meish dot org: life, unfolding

Part of my tenth blogiversary series.

1. Reverse-chronological (unless I was Benjamin Button)
2. Permalink (I think Prolific invented or at least named these, didn’t she?)
3. Archives (unless I was a librarian)
4. Publish (unless I was Rupert Murdoch)
5. Blogroll (I don’t have one, though)
6. Blogring (remember them?)
7. Post (unless I worked for Royal Mail)
8. After the jump (unless I worked for the Samaritans)
9. Pingbacks (unless I was Brian Eno)
10. Plugins (unless I was an automaton sexbot)

Addendum: Things I do not say, even though I have a blog

1. Blogosphere, because it’s stupid
2. Blog when I mean blogpost because it’s just WRONG

I missed the actual tenth birthday of this blog/me blogging but I can’t let a milestone like that go unmarked, can I?

Originally started as a place to store and share links, this blog gradually became a place to playfully interact with the world, and over time that turned from introspection to exploration of the world, media, experiences and ideas. I don’t think I’m alone in that kind of journey with blogs.

I am immensely (unreasonably, perhaps even pathetically) proud of having been blogging for so long. I can say confidently that I was in at the beginning, when all this were fields. I was here before many of you young whippersnappers who have gone on to eclipse me, and blogging, and the web entirely in their success and influence. I don’t put my early involvement down to canny prescience about the way the web was turning so much as an inevitability given my proclivity for tinkering with web things, my early academic and personal interest in communicating online and my inability to shut up. Blogging and me; it was only a matter of time and technology before we found each other.

I was there. I remember the start, and the hype, popularisation, commercialisation and ubiquitisation which followed. I couldn’t possibly have known it at the time, but my blogging was to introduce me to dozens of interesting people, influence others to start doing it too, cause interesting opportunities (and worrying situations) to develop. Blogging has become part of what I am, what I do. I blog now for the same reasons I did in early 2000: because I can’t not tinker with and publish to the web.

Ten years ago, I was embarrassed to mention having a blog in polite company, because it was so difficult to understand - not just what but why. These days, even both my parents have blogs. It’s not a weird niche oddball geek thing anymore. It’s so normal it’s almost passé. Good.

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On Friday I attended The Story, a London conference about stories and storytelling.

The stated proposition for the event laid it out as

a celebration of everything that is wonderful, inspiring and awesome about stories, in whatever medium possible. We’re hoping to have stories that are written, spoken, played, described, enacted, whispered, projected, orchestrated, performed, printed – whatever form stories come in, we hope to have them here.

The Story is not about theories of stories, or making money from stories, but about the sheer visceral pleasure of telling a story. Whether it is in a game, a movie, a book, or a pub, we’ve all heard or told or been part of stories that have made us gasp, cry or just laugh.

There have never been so many stories, never so many ways to tell them. The Story will be a celebration of just a small sample of them.

It was an interesting day which has already been well documented elsewhere, but after the event I found myself reflecting on the content and which bits I’d enjoyed and craved more of, and which less so.

Throughout the day, I was variously amused, intrigued, distracted, confused, impressed and challenged at points, but didn’t leave feeling overly inspired to create myself - or at least, no more than usual. It felt like a brilliant event showcasing brilliant creators, but with less emphasis on the audience - a room packed full of potential creators - and how they could also play, create, bring stories into existence, either from their imaginations or from life.

Without dwelling on particular contributors and their participation, I tried to think about the wider classifications of activity experienced throughout the day and how I found them, and how they fit together. As I see it, there are four potential story-related events which could have appeared under this banner:

The first is a forum for established, published authors to read their works aloud in public. This is most like “an audience with” and suffers from three potential problems. Namely: that things that work when written down don’t necessarily work so well read aloud; that authors reading their work aloud rarely add anything to the interpretation except their identity (in this situation, their fame tends to compensates for the diminished quality of a live performance of a written text); that the audience can usually read for themselves and don’t need to attend to do so. In this context, the story is subservient to the identity and presence of the author. You are in the presence of a creator. The audience is required to participate only through attention and appropriately-timed ripples of laughter. This kind of event is opaque.

