We Are Team Rubber

Chris posted a nice link on our Rubber Republic blog to this video explaining Social Media in Plain English. Be prepared for ice cream stall metaphors and appealing cut-out animation!

Paintworks is lovely in summer; seagulls, sunshine, river, nice atmosphere, lovely buildings to work in. I was there the other day meeting Wildfire about a secret project, and it’s a great place: full credit to the people behind it, Bristol needs this kind of place.

On the other hand, Paintworks is a 12 acre site, a small dot in a big city. I would say pimple, but I don’t think the analogy is fair to the achievement of Paintworks. But we need more than a dot; we need a thread of creative business and innovation woven into the fabric of the city. The seeds are there, they need to grow.

That means providing clear support through planning, the built environment, and leadership. Some of that can only come from the public sector. The rest, we can do.

– Extra food for thought —

• Silicon Valley is 40 miles long and 15 miles wide.
• How to be Silicon Valley and why geography may not be destiny (a fairly well-known essay by Paul Graham)
• Counter point arguing geography is destiny

I don’t think we should be Silicon Valley. Only Silicon Valley can do that.

I think we should be Bristol, without any reservation or limitation to our self-belief in doing so. We should understand the texture of the city, and above all how to make the most of it - through networks, physical environment, and the story we tell about Bristol.

(The comment on texture originates with Dick Penny)

This is slightly old news, but worth a blog nonetheless…Super Seeder Joanna scraped the internet for new Euroball mentions/buzz and came across this wonderful little article on our beloved tabletop penny flicker. We were site of the Day as of July 1st, this is another compliment nugget to add to our praise arsenal!

Nothing makes a catchy headline like an unsupportable proclamation. Do Google really have nothing on Claude C. Hopkins, self-declared creator of measured advertising? Well, probably not, but Hopkins did stack up a mountain of achievement a long time ago. That’s the strongest impression I formed from reading Hopkins’ book My Life in Advertising / Scientific Advertising.

In the early 1900s Hopkins was measuring and optimising direct-response advertising to an impressive degree. His tactics included:

• Detailed and endless revision of ads based on split tests of their performance, similar to the split testing now being widely adopted by digital agencies of all sizes (thanks to our ubiquitous friends Google and their Website Optimiser).
• Tailoring of ads to suit specific locales, regions, dialects, attitudes - on high circulation campaigns, using primitive technology.
• Crunching a lot of numbers to assess the performance of ads.
• Writing great copy - the secret sauce that measurement and revisions can only ever support, never provide.

For those who know direct marketing inside out, Hopkins might be less impressive. For those who are sometimes tempted to believe that advertising has been thoroughly re-invented by Google, Hopkins is a salutatory read.

So, after going all round the Wrekin on a Travel West Midlands bus trying to get into Wolves I have now ended up at LUG Radio Live.  I’ve just listened to a 60 minute talk on bzr from a Canonical employee and Bazaar developer Robert Collins.  After giving us an overview of Bazaar and the design goals (laudable principles such as user friendliness and hackability), he showed some demonstrations of some cool plugins.

I very much enjoyed the bzr search command which I could imagine using all the bloody time.  There’s also an IRC bot plugin, much nicer than using the CIA disc image I have been.  As the SVN binding are different in design to git (which put me off dVCS systems) I’ve decided to have a play next week and see how it works in practice.

I also have a SUSE cuddly toy.

Interesting campaign for a Bristol mayor.

A striking aspect of Bristol is that the City Council is not very visible in daily life; in big northern cities like Sheffield, Nottingham and Leeds, the presence of a council identity is visible in the street furniture, signs and vehicles; in advertising and buildings; in press and post, and posters. For better or worse there’s a clear municipal culture, the sense of an authority overseeing the city that contributes to the perception of these cities as big powerful machines for living.

By contrast you can pass days at a time in Bristol and barely be aware of the city council. I can’t be sure if that’s good or bad: the lack of leadership might be the reason Bristol has such a distinct and appealing culture, that do-it-yourself, grow-your-own mentality. On the other hand, lack of leadership might be why we have such shocking state schools, inadequate transport, and a weak city identity (we really don’t seem to understand how good we are at so many things).

I’ll be supporting the campaign for a mayor; it’s worth trying, and growing our own is completely the Bristol way to do it.

People I know of blogging in and about Bristol agencies, creativity and the industry:

• Thought Den
• Beef
• OKCOOL
• Ed Mitchell
• E3 Media
• iShed
• Mobile Pie
• Enable
• Connecting Bristol
• Rick Hurst
• Bristol Media (news, jobs and events listings)
• Underscore (blog aggregator and events listing)
• Bristol Open Coffee (event listing)
• BDH Cake

Did I forget anyone? Let me know.

– footnote –

I don’t know (yet) how to customise a Wordpress theme (me and PHP are not on speaking terms). When I figure that out, I’ll add some sidebar links to other blogs, or get someone else to.

– updated –

Wordpress is clever. The blogroll is now rolling…

Another good Bristol Open Coffee event. Revamped Open Coffee is working well. Early starts aren’t my favourite, but it’s worth the time.

I’ve met good people at each event; this time Glen, Juliet and Tilly from Future Intelligent Transport Systems were explaining their research project about user-innovation in transport - interesting project. We also talked about the Pervasive Media Studio and the benefits of connections between different networks.

Mark from OK:Cool was very excited about Claude Hopkins and Scientific Advertising. I’ve read Hopkins too so we’re trading book suggestions (welcome to the Team Rubber Library Mark). Also good to see Nick Sturge from Set Squared there.

Next event July 29th, details here. http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/4416/

Thanks to John Bradford for organising, and Starbucks for free drinks.

This Radiohead video is art. It’s engineering too.

The song itself does nothing for me (I prefer early Radiohead), but you need something to hold the video together I guess. Director: James Frost. Production Company: Zoo Films. Technical Director: Aaron Koblin.

Google have the whole visualisation dataset available to download.

You may have noticed that version 0.2 of Malthe Borch’s truly excellent JBOT came out last night.  We use this in some of our themes, and hence has found its way in as a dependency for a good deal of our recent projects.

I ran development buildout last night and suddenly saw a lot of zope 3 components being downloaded, which if you’ve done it before you know is a recipe for disaster.

It seems one of the new features in version 0.2 (aside from the long-anticipated browser layer support) is it now correctly defines its dependencies.  This is a Good Thing™ but it does mean that JBOT now requires you to use fake-zope-eggs in your buildout.

Your zope2install section now needs to look like this:

[zope2]
recipe = plone.recipe.zope2install
fake-zope-eggs=true
url = ${plone:zope2-url}

Not a big change, but it will cause Zope to advertise the packages it provides properly.  Incidentally, you also need to do this to try out plone.app.batch, a summer of code project that’s looking for comments for its demo.