). It’s designed to be ultra-quiet thanks to aluminium cooling fins. I had a lot of problems with drivers and the TV signal but a new signal booster and lots of downloads later, the whole thing works like a dream. With 500GB of hard disk space, it can record something like 400 hours of TV and the video card does a great job of upscaling to 1080p. I bought Microsoft infrared Media Center keyboard for £20 from Novatech. (Don’t pay more than this - Amazon and others were charging close to £100. Also be aware that the mouse pointer on this gadget is terrible - just about usable for the odd login only.)
• Sky HD satellite decoder. Great sound quality and picture quality from HD channels. I just wish it had a bigger hard disk so I could keep more stuff. The 160GB capacity is enough for three or four HD films only. My only gripe here is that Sky’s HD website obfuscates the fact that you have to pay extra to get HD movies. It sort of implies that the £10 a month HD subscription also includes the two HD movie channels. It doesn’t.
• Arcam DV137 DVD player. Awesome DVD player. It upscales to 1080p. With new DVDs, the picture quality is the same as ‘true’ HD off the PC or Sky box. Lord of the Rings is particularly good.
• Arcam AR350 Receiver. Nearly a 1000 watts of neighbour-aggravating sound. The PC, Sky and DVD player all hook up via optical audio cables. The Sky and DVD use the HDMI for video. I haven’t turned this up beyond about 50% of its full capacity. I wish I lived in the country so I could dial it up to 11. It rocks.
• B&W PV1 Subwoofer and B&W satellite speakers. The subwoofer is particularly cool, as a piece of sculpture and as a chest-thumping speaker. I hadn’t realised how important sound quality was to watching films until I got this setup. Sky HD programs and the DVD push out 5.1 surround sound and the experience is very different from watching regular TV.
  

However the key to the whole thing is to get a programmable remote control. This replaces (in my case) five separate remotes and makes it much easier to use the whole stack.

• Logitech Harmony 1000 programmable remote. I bought this from Amazon after extensive research. It’s easy to set up using a PC and the internet. It’s made of shiny aluminium and has a touch screen. With a bit of fiddling (well a day, actually) I got it set up to control everything beautifully. I think I could probably set it up again from scratch in about fifteen minutes, knowing what I know now. Certainly, adding the two Arcam boxes took ten minutes.
  

Lastly, I also got a couple of cheap reclining armchairs from Furniture Village and a huge curry from TiffinBox. A good sit down and a curry are essential parts of the home cinema experience.

Here are some tips from my experience:

• Read the manual before you start playing around with programmable remote controls.
• Make sure your PC is certified Vista compatible before you buy it. I had to flash the BIOS, reinstall Windows twice and download new drivers for motherboard, graphics, sound and video capture card. (Mind you Hush technical support was first-rate, the machine is beautiful, silent and works fine now and Evesham couldn’t even deliver one when I order a media centre PC from them.)
• Don’t let Hi-fi shops flog you expensive cables. They wanted to charge me £50 each for three fibre optic cables. I bought cables from Amazon for £8 each. It’s digital. Cable quality doesn’t matter. At least it doesn’t matter worth £150. Similarly, I was sold a pup on speaker cables, HDMI cables etc. You can easily waste £500 on cables for a set up like this if you let the ‘experts’ baffle brains with bullshit (”Do you want woofers and tweeters with that” comes to mind.)
• Choose your supplier carefully. Martin Kleiser charged me a lot of money for ‘project management’ and provided virtually none. They also tried to nickel and dime me on cables (e.g. £75 for a roll of Cat 5 cable when I only need 20 or 30 meters). They were particularly keen on flogging me gold-plated cables. They installed my Sonos system (well actually, they screwed in the speakers and I set up the software) and ‘helped’ with the cabling for the home cinema but I got so fed up with their nonsense that I bought all the kit and the final installation from Sevenoaks Hi-Fi in Ealing who were much more helpful and less haughty. They also gave me 30% off the TV, 25% off the speakers and 15% off the receiver and DVD player. This is a significant saving.
• Plan your cable runs and test your cables. If you are embedding cables in the wall, you need to coordinate between your builder and your hi-fi installers. Get the cables tested before you re-plaster. Ideally, bury cable trunking rather than cables so you can run new cables through if necessary. Make sure you embed all the cables you’re going to need. Because of Martin Kleiser’s negligence (see above), I have one duff cable which means a surface mounted replacement plus only one of the three cables that run out of the TV are embedded in the wall. It actually looks okay (because of the layout of the room, doors and things) but it could have ended up looking terrible.
• Test the digital TV signal first. I had a strong digital TV signal but an electrical problem with the distributor / amplifier was causing it to drop out every few minutes. Getting an aerial company out and testing it properly helped diagnose the problem. I replaced the signal amplifier for about £80 and it works perfectly now. However, I spent a day trying a lot of other things to figure out why the signal was hiccuping first.
• Get professional installation help. I’m a certified geek and I love playing with all this stuff but I think the guys from Sevenoaks really knew their stuff and got the stack set up in four or five hours whereas it would have taken me a couple of days. I’m geeky but not that handy with powertools so I needed help from my builder and installers to mount the speakers and TV bracket.
• 1080p matters. Several people told me not to bother with 1080p. However, the small marginal cost of getting a TV that can do it means that I can get the best possible signal out of all my other devices and, especially, my PC which runs in full 1920 by 1080 pixels - great for photo slideshows and presentations.
• Did I mention the curry?