The second is a platform for the telling of original stories. The identity of the storyteller isn’t as important as their ability to tell a good story, and this is only heightened by context-specific or unique stories: tales woven specifically or only for a particular time and audience. There’s a long-established tradition of doing this - think about Fray Cafes for example - and like open mic nights, they require the audience’s support and potential participation. The story is more important than the teller, and the audience tends to want something which doesn’t feel like a well-honed routine, because that makes it seem more like a rote performance and less like an act of engaged sharing. This kind of event is levelling.

The third is an event about the craft of telling stories - via multiple media - from storytellers themselves. In this sort of event, writers and creators share their thought processes, techniques and patterns of working out ideas, and secrets of their industry or approach, while exploring how and why they do what they do. This provides additional layers of context and insight into the stories themselves, as well as positioning the author or storyteller as a skilled and thoughtful creator. The audience is let in on secrets, and gains a great and inspiring understanding of how these artists tell their stories. This kind of event is inspiring.

The fourth is a more theoretical platform for discussion of stories (plural rather than specific), in which the speakers may not be practitioners of storytelling itself but come from related disciplines and fields such as academia, publishing, commissioning, adaptation and editing. They speak about the patterns and particular aspects of storytelling as it relates to wider contexts than the urge to share a particular story, and may reflect on topics such as the art of the cliffhanger, how narrative curves engage the reader, the seven basic movie plots and why the future of stories is games. The audience is challenged to make a mental leap to the semi-abstract, and in the process gains insight into the general activity. They take lots of notes. This kind of event is stimulating.

The Story was none of these events, specifically. It was a combination of several of them - some of the first, a few sessions of the third and one or two of the second with (purposefully) very little of the fourth.

Personally, I’m fascinated by the third and fourth, and would really enjoy a day of them combined with a more relaxed evening participatory cabaret of the second type described above. The first leaves me a little cold, I’m afraid - possibly because while I like hearing from authors, I mainly want to hear them talk about their work and their ideas and their approach and their stories, and less straight reading from the printed page.

I know Matt Locke, the creator of The Story, has already stated his intention to put another event on next year. I look forward to seeing how The Story develops - or, to put it in more appropriate terms, what the next chapter contains.

I am not a sport-loving person, but I make one rather large exception every few years for the Olympics and - more specifically - the winter Olympics.

It started in the early eighties.

In 1984, I watched Torvill & Dean’s winning Sarajevo ice dance performance, and was enchanted.

Inspired by their performance, my older brother and I decided to recreate the performance on the slippy tiled floor of our hallway. We swooshed about in socks, and he grabbed my hands and told me to dive through his legs. At no point did he specify that I should attempt this manoevre feet-first, and the resulting broken nose was a humiliating reminder of the universal folly of letting oneself be cajoled into doing stupid things by elder siblings.

Around the same time - and not coincidentally - I started going ice-skating every Saturday at Queensway ice rink in Bayswater, with my friend Jane. If we got there early enough, we could be first to carve up the smooth surface after the Rolba Zamboni had trundled across the ice. For ten minutes of every hour, they would pump out disco music through the rink speakers which we could dance to in a shambolic sort of way. I couldn’t afford lessons, and so taught myself to do wobbly backwards skating and slow, clumsy spins.

But no matter - I had a pinky-purple leotard-like lycra dress with silver glittery raindrops on it and a skirt which flared out when I twizzled around, even if I couldn’t afford the proper thick skaters’ tights, and had to do with Pretty Polly instead. The cafe there served hot chips with vinegar, and I think I even had a birthday party there on year. Maybe my tenth or eleventh?

This was also around the same time that we got a home computer - a Dragon 32, which was terrible for just about everything - but a couple of years later, we finally got a family computer that could do good stuff.

And by good stuff, I mean games.

