The Tao of Charles Darwin

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science , for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

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My thoughts this month...

We're all social media experts now

Over the past five years tens of millions of consumers have been flocking to social media sites every day – and during that period most of the advertising and marketing community stayed away.
The only sector in the communications mix to embrace social media – first with blogs and now, most recently with Twitter, were those operating in public relations. The rest of the marketing community sat on the side lines and looked on uttering snide remarks about geeks and claiming there was no money in social media.
They either didn’t understand how to join the conversations - without sounding like suits - or they were frightened away by the prospect of associating their brands with questionable content and the great unwashed who make up the vast audiences the internet attracts.
That’s all changed now and a lot of cut-out-and-keep so-called social media gurus (some guy with a week-old Twitter account and three blog post to his name) are emerging from the old deadwood marketing agencies and embracing social media. Why’s that? Simple – the smell of money.

According to the “The ROI on Social Media Marketing” report from the Aberdeen Group, sponsored by Visible Technologies, marketers have developed the tools and methodologies to drive marketing ROI by listening to and learning from customers and prospects.
As eMarketing points out: “The money is following the methods. Aberdeen found that 63% of the companies in their survey (defined as best-in-class) planned to increase their social media marketing budgets this year.
“Companies are learning how to leverage social media and tap into the rising tide of consumers participating in social network sites, blogs, wikis and Twitter,” they note.
“Companies use multiple approaches to identify the individuals who wield the greatest amount of influence in any given topic area and to track changes in their influence over time,” said Jeff Zabin of Aberdeen. “Best-in-class companies engage these top influencers as brand evangelists, and then track the impact of their words and actions in terms of return on marketing investment.”
So here’s one prediction to go alongside Aberdeen’s forecasts – expect the number of social media experts to grow exponentially over the next nine months. What do you think?

My colleague Thomas with client Jasmeen from the Institute of Occupational Health & Safety raising money on Red Nose Day. I love this picture... and full marks to Thomas for sheer chutzpah... good word

Print is dead. Long live journalism

Regional newspaper journalism is in meltdown and there seems no way out of the decline. There was a very depressing article in today's Media Guardian by Jon Slattery headlined Where the hell do we go now? Where, indeed?
Meanwhile, another online Guardian piece on strikes at the BBC underline the pressure on journalists at the moment - check it here: BBC journalists to strike for two days.
National Union of Journalists chapels across the UK seem to have no answer to this. They can shake their fists and take the moral high-ground - but from up there, in one's indignation, there is not much that can be achieved. In Yorkshire the good men and women who make up the editorial teams of the Yorkshire Post, Yorkshire Evening Post and countless weeklies are currently striking - see previous entries - and I wish them the best of luck. DISCLOSURE: I used to work as a journalist there.
A lot of the big publishers are using the Credit Crunch as an cynical excuse to ditch valued editorial people - when there is a lot a bad news around what better time to put out bad news and not be criticised for doing so? Particularly by your own titles and rivals.
However, one has only to look at the state of regional and local journalism in the US (60 titles closed in the past six months) to realise that a lot of the regional titles we cherish in the UK will not exist in five, ten, 20 years time. I really do fear the Yorkshire Post which began more than 300 years ago has a shelf life of less than ten years. I follow a guy on Twitter who chronicles the collapse, demise and slow, slow death of print media - it's depressing.
So what's the answer? Well clearly the consumers of the traditional deadwood media are dying off. They don't go online - that's for sure. But then a lot of journalists - particularly those in the regions don't too. Because, like their owners, they saw the web as an amatuerish, slap-dash approach to journalism and publishing. No-one, they thought, will use these services...
But here lies their salvation. However, regional newspaper websites are shite. They are shite because the bean counters couldn't work out a business model for them so they threw away content without thinking about how they could moniterize the whole process. And they didn't invest. And they didn't ask the editorial teams what they thought. And this was ten years after the internet took over. Ten years!!!
Journalism is in denial - your medium is dying. Print is dead. Long live Journalism.
I believe that a group of journalists in any city could create a news website in a day - yes a day - and make it work. Would it pay salaries? Probably not. But it just might...

