Wordle creates beautiful tag clouds from any text. This is what it did with my delicious tags. If only it was hyperlinked too.
Via: Thomas Hawk who points to a hack for creating a Flickr tag cloud in the same way.
Scott Blake makes portraits from bar codes. By hand.
The BBC have created an innovative music chart called the Sound Index based on aggregating usage and purchasing data from popular internet music sites:
"The BBC Sound Index analyses what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web.iTunes, MySpace, Bebo, Google Groups, Last.FM and YouTube
The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are. So, the Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public."
The chart is updated every six hours and broadcast on the BBC every Sunday. Yet more good stuff from Ashley Highfield and team:
"Under Ashley's leadership, the number of UK adults visiting bbc.co.uk has more than trebled from 4.6 million to 14 million every month and page impressions have increased tenfold to just over 3 billion a month."
I love this (only partially) tongue in cheek visualisation of the extinction timeline of a number of things we take for granted.
Whether it is innocence (2001), retirement (2017) or ugliness (c.2060) Richard Watson can see it coming to an end some day. In fact he even predicts the end of futurists in c.2050 (at about the same time he thinks that we might finally wave good bye to Cher).
This is a great post from Regine at We Make Money Not Art which documents and explores the idea of 'Strategic Boredom'.
Following from Kierkegaard, Molly Wright Steenson sees boredom as an inspirational and provocative state of mind that demands a response and spurs creativity. In her talk she reports on the historic role of boredom in bringing about innovative thinking.
Clearly adding moustaches to ads isn't subversive enough for some people. The East London Decapitator has taken to protesting against urban spam by ripping the heads off ad people and leaving nothing but bleeding stumps where their heads once were. ELD on Flickr. ELD on YouTube.
Moustache Me sell vinyl stickers that they suggest would be perfect for defacing ads.
They collect some of the best amateur ad moustachings on their site. This is one from the latest batch.
So it seems that the AdBusters crowd has gone all Dada on us and now wishes to protest at the imposition of commercial messages in the same way that Duchamp subverted the Mona Lisa.
I imagine that fee negotiations with pre-moustachioed stars like Merv Hughes, Tom Selleck, Helena Bonham-Carter and Salma Hayek are about to get a lot tougher.
The philosopher Dan Dennett started his 2002 talk at TED with this statement which contrasts painfully with much of the self-help pop-psych blah-blah orthodoxy on happiness today:
"Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it."
Image: a serene lion pictured in Fisherman's Wharf, SF
One for the mob from BBH over at KnitWare who have chosen an interesting way to manage any concerns they might have about blogging and privacy.
Via Ffffound.com.
I was delayed for three hours last week due to 40mph crosswinds at Heathrow. At the time I just moaned. However, now I know why they were being so cautious. This was the scene in Hamburg:
Crosswind landings require unusual techniques. This BA pilot demonstrates the crab technique:
Gordon Torr: Managing Creative People: Lessons for Leadership in the Ideas Economy
I hope Gordon didn't choose that subtitle. It seems below him somehow. Grubby even. His book is, he insists, the first attempt to fully explore how to get the best out of creative people. I'm currently half way through and loving every bit of it. More soon. (****)
Randall Rothenberg: Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign
Rothenberg is a long time NYT journalist who went on to be editor of Ad Age and is now president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Where the Suckers Moon is an implausibly detailed account of the pitch and subsequent development of an ad campaign for Subaru USA. The book ends with Wieden's Subaru ads being voted dead last by consumers on Superbowl Sunday in 1993. It's quite a ride. (*****)
Joshua Ferris: Then We Came to the End
The rythyms of life in a Chicago ad agency during a recession. The writing is a bit too staccato for my liking and the characters are all long gone before you can get to know them. Nonetheless, it is about as close to home as you can get. (***)
Nick Davies: Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media
Davies finds his colleagues in the media guilty of systematically recycling press releases and news agency output without checking the facts or seeking to find the truth. Shame he doesn't even attempt to seek a solution. (****)
Sam Delaney: Get Smashed!: The Story of the Men Who Made the Adverts That Changed Our Lives
Enjoyable romp through the history of (mostly British) advertising containing some (possibly apocryphal) tales from those that lived through it. (*****)
Mark Tungate: Adland: A Global History of Advertising
Tungate manages to make the history of advertising boring. Quite an achievement. (**)
Robert Johansen: Get There Early
The Institute for the Future's president Bob Johansen gives us the benefit of his 30 years as a trends forecaster and futurist. (***)
Joe Moran: Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime
Watching the English revisited. Joe Moran digs into the Mass Observation archive (and a lot more besides) to tell the story of how everyday British habits have changed over the last century. (****)
Oona Strathern: A Brief History of the Future; How Visionary Thinkers Changed the World and Tomorrow's Trends Are 'Made' and Marketed
A worthy attempt at pulling together the history of futurists and trendspotters. Nice companion to 'Where's my Jetpack?' (****)
Jim Taylor & Steve Hatch: Rigorous Magic: Communication Ideas and Their Application
A valiant but ultimately flawed attempt to codify and assess the value of different types of communications ideas. The typology they have created is useful but they fall down when it comes to providing workable definitions (e.g. between an 'emotional platform' and a 'brand idea'). Furthermore, being media men they are predictably in thrall of those kinds of ideas that media agencies can control ('activation' and 'symbiotic' ideas), less enthusiastic about 'brand' ideas and brazenly critical of the value of 'advertising' ideas. (**)
Stuart Maconie: Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North
Imagine if Pevsner was written by Nick Hornby. Maconie fights his demons about living in the South of England by going back home to the North. Supposendly a travel book, this is Maconie's humorous and informative take on the North-South divide. (***)
Mark Earls: Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature
Mark Earls, the professional contrarian and erstwhile Head of Planning at Ogilvy London has developed his ideas about herd thinking into a book for all to see. (****)
Dick Taverne: The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy, and the New Fundamentalism
If you like Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column in The Guardian then you will enjoy this. I don't agree with all of it but then that's part of the point. (***)
Andrew Marr: My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism
Andrew Marr writes his autobiography under the guise of authoring an insider perspective on the world of news journalism. Fascinating and written with a light touch. Not as ambitious as it might have been but riveting nonetheless. (****)
David Freud: Freud in the City
David Freud (great grandson of Sigmund) tells of his exploits in the City of London as British investment banking changed irrevocably after the 'Big Bang' of 1987. An erstwhile journalist, Freud tells a good yarn and provides an interesting and jargon-free look inside the workings of the City of London. (***)