Technorati Tags: HD, High Definition, 1080p, Logitech, Samsung, Arcam

A while ago, I wrote about the pictures of ‘found words’ that I took in San Francisco a few years ago. I called them street poetry.

Now, I read in Boing Boing about someone who has created one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ stories and stenciled it onto the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. Fabulous.

Technorati Tags: Art, poetry, stories, interactive fiction

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is the one book you MUST read if you are in any kind of professional, knowledge worker business. Although it is written for the software companies, in fact it is packed with insight that applies to any business where people work with their brains.

It talks about the kind of working environment you need to ensure maximum individual productivity (two person private offices, big desks, lots of shelves etc.) and to maximise concentration (stop paging people over the PA) and to ensure maximum team productivity. As the name suggests, the authors think that people are the critical ingredient for project success. It’s also a short book - about 220 pages.

I was reminded of this essential book when I read an interview with Tim Lister this morning about his new book (hat tip: Slashdot).

Other related books that I highly recommend: The Mythical Man Month and Other Essays on Software Engineering(summed up by an old colleague of mine as “it doesn’t matter how many times you have sex, it still takes nine months to produce a baby”) and Rapid Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules (a bit of an epic but biblical in authority as well as length) and Frederick Herzberg’s classic: One more time: how do you motivate employees? (clue: more money won’t do it).

Technorati Tags: GTD, productivity, teamwork, Peopleware, Mythical Man Month, motivation, concentration

When I do an interview I tend to write near-verbatim notes. This is an old habit from my days as a journalist. However, it gets me into some interesting problems when I do it for corporate clients. For example (and without naming any names!):

• One client who, on hearing that I did this, tried to claim that they should get copies of all the transcripts automatically. (I did this once with another client and I ended up having to rewrite a case study three times because different people liked different quotes from the interview. Ouch. More importantly, there’s a big difference between my unproofed, unedited transcripts and something I would be happy to show a client. Also, there’s still something of the confessional about an interview and I don’t like to share notes like this.)
• Another client who asked for summaries of all the interviews I did, by way of contact reports. That’s fine but it was the best part of a day’s work. It’s one of those things that easier to ask for than to do.
• Another client who wanted me to send all my interview transcripts (done for a general business article, not case studies) to another agency so that they could produce case studies out of them. It’s hard to explain that an interview for an article isn’t necessarily the same thing as an interview for a case study.

Also, on reflection, it’s obvious that transcripts involve a huge burden of typing and note taking. A 30m call will generate 1200-1500 words of notes. I do a lot of interviews so this is by far and away the biggest chunk of my typing. Even thinking about it gives me RSI.

So, am I being over-punctilious taking transcripts? Do they open me up to more trouble than they save? What do other folk do?

Technorati Tags: Transcripts, interviews