Take a pop at bubblewrap bureaucracy

Over at GREEN the ‘Bubblewrap Bureaucrat’ will be having his suit ‘popped’ to raise money for Comic Relief in Liverpool on Thursday 12 March. Editors are welcome to send photographers/TV crews/reporters from 11.00 – 11.45am
‘Wear something funny for money’ is the challenge for this year’s Comic Relief appeal – and as outfits go, they don’t come much funnier than that of the ‘Bubblewrap Bureaucrat’.
In fact, his get-up of bubblewrap suit, with bureaucratic bowler hat and briefcase accessories, looks so silly that Merseysiders are invited to ‘pop’ the bubbles on the suit, for charity. Anyone who spots him trying to lord it around Liverpool city centre, between 12.00am and 4.00pm, on Thursday 12 March, is invited to hand over £1 for Comic Relief for the privilege of popping one of his bubbles.
The Bubblewrap Bureaucrat is a creation of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH), Europe’s leading body for health and safety professionals, which is holding IOSH ’09, its annual conference and exhibition, at Liverpool’s BT Convention Centre, from 17-18 March.
IOSH President, Nattasha Freeman, explained: “We, as health and safety professionals, are tired of health and safety being used as a bogus catch-all excuse to ban fun activities. There are also those who, misguidedly, seek to over-protect us from everyday risks by trying to wrap us all up from harm, as if in bubblewrap.
“It’s great that Red Nose Day falls just before our main conference because it gives us a chance to highlight this issue through the Bubblewrap Bureaucrat, have some fun with it, get out into Liverpool before our big event and raise some money for good causes along the way,” added Nattasha.
“We’re looking forward to tapping into the well-known sense of humour and generosity of scousers, helping Comic Relief, raising awareness of what health and safety is really about… and hopefully, by the end of the day, we’ll get to see our bubblewrap friend walking around in some very flat, sad-looking plastic rags!”
For further information contact Thomas Atcheson on 0845 4503210, email:Thomas@greencomms.com or Twitter: http://twitter.com/Barc_alpha

Climb every mountain

Very puzzled about all the brouhaha about the C-List celeb's climb up Kilimanjaro as if they have conquered Everest for the first time. Well done them. And all for a good cause too... Red Nose Day.
No seriously, well done them. They obviously struggled through the whole experience and it is a big mountain to climb, but it's not a climb - no ropes, no crampons, no traversing etc. Did any of them carry an ice pick? Basically, Kilimanjaro is like a very long walk - think Whernside times 12.
What effects you most is the lack of air. At altitudes in excess of 10,000ft the atmosphere becomes so thin you have to literally suck air into your lungs to keep going - not pleasant, and neither is altitude sickness. Altitude sickness = nose bleeds, vomiting, lethargy, muscle spasms and in extremis, the shits.
But I know at least 20 people who have done the Big K for charity and completed it in a modest, grim, cheerful mood with no executive jet home. And by the way they paid for it themselves. I know of two friends who, once they completed Kilimanjaro, walked the Rift Valley and then... climbed Mount Kenya too... They did it for charity too but then, they were not C-List celebs and did it be cause they could.
Am I being Mr Grumpy? Yes probably - but sometimes I think credit should be where it is due with real people and not on a "look-at-me-celeb-wank-fest". Sigh.

Recessions are for wimps!!!

This is harsh! But I have a lot of sympathy with the sentiments having been through four recessions in the past. Now is the time to kick ass, including your own - I assume that is what Gaping Void intends.