And by games, I mean more than just text-based adventures (as good as the H2G2 text game was).

Specifically, I mean Winter Games (Epyx, I think), which was the height of computer gaming brilliance at the time, rendered in woeful graphics and required the player to left-right-left-right-left-right to cross country ski or speed skate; leftleftleftleftrightrightrightrightright on the bobsled and luge; time your smacking of the space bar perfectly to hit the targets as your cross-hairs wobbled in the biathlon; mash various combinations of keys to produce camel toe loops and triple salco stunts (whatever they were) in the figure skating, all performed to a jangly 8-bit rendition of “Waltz of the Flowers” from “The Nutcracker Suite”.

[in German, but you get a great sense of the gameplay]

The game(s) also included a ski-jump simulation. You set off from the top of an impossibly steep slope by hitting the space bar, then hit it again at the bottom to “take off”, then once more to land in an upright position. Not exactly tricky, but sort of puzzling. Why would someone even want do do such a thing? Most perplexing.

In the years that followed, I got into the habit of watching Ski Sunday, which my family were completely bemused by - we were not a ski-holiday type of clan - but tolerated nevertheless.

I just liked watching people do technically complicated things in a seemingly effortless way. I liked the fact it was a solo pursuit, not a team thing. It focused the attention - and the performance pressure. There were brilliant interpersonal battles over hundredths of seconds, and occasional spectacular spills and tumbles. Plus it all happened in stunning apline snowy scenery, with spectators bundled in multiple layers of fleece, sounding cowbells. What’s not to like?

In 1988, I watched the winter Olympics from Calgary, mainly for the figure skating and downhill skiing, if I’m honest, but it was the ski-jumping that got me hooked. I hadn’t realised that the slope was so big and the men and women competing her basically flying. How cool! Can anyone have a go? Where do I sign up? Answer: not in west London.

That was the year that Finn Matti Nykänen won gold medals in both ski-jumping events.

I cut out pictures of a man in flight and stuck them on my bedroom wall. What an idol.

I hadn’t kept up with his colourful career since then, but it transpires that he’s become quite the tragic once-successful now-struggling sporting characte - the George Best of ski-jumping, only more so.

This excellent article by Barney Ronay contains a glimpse of the man behind the headlines, and is definitely worth a read, if only because any article with a standfirst like Matti Nykänen was Finland’s greatest sportsman, winner of four Olympic golds. Since then he has stabbed someone in a finger-pulling contest, worked for a sex phoneline – and found God - surely deserves further attention.

It also provides insight into how Nykänen remains a national hero of sorts, in his native Finland.

Nobody in Finland is excusing Nykänen’s worst transgressions; but it is perhaps to their credit that Finns appear willing to forgive this strangely home-made, ne’er-do-well kind of national hero. Finland is fascinated by the turbulence of his decline, but also sympathetic to his plight.

There was even a sense of a Nykänen revival in train before his latest explosion. In the autumn of 2007 he came out of retirement, then won the ski-jumping-for-veterans International Masters Championship the following year. And last year he moved, tentatively, into a new career as a celebrity chef.

[...]

Perhaps it is this wistful quality that has endeared Nykänen to his people: the man-child ex-superstar athlete with his look of rampaging bewilderment, his middle-aged puppy fat, and his inability to engage sensibly with the world beyond the icy slope and the jump ramp.

Fascinating story. Complete character. Unbelievable sport.

So, in short, the summer Olympics are good and everything, but it’s the winter Olympics which really get me excited. It contains so many more sports and disciplines that I’d like to have a go at myself. Curling! Biathlon! Luge FFS! Who wouldn’t want to have a go at the luge, really?

OK, maybe not. But I’ll certainly be watching it and all the other sports on telly when the Vancouver winter Olympics start in a little over a month’s time.

I. Cannot. Wait.

More snow! More crazy sports! More skintight lycra! More cowbell!

