Check out the promo poster here:

The brief for Crisis Point was along the lines of “come up with a teaching aid to help citizenship teachers teach European Citizenship more easily and effectively”. So – as always – we wanted to give a bit of Delib’s patented *engagement zing* to the project and came up with the concept of the Crisis Point game – a kind of Hollywood Blockbuster disaster movie meets teacher resource ; – )

Pitched with the line “Europe has reached Crisis Point. A contagious pandemic is spreading fast. Can you make the right decisions to save lives?”, the idea of the game is for school children to play out the roles of a citizen, MEP and European Commissioner to experience how the EU works at first hand – albeit in the context of impending disaster.

Check out some photos of the school teacher packs here:

A big thanks to all the team involved in this, including Craig H, the nice people at Play Nicely and of course our lovely clients Daniel + Vera at the European Parliament.

Rubber Republic’s Nooks and Grannies official SXSW billing …

Introducing Auntie Margaret to the world

The Nooks and Grannies audience get animated as Auntie Margaret hangs . . .

Sam (from @AlbionLondon) gets cosy with Auntie Margaret at lunch

Auntie Margaret prepares for Jaron Lanier’s talk

Auntie Margaret lets her hair down . . .

Auntie Margaret tucked up in bed – Ally’s bed ; – )

(Listen + meet+drink) x share

So here you go – some sharing of mine (and Ally’s) listening and meeting and drinking from the past 3 days (in pictures)

Arcattack – singing Tesla Coils

Midnight pancakes

A conversation with Michel Gondry

Bre Pettis – Maker, hacker, inventor, and founder of Makerbot

So this blog post gives some quick tips and advice for SEO-newbies into how blogging can be used to optimise the SEO of your website, making sure it has the best chance to go viral (and be found).

Some SEO basics

• – Google loves content

• – Google loves relevant content

• – Google loves well-structured content

• – Google loves very focused content

• – Google loves content that is loved by other people (i.e. content that is linked to)

• – Google loves content that is loved by popular people

• – Google loves content that is connected to other popular people

What this means when you blog – 11 tips on optimising for SEO

• 1) Write content that is very focused and relevant.

• 2) Make sure your blog post has a tight focused title – always thinking “what terms / question / phrase would someone search for?”  For example, if you’re wanting to target keen bloggers, then they’re always interested in finding out “how to optimise the seo of my blog” – so give it as the title of your post!

• 3) Make sure that the link of the blog post (which is often auto-generated from the title of the blog post) contains the relevant search terms.

• 4) Make sure the opening paragraph repeats those key phrases – as the opening 30 or so words are the ones are judged as being particularly important.

• 5) Make sure you you link key words / phrases in your blog, to key pages in your site.  For example if you write “Viral seeding is an effective way to gain brand awareness“.  Link the words “Viral seeding” to the relevant page in your site you’re trying to optimise.

• 6) Keep repeating key phrases and terms throughout the blog post, and remember to do the relevant linking.  Don’t go over board though – as this may look like SPAM to Google’s bots.

• 7) Include other relevant content in your blog posting – so maybe include a relevant YouTube video, or post a relevant (and tagged) image.  This all adds to the richness and relevance of the blog.

• To show your blog post is connected and influential, drop is some links to other more influential sites.  e.g. You may link to the Brand Republic site, if you’re talking about advertising – to indicate that you’re connected to other sites.

• 9) Once you’ve written your blog, make sure it’s linked to by other sites.  N.B. the more influential the site linking to you, the better.  So for example, Digg the blog via Digg.com, or link to the blog from another blog – e.g. the Team Rubber blog.  To do this you might do a weekly blog round up of the best Team Rubber postings.  You should also obviously Tweet the post – to optimise the opportunity for the blog being picked up by others.

• 10) Finally – remember to write interestingly and well.  After all, much of the success of your blog post will be down to the how people enjoy and share your blog / content.  If people think it’s great, then they’ll do the link sharing for you!

• 11) Finally #2 – consider how someone might find your post out of context, and make sure it ends with the right kind of call to action – e.g. you might write an end line along the lines of “If you’re interested in this, then you may be interested in the Viral Ad Network, which provides great fun ads for the best blogs and sites.  Check it out our Viral Ad Network here!“

N.B. these tips were first posted on the Viral Ad Network blog, giving tips on how to optimise the SEO of your blog.

Chatting to him got me thinking about how we should maybe run a Team Rubber election hustings in the run up to the forthcoming election.  A simple suggested format could be us running a 3-way virtual husting where we get each of the candidates to film a 90 second speech, put it on YouTube, and then maybe link it into Twitter with hashtags, and get the local community to ask questions.  We might even include a vote – though maybe the voting might overtake from the more important aspects of the discussion.

Anyway – there’s a thought.  We could even roll the idea out as a wider-platform, and run hustings around the country???

Paul Smith @ Team Rubber HQ

One of the biggest drivers of traffic at the moment seems to be from schools – and especially schools in the US.  At the same time as people make arguments online, they’re also buying our series of pocket argument guides – with one school in Florida buying 50 the other day!

So to help these teachers, I’m really trying to build up the educational resource section of the aMap site – and have just created a critical thinking exercise for use in Critical thinking a-level classes.

The Critical thinking worksheet is designed to work alongside our aMap argument guide range, so hopefully as well as being useful in the classroom it will also encourage teachers to buy at the same time!

Pain can be a beautiful thing. And in my case quite an inspiring thing too. For the last 5 days I’ve been stuck in hospital with severe back pains – which have meant I’ve been totally bed bound, and completely dependent on the nurses at Kings College Hospital London (who have – by the way – been really great!)