Tough times for regional journalism

The picture above shows journalists from the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post – both based in Leeds, UK – striking over threatened redundancies.
This has been a common theme of the recession so far – the decline of regional journalism with swinging cuts from the South-West right up to Scotland. Now it has come to Yorkshire with 18 jobs up for the axe at Wellington Street. Full disclosure I used to work for Yorkshire Post and obviously my sympathies are with old colleagues.
Last year I took a phone call from an old newspaper colleague a couple of weeks ago. He wanted to know if I could help a former work mate find a job after being made redundant by a major regional newspaper publisher. I seem to be getting a lot of these calls recently
Since 1989, circulation is down 51% to 12,549 for the Birmingham Post; 49% to 70,028 for the Leicester Mercury; 43% to 50,256 for the Northern Echo (I used to work there); 62% to 32,874 for the Argus in Sussex; 38% to 38,844 for the Echo in Southend; 38% to 36,516 for the Herald in Plymouth; 49% to 20,976 for the Oldham Evening Chronicle; 46% to 19,956 for the Halifax Evening Courier. North, south, east, west, large, small, morning and evening, the story for Britain’s local papers is one of unremitting gloom.
Obviously, blogs, the internet, YouTube et al are having a huge impact on regional newspaper journalism and they are not going to go away. The main problem, certainly with the dailies, is that they are pretending to give local, regional and national news.
But parochialism is everything - and regional newspapers seem to have forgotten that. In my part of the world, what makes news in Bradford doesn’t make news in Leeds (ten miles distant).
Indeed, regionalism may have been deemed dead in some respects certainly at a local political level where people are not interested in what the councils of Hull, Leeds, Bradford or York have planned for their citizens. In spite of this I still love the Yorkshire Post and buy it every day. Similarly, as a resident of Barnard Castle I bought the Teesdale Mercury every week when I lived there.
Local is so important in regional newspapers. Back in the day when I was still a journalist - that meant covering the Women’s Institute meeting, the Parish Council and the local art competition. The idiocy of the current situation is that the more you cut the editorial resource the more you damage a newspaper’s ability to report local news.
Perhaps, we should launch our own web-based community funded newspaper for Yorkshire – now there’s a thought.

What I have been thinking this week

Total word of mouth

Sometimes, Andy Green tells me, we are faced with situations where a tenuous, fuzzy response – one that is deliberately vague – is the best strategy.
The recent response of a German Football league spokesperson is a delight to behold, a fantastic example of ‘tenuous talk’ at its best.
Just weeks after the revelation that Croatian footballer Dino Drpic had claimed to have had sex with his wife in the centre of his then team’s football pitch at Dynamo Zagreb’s (Metro Thursday February 12th) he suggested to his new Karlsruhe that he should wear the number 69 – apparently in homage to another of his passionate marital activities.
The German club’s marketing people rubbed their hands with glee only to be overruled by the League officials.
What do you say in response to a situation where you don’t want to focus on the direct innuendo, yet you have to justify your actions. Your comment must also have some form of coherence or validity.
“We asked the club to pick a lower number for the sake of clarity” was the wonderfully tenuous answer.
Can anyone out there beat that as a great response to a potentially embarrassing situation?

A few lessons from Obama

For anyone operating in the world of public relations or communications you could do worse than look at the principles behind Barak Obama’s campaign for the White House and how they can be applied to your own business…
1. Keep it simple and be consistent. Everything about the Obama campaign was big and yet simple. The big ideas addressed core issues that are crucial to the majority of Americans. They were communicated and addressed in a really simple way – consistency and simplicity ruled together for maximum effect.
2. Stay true to your message. Change was the one word that summarised the campaign and was referred to again and again. The prospect of moving away from a Republican government for the first time in eight years symbolised it all: change – that, in turn, led people to believe in change for the good. By simply staying true to the message, the campaign created a ground swell of opinion that it was change that was needed to win. Obama’s website is even called change.gov.
3. Stick to your objectives. Obama’s campaign was rigorously committed to its objectives and every aspect of activity was focused on achieving one, some or all of them simultaneously. Not only did it achieve the primary objective of getting people to vote for Obama, but the campaign also successfully achieved its fundraising objective - more than £500m dollars.
4. Get to the people that matter. At the heart of the campaign was a quest to embrace and train local people to build volunteer bases in different communities – this led to one of the biggest grassroots campaigns in the world today. Individual advocacy is the biggest driver of sales – turning one supporter into an advocate was worth at least 10 votes, as the results show.
5. Make people feel empowered and involved. This was the real secret of its success. Every single person involved at the grassroots was made to feel like he or she had a role to play. Whether participating in a rally, donating or training, the campaign ensured that voters became the most important participants and felt like their contributions really mattered. Every piece of communication was personally addressed to the recipient with a personal message of thanks from Obama.
6. Refine your data gathering and completion. Such was the scale of the compilation of data that the campaign’s different hits reached millions every time. A centralised online database meant every detail was recorded and allowed for easy cross-referencing of information and creation of lists to target specific groups, ensuring that the communication was right on target every time.
7. Embrace different media forms. The Washington Post described Obama as the “king of social networking”. During the general election 46 per cent of Americans used the internet, e-mail or text messaging to get information about the candidate compared with 29 per cent who watched network TV news and 34 per cent who read newspapers. As a result, online activity including videos, YouTube, myspace and FaceBook were used to maximum effect.
8. Getting the language right. Every element of the campaign used language that captured the audiences and had maximum impact – the choice of words and tone had to be in harmony with the campaign’s overall vision and messages. It was about using few words for maximum effect – Yes We Can, For the Change We Need...
9. Mass integration. Undoubtedly the mass integration of all forms of communications and data gathering are mutually beneficial components of a cohesive political operation. This was the key to the campaign’s overall success. It shows that consistency and a conjoined approach works. To say it broke new ground would be an understatement.
10. Protect your brand. It’s all very well building up a successful brand but it is as important to ensure that you maintain and protect it. With expectations now well and truly raised and that’s what all will be watching. Obama’s next challenge is to protect his reputation which will be another fascinating story to tell… I’m sure.