If the usual Christmas televisual extravaganza over the next few days doesn’t tickle your fancy, then you could do worse - much, much worse - than taking an hour out of the commercialised, overhyped seasonal frenzy, making yourself a cup of tea (and go on then, possibly a mince pie or two, too), putting your feet up and watching the wonderful Time Shift on Oliver Postgate: A Life in Small Films which was shown on BBC Four last night (only available to view on iPlayer for another few days, and only if you’re in the UK, sorry no longer available online, sorry).

The documentary is a delight from start to finish. Lots of archive footage from the Small Films collection (Clangers, Noggin the Nog, Bagpus, Ivor the Engine et al) plus interviews with children’s writers and illustrators like Michael Rosen and Lauren Child.

It also features plenty of gentle, revealing conversations with Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin themselves (and their families), talking about the various inventions, models and hacks, the process and craft of making the films, the secrets of their loving creations and - perhaps most wonderful of all - the socio-political background of the stories and the character concepts. And the famous shed.

Oh, the shed. There has never been a more inspirational shed than Postgate’s, in my opinion.

In the Guardian, Nancy Banks-Smith has a wonderful writeup in today’s paper:

Oliver Postgate, who died last year, concocted a perfect little world in a garden shed. It was the sort of shed you open warily, knowing an avalanche of stuff-which-will-come-in-useful-sometime will flood out. My husband had a shed like that. It contained, among much else, a sea-going compass, which would come in useful if we ever had a yacht. The Clangers, who communicated in the melancholy swoops of a swannee whistle, lived there. The ear of faith can interpret what they are saying, and the BBC was ruffled to decipher in one such swoop: “Dammit! The bloody thing’s stuck again!”

Bagpuss slept there, too, in a cardboard box. The Clangers were pink in order to rise to the challenge of colour television, and because that was the colour of the wool that Joan Firmin, the wife of Postgate’s partner, Peter, happened to have handy. Bagpuss was pink because the proposed marmalade stripes went squiffy in the kiln.

She goes on to relate some early characters in his life:

[Bertrand] Russell later resurfaced in Bagpuss as Professor Yaffle, a self-opinionated old bookend with Russell’s very dry, thin voice. Postgate, whose own voice was soft, warm and, somehow, knitted, voiced all the characters himself, so we know for sure how Russell sounded. Professor Yaffle, by the way, had to be nailed to the floor so that he wouldn’t fall over and dent his dignity.

Her review also contains one of her most delightful turns of phrase, in describing the relationship between Postgate and Firmin:

“…one of those happy conjunctions, like Flotsam and Jetsam, in which people who are individually surplus become jointly glorious.”

Well put, and something many of us can only aspire to.

If you haven’t already got it (and if you can find a copy) I strongly recommend Oliver Postgate’s autobiography (Hardback in stock at Amazon) which came out a decade ago and I’ve read a couple of times since. So many details. So much obvious affection and curiosity about making characters come to life.

Postgate remains one of my biggest inspirations - not because I am a film-maker or have even a fraction of his talent, but because he was a creative tinkerer. He and Peter Firmin used wool and meccano and pulleys and string and wire to make things work; they experimented with techniques and subverted children’s storytelling with politics and humour and silliness that was in no way patronising; their love for what they did (and how they did it) was obvious and infectious to a whole generation of creative tinkerers, like me.

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(Images in this post are screencaptures from the BBC Four documentary)

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In case I don’t get a chance to post again in the coming days as the year ends - heartfelt felicitations of the season to you and yours. Be safe and happy.

Hot on the heels of the fortieth birthday of the information superhighway, it’s time for another birthday: an actual highway, this time: the M1, which today celebrates 50 years since opening by, presumably, having some sort of jam session, or maybe wearing one of those traffic cones on its head.

Motorway, by Darius Kay. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution/Noncommercial license

I can’t say I feel quite the same levels of personal enthusiasm and excitement about the potential of the motorway as I do about the internet….

