The year we discover that... We lived in a physical world all along. Virtual was a passing phase due to imperfectly integrated technology. We get further in the future by respecting the past. There are no such things as old and new media. We like unfinished, but not unfit for purpose. People set a higher bar … Continue reading Welcome to Twenty Oh Nine!
Adam Greenfield takes issue with the recently coined abbreviation BRIC, which arbitrarily lumps together the peoples of Brazil, Russia, India and China into a single multi-billion-sized unit. Terms like this are: antimatter to clarity of insight, or more accurately, some malignant linguistic equivalent of ice-nine: to drop one of them into a sentence is not merely … Continue reading On BRICs and broken boxes
Temple Works is a one-off. Its construction as a flax mill in 1840 must have made a powerful statement about Leeds' status as global pioneer of industry. At the time it was said to be the "largest single room in the world," with innovative air conditioning under the floor and sheep grazing on a grass-covered … Continue reading Help, our industrial heritage is falling down!
"I have got the Drawing for Your Arms in the Pediment done to a quarter of the size, shall order it to be such next week" - Robert Adam in letter to Sir Rowland Winn, owner of Nostell Priory, 1774 Now that's what I call unfinished.
05102008295 Oh the impatience of youth! The first time one of my sons pressed the button on a non-digital camera, he turned to me and asked "where can I see the picture?" I knew at once it was a significant moment, but I was all wrong about the reason why. How cute, I thought, he's … Continue reading “Why can’t I see it now?” Or why it pays to listen to your most demanding customer
"Is Print Dead?" was the provocative title for David Parkin's Leeds Media Breakfast Briefing the other day. If the answer had been yes, I guess we'd all have had to wolf down our croissants and get back to work. Thankfully as a newspaper business editor turned online start-up entrepreneur, David treated us to a more … Continue reading Print’s not dead, it’s just evolving
And now some news just in from the Department of Unintended Consequences. As a young journalist, fresh out of college in the days before blogs and 24-hour rolling texts and emails, I learned the art of the vox pop. It's one of easiest ways to fill column inches. The recipe for the news editor is … Continue reading And Smoker Shall Speak Unto Nation
Back in May I blogged about Clay Shirky's book "Here Comes Everybody". I was torn: I wanted to believe that social media could indeed make the world a better place, yet my inner history graduate protested that people are people, and have communicated and interacted for good and ill since time immemorial. In "Television may … Continue reading Here Comes Everybody bigger (and smaller) than ever before
In a single Noisy Decent Graphics post, Ben Terrett effortlessly segues between my two preoccupations of the moment - agonised middle-class parenting, and the superiority of mobile web over fixed. How could I resist? "City kids are not like country kids", he notes, "... the space available to play is smaller... so they learn to play smaller." … Continue reading Play Small: why mobile challenges designers to make a better web
We modern parents are sometimes accused of neglecting the enjoyment of childhood here and now, in order to lay down a catalogue of memories to be looked back on from afar. We pack our children's lives with structured activities, with classes and certificates, with trips to theme parks and zoos, seaside and stately homes, so … Continue reading Rites of passage in late noughties childhood
be good Originally uploaded by mattedgar.
What a stroke of genius to commission Scott McCloud to tell the story of Google's new web browser, Chrome, in comic form. McCloud's own books have communicated his enthusiasm for the past, present and future of comics themselves. Now his fluid, conversational style perfectly captures the diverse passions of project team members - passions that … Continue reading Brushed chrome – the story of Google’s browser in comic book form
Adam Greenfield posts on Speedbird about British Airways' current ad campaign to rehabilitate Heathrow Terminal 5. The ads run across print, radio and digital, and confront low expectations of T5 based on its highly-publicised teething troubles. They break new ground in their use of near real-time statistics, such as the number of yesterday's flights arriving … Continue reading Even on paper, the immediacy is the message
Carlo Longino on Mobhappy and Tarek Abu-Esber at Mobile Messaging 2.0 both asked this week "When Will The Mobile Web Be Mass Market?" - a question prompted by the declaration from Nielsen Mobile that we've now reached critical mass. According to Nielsen, 12.9% of the UK population used the mobile internet in Q1 2008. Now … Continue reading The mobile web: today, asparagus; tomorrow, the world
Matt Edgar writes here 