OpenCoffee in Bradford

Following the success of bmedi@’s previous OpenCoffee events, we are running another event on Thursday, February 19.
The emphasis of OpenCoffee is very much on the internet and new media industries. The free events are informal and see a range of technology entrepreneurs, designers, bloggers, developers, geeks, investors and anyone else who’s interested in digital media and technology exchanging ideas and striking up relationships that would otherwise never have flourished.
The philosophy of OpenCoffee is very much of an Open House of ideas and people.
OpenCoffee Bradford (Shipley), is being sponsored by the YoYo Bar & Restaurant as well as hosting the event here.
The event is open to anyone who is interested in the region’s digital, creative and new media industries. You’re welcome to enjoy the coffee, the cakes and the company. To book e-mail steve@bmedia.org.uk or register at Upcoming here.

Bradford Vets Winter Training from Ian Green on Vimeo.

This is me in the number three seat on the River Aire with the Bradford Amateur Rowing Club Veterans. This is not completely about vanity - I have just started using Vimeo and wanted to see if worked!

LaidOffCamp - WTF?

It says something about the times we are in - in San Francisco they are now running BarCamps for those cast out by the recession. Here's an email I just received:

'I'm organizing an event in San Francisco on March 3rd (and 8 other cities at later dates) called LaidOffCamp that is partially built from the BarCamp model. Each LaidOffCamp will be an unconference style event primarily for unemployed & self-employed people looking to share ideas about 1) starting a company 2) being a freelance consultant and 3) finding a job. I thought I would post this message in the BarCamp Google group not only because XXXX said it would be a good idea, but also because I wanted to invite the BarCamp community to come to any of the currently in-planning LaidOffCamps, make suggestions to the concept, or even bring a LaidOffCamp to their own city. Also, because there is a wealth of information on this group and on the BarCamp wiki that has been helpful to my planning, I want to say thank you to everyone here for being so open and allowing others to learn from each BarCamp experience.'

Good for them - using social media to sort out your circumstances!

Blinging up my business

Thoughts of an East Coast Liberal

Quite often people point at me and laugh because I blog and twitter and even engage with friends on Facebook or Linkedin.
Mainly, I suspect, their derision is based on the idea that the internet is a bad thing - a medium inferior to say, the novel or newspapers, where the traditional literary narrative. And by the way I am one of the most hungry consumers of books among my peers and currently have 15 books stacked at my bedside waiting to be read.
Given the wealth of information available in the web I am always stunned by the accusation that internet has cut our attention spans, dumbed us down and reduced the literary narrative to text-speak - LOL.
So I was cheered to come across Clay Shirky’s interview with the Columbia Journalism Review. Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody, is one of the brainiest people on the planet who deftly anwers the question - is the web shortening attention spans? Here it is:

You know, "Life was better when I was younger" is always an acceptable narrative. Right? And so for anybody who was brought up genuflecting to the literary culture and the virtues of reading Tolstoy - and essentially Tolstoy is a trope in these things, War and Peace is the longest novel in the sort of Euro-centric canon - you could always make the argument that the present is worse than the past by simply pointing to the virtues of the past. And so, what the Web does is that it does what all amateur increases do, which is it decreases the average quality of what’s available. It is exactly, precisely, the complaint made about the printing press. So, the only thing surprising about the Web, in a way, is that it’s been a long time since we’ve had a medium that increased the amount of production of written material this dramatically.
But people made the same complaint about comic books, they made the same complaint about paperbacks, and they made the same complaint about the vulgarity of the printing press. Whenever you let more people in, things get vulgar by definition. And people who benefited under the old system or who dislike or distrust vulgarity as a process always have room to complain. But, the interesting thing is, when you say so many people believe this, in fact almost no one believes this, right? There’s a tiny, tiny slice of the chattering classes for whom “Life was better when I was younger” is an acceptable complaint to make, and they have these little conferences or whatever and agree with one another about that phenomenon. But when you look at the actual use of the Web, it is through the roof. And it has continued in an unbroken growth from the early ’90s until now. So, in fact, almost everybody thinks it’s a good idea because they’re embracing it and they’re experimenting with it and they don’t really care what we think.
And when I say “we,” I mean—I am a member of the Chardonnay-swilling East Coast liberal media elite. But I also recognize that anything I might have to say about the utility of the media actually isn’t going to influence whether or not people are going to adopt this. And so once you get out of the idea that basically the previous avatars of the cultural good, and the world that George W.S. Trow chronicled so beautifully Within the Context of No Context—once you grasp that those people are powerless to that effect, powerless with regard to the adoption curve—the question really becomes, “How do you point out an effect where something has been damaged?” And that’s where I think a lot of this conversation about reading breaks down, because if you assume that reading Tolstoy is an a priori good, your world crumbled in 1970. And it’s hard to point to the Web as responsible for any of that because that was a done deal for some time.
If you want to point to more proximate harms, it would be very hard to argue, for example, that innovation, inventiveness, new intellectual discoveries had slowed as a result of the Internet, and so people are left with these kind of mealy-mouth cultural critiques, because nostalgia becomes the only bulwark against change. The actual effects of making more information available to more people have been enormously beneficial to society, yet not to the intellectual gatekeepers in the generation in which that change happened.

We're doing a BarCamp

Big call out! We - and that includes you - are planning BarCamp Bradford as the city's first 'unconference', a event where the participant who attend create the programme of sessions themselves. BarCamps are open, participatory, democratic, 'workshop' events; the organisers and sponsors simply provide wireless broadband, a venue, beverages and food! The attendees provide the content - and the buzz ;- )
An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants (generally day-by-day during the course of the event) rather than by one or more organizers in advance of the event on Saturday, April 18.
The term BarCamp is primarily used in the geek community. Open Space Technology is an energizing and emergent way to organize an agenda for a conference. Those coming to the event can post on the wiki here ahead of the events the topics they want to present about or hope others will present about. The wiki can also be used as an attendee list and to manage the organization of the event from food through to the provision of wifi etc.
We're anticipating sessions on social media; blogging; 3D printing; digital film making; Augmented Reality interfaces; Cloud Computing; mobile technology trends; Drupal, games design; co-creation; public relations and marketing in the digital age; an SEO clinic as well as talks from some of the big digital players of the North.
We'd love for you to come - if you're a creative; an artist; a writer; blogger; technologist or a developer; a geek; an entrepreneur; an academic researcher; gamer or investor please join us. If you're just curious and interested in digital culture - we'd love to meet you too!
Come and demo, talk, share or just hang out!
The event - which will be held at Shipley College - starts with an introduction by the organisers rearticulating the purpose of the event, the guidelines for conduct during the day, parameters and health and safety.
Parameters explain the start and end time of the event, duration of the sessions, breaks for food, how to access the network etc.
The Rules of Bar Camp?
Rule 1: You must talk about Bar Camp Bradford.
Rule 2: You must blog about Bar Camp Bradford.
Rule 3: If you want to present, you must write your topic and name in a presentation slot.
Rule 4: Only three word intros.
Rule 5: As many presentations at a time as facilities allow for.
Rule 6: No pre-scheduled presentations, no tourists - we might break this rule with a key note speaker
Rule 7: Presentations will go on as long as they have to or until they run into another presentation slot.
Rule 8: If this is your first time at BarCamp, you HAVE to present. (OK, you don't really HAVE to, but try to find someone to present with, or at least ask questions and be an interactive participant.)