(Incidentally, I’d link to the interesting BBC Four series about the cultural and engineering history of motorways, except of course you can’t watch it now. Ah well. Here’s a review instead)

Part of the brilliance of a photographic observation game like noticin.gs (which I wrote about the other day in the context of synchronicity and gaming) is that - as the name implies - it encourages you to be observant and notice things when you’re out and about in the context of your everyday life.

Paul Mison wrote about noticin.gs recently saying that it’s “helping [him] to look around” and that’s absolutely the same feeling I have.

I’ve got a long history of capturing random spotted/found/noticed things and moments from my commute and daily wanderings, stretching back many years - and not just photographically, either. Sometimes with the camera, sometimes with words, sometimes just by making a mental note - it’s the habit of receptiveness to the world around that’s interesting.

This relates to something else I wrote a while back about super-noticing:

Super-noticing is something which happens a lot if you’re trained to be receptive and observant, but also if you’re thinking about a particular thing.

This in turn relates to another earlier post about the ethnographic discipline of pattern recognition:

Part of the toolkit of ethnography and anthropology in general is observing patterns. This could be patterns in behaviour, appearance, ritual, language or otherwise. The anthropologist’s job is to spot the patterns and try to understand what (if any) significance they have, especially in relation to social or cultural environment, or other prevailing conditions.

The discipline of noticing stuff is part of what makes receptiveness and observation useful in life, as well as in anthrolopology and social gaming. But it’s good to have a particular outlet (or should that be inlet?) for the activity. As I wrote in the super-noticing post,

“Flickr is great for developing a discipline around noticing, too, and Flickr groups in particular - if your eye is receptive, then every journey out into the world can be filled with potential squared circles and little fellas and malapostrophication and more.”

Well, noticin.gs turns that hyper-receptiveness up to 11, but inverts it - it’s not about seeing the patterns so much as the anomalies - the things you spot which shouldn’t be there, or stand out, or catch the attention because they don’t belong, or are otherwise notable. Noticeable. Noted.

Once you start playing noticin.gs, it’s very difficult to stop noticing things. Above and below are just a few of the things I’ve noticed while out and about, captured with my phonecam, and filed to noticin.gs.

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As part of Quadriga’s Online Communication 2009 conference, I was invited by the organisers to present some reflections about how to communicate with people online, drawn from both personal and professional experiences, in the form of an after-dinner speech. This was a new experience for me: I’ve never done an after-dinner speech before. Lots of presentations, lectures, debates and panels, but nothing in quite this format before, with no visual aid, nestled in between main course and dessert.

Rather than just post my notes, here’s a fully-written up version of what I said, including links to sources, resources, inspirations and further reading. Forgive the slightly odd formatting, with so many paragraphs - it’s structured this way to reflect the emphasis and pauses and topic sections as I spoke.

If anyone wants it, I was thinking about making an audio version available to download, because this is fairly long (about 25 minutes) - let me know if this would be interesting to you. And if you’re interested in me giving this presentation (or one similar) at an event you’re organising, do get in touch.

When I first told my friends I was coming to Amsterdam to speak to a room full of online communication executives, they asked me why I had to fly to Amsterdam to do that. Why do we all need to get together in one room? Couldn’t I just do it by email, maybe in a newsletter or a series of tweets?

Well, maybe – but if that had been the case, I wouldn’t have got to enjoy such a delicious meal and wouldn’t have met so many of you face to face. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that.

Actually, yesterday I asked my Twitter contacts whether there’s anything they’d recommend to a room full of the best and brightest communication professionals in Europe. I got a lot of interesting answers, many of which I’ll draw on later, but I particularly liked this suggestion from a contact who said:

“Just tell them they should promote the juniors for two months and let them run wild over the internet.”

Well, it’s an idea. Not sure it’s the first thing you could do, but still…

When Quadriga were putting together the conference programme, I was asked to present my perspective on online communication from “both sides of the wall” – as a keen online user both personally and professionally.