Anyway, lying in bed – in pain – inspired me yesterday morning: could I be of any use to hospital lying here? The hospital staff are being great – but could I add anything – could I help improve how the hospital is run?

And the answer is of course YES. As a patient I – and the hundreds of other patients – are in the best place to help the hospital improve, as we’re the ones at the coal-face, experiencing the end products that the hospital delivers – whether that’s a quick fix in A&E, or a longer stay in one of the wards.

The only issue is how you collate and make sense of this collective experience. And the answer to that is the internet – create a crowd-sourcing website with a focus on collating “ideas of how to improve the hospital” and let patients share ideas, and self-organise the value of those ideas via rating and commenting systems. Given I’m the co-founder of an e-democracy company – Delib – that specialises in citizen empowerment – this was the easy bit!

So lying in my hospital bed – I asked Andy, Jess and Dave in Bristol to quickly put together a patient crowd-sourcing site using our one of our apps – and 2 hours later we launched “Help us Improve Kings”.

Check the site here (and add ideas if you have any!)

With the prototype site up and live, I’m now in the process of getting patients to take part and share their experiences and ideas – a bit of a tricky feat given I can’t walk, but they’re coming in slowly as I lynch people walking past my room! I’m also in the process of talking to the Patient Involvement team @ Kings – as obviously to make this work, we really need them on board to actually turn the ideas generated into concrete actions.

So there you go – an example of bottom-up patient power – empowered by the wonders of broadband and a wonderful set of e-democracy tools. Social media empowerment at its finest!

And most importantly this is a lesson to all those brands / businesses / government departments out there who are trying to work out how to make their business work better – the answer: empower your customers and employees and they will in turn help power your business!

Check out his viral efforts here – viral genius, or viral suck?

I think I can say for certain that it’s really not very good, and kinda backs up my theory that he doesn’t get what viral is (or rather doesn’t listen to me – a life-long gripe).  Here’s my quick analysis of his efforts:

- OK, so the generally creative conceit isn’t too dreadful.  The idea of promoting an alarm by showing it in action (burglars breaking in etc.) makes sense. (that’s the positives over and done)

- But, then we come to the narrative.  I mean – sorry – what narrative???  Two blokes jump through a window, rummage around a bit, set the alarm off and run off with the beautifully scripted words “F*ck me, I’m off!.”  Come on – I’ve seen better in episodes of Prisoner Cell Block H Sunset Beach.

- And then there’s the direction.  I’m not quite sure how many takes it took to shoot (I hope one), but if you’re gonna allow two of your employees (sorry – actors) to spend time jumping through your home window in a not so convincing I’m-a-burglar-breaking-into-a house-way you may as well shoot it properly – otherwise you’re wasting everyone’s time – including the people who have to watch your sorry ad (me).

- And to cap it off, there’s the music.  A bossa-nova keyboard version of Queen’s “Another one bites the dust”.  This for me is the final nail in the viral coffin.  I mean, why didn’t you go for the pan-pipe version???  Everyone knows Queen sound better in pan-pipe than bossa nova.

So there you go.  As a founder of a viral marketing agency I’m ashamed of my father.   PLEASE NEXT TIME LISTEN TO ME DAD AND DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME MAKING SUCH PAP IT MAKES ME ANGRY AND MAKES ME WANT TO TYPE IN CAPITALS.

Rant over.  Back to work.

Hosted by Danny Alexander MP, the panel is: Nick Robinson (BBC), Michael White (Guardian), Peter Kellner (YouGov), Grant Shapps MP (Shadow Minister for Housing), Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes’ blog).

Follow the debate (it’s running from 6.30pm today) and send in your questions and comments to the panel – before or during the debate – and they’ll reply (if you’re lucky!)

Once she’d got over the introductory bits of her presentation of various e-democracy projects from around the world (which covered the usual Downing Street e-Petition stuff), she went on to make some really interesting points.

Here’s a random selection of some of the things I learnt from Beth Noveck’s video (N.B. I only last til 40 mins, when I got hungry!):

- Her main interest is in how to break out of the current nature of ad-hoc democratic processes – e.g. one off consultation events of things like Flash mobs – and create ongoing collaborative governance.

- Vermont is trying to become the “digital Delaware”, setting up a legal framework for creating “virtual companies” i.e. legalising online collaborative partnerships

- Libya’s Policywiki – bizarrely, Libya has embraced e-democracy, and has set up a Policywiki,  enabling citizens to take part in collaborative policy making.  The projects been funded by the Qadhafi foundation.

- I liked her description of the Peer-to-patent’s project as creating a “Human database”.  It was also interesting to hear how the peer-to-patent project uses highly structured participative process, aimed at experts.

- I LOVED her anecdote about Thomas Jefferson being the founder of participative governance.

- Her point about collaborative governance being about effectiveness not equality was something that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

- Visual deliberation – I thought this was her most interesting point.  She described a research project’s findings that found that when we see ourselves in the screen we change our behaviour.  And gave the example of how if you morph your face into the face of a President you’re more likely to vote for them.  Further she made that described how President Bush colourised his face darked in ads targeted at black and hispanic neighbourhoods.

- Group brain – this is the point that if you explicitly identify a group as a group, then they’re more likely to act as a group, and be more effective at solving a problem collaboratively.

- Social Translucence – following on from the Group Brain point, is the question of what happens when you see yourself as a group in a screen?  And also, how do you design interfaces that create this?  She firmly believes that this idea would  bring about change.

She then got on to a point about “Green Chicago”, at which point my hunger took over and I had to go!