I’s just like to note that that implies the wall is somehow this insurmountable, divisive thing which is rarely scaled. In fact, the walls are coming down. I think it’s remarkably easy - and getting easier - to hop from one side to the other, and in fact the boundaries are blurring for many of us every day. I count myself as incredibly lucky that my professional life draws on my personal experiences and passions.

As part of that, I have a confession to make.
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I was interested to learn (via Mashable) that Hipster social location game Foursquare is launching in London at the end of the week. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s not in fact the primary school playground game we used to call “Champ”, but a location based social networking game played mainly via mobile apps, which involves players “checking in” whenever they visit a bar, restaurant, event or hangout to receive points based on frequency, pattern of activity, who else checks in at the same time as them and so on (there’s a full breakdown of points awarded in their Wikipedia entry). With enough points, a player becomes the “Mayor” of a particular venue, until someone else overtakes them.

Friends (and family) in the US tell me that it is hopelessly addictive and that it’s increasingly the first thing people do when arriving at an event these days.

I’m not sure that London has enough social butterflies and hipsters to make this take off in much the same way (who am I trying to kid? Of course it does!) but it reminded me a bit of two other things I’ve been engaged with in recent time.

The first is recently-acquired by Nokia social travel tracker Dopplr, which contains strong elements of synchronicity and coincidence built in to the user experience - while no points are awarded, the service tells you when your friends will be visiting your city, or when your scheduled trip will coincide with that of another traveller you’re linked to. In theory, that could mean that you’d be able to drop people a line saying “Hey, Dopplr tells me you’re going to be in Madrid at the same time I’m going to be there - let’s do lunch!” though in practice my experience has been that I tend to know when friends are going to be in the same place as me because we’re going there for the same conference or wedding or whatever.

But another game I’ve been playing recently (and really getting into) is the rather marvellous noticin.gs which is wonderfully simple yet very addictive. The game involves taking photos of things you’ve spotted and then geotagging them on Flickr.

You get points for noticing things
and points for being geographically near someone else’s noticing
and points for being the first noticing in a new area
and points for being noticed within a few minutes of another player’s noticings
and so on.

All you need to do to play is take a photo and upload it to Flickr, tag it “noticings” and make sure it has location data - some mobile phone apps include this on upload, but if not, you can always do it manually later, bearing in mind that points are only calculated on the previous 24 hours of noticings.

It appeals to me partly because it’s a habit I have anyway (spotting interesting things on my daily routine or extraordinary explorations and migrations across town) combined with a delicious frisson of pointy reward but for things which are not to do with effort but to do with coincidence and synchronicity and chance.

In other words, playing the game is rewarding in itself because it encourages you to open your eyes and capture interesting stuff in the everyday; getting points for doing so in a time/place which coincides (or not) with another player’s actions which you couldn’t know about is a delightful, random cherry on top.

(In this scale good = “Blimey, I didn’t know they were British” and bad = “A British equivalent of Dick Van Dyke”)

John Mahoney (Frasier) Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Without a Trace) Ed Westwick (Gossip Girl) Idris Elba (The Wire) Damien Lewis (Life) Joely Richardson (Nip/Tuck) Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica) Hugh Laurie (House, MD) Robert Pattinson (Twilight) Gabrielle Anwar (Burn Notice) Joseph Fiennes (Flash Forward) Ian McShane (Deadwood) Anna Friel (Pushing Daisies) Louise Lombard (CSI) Minnie Driver (The Riches) Dominic West (The Wire) Kevin McKidd (Grey’s Anatomy) Michelle Ryan (Bionic Woman) Kevin McKidd (Journeyman) Eddie Izzard (The Riches) Mark Addy (Still Standing)

Of course, it’s not for a British person to say whether a fake American accent is convincing or not, because we don’t have the natural ear, so this is more of a list of British actors playing Americans on TV ranked in order of whether their accent is convincing enough to the non-native ear to suspend belief or confound expectations of an audience who have previously heard them speaking in a different way during a performance. See: Lovejoy, a bit of Fry & Laurie, Eastenders.