“The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.” Slavoj Zizek

Sunday night treat.

Day 3: No pancake joy.

It's pancake day. Except for me. Even if I were to do a slowcarb version (omelette or meat-pancake) it's really the fillings that make pancake day: ham and cheese, banana and nutella, raspberry jam.
No, I'll have to content myself with chicken breast and broccoli. But a lighter, healthier me is worth it.

Day two of the 4-hour body

Day one is always a breeze. It's good to know I have willpower enough for that. This was dinner. A Mexican pork and chickpea stew with homemade guacamole. By far one of the best stews I've ever made.

I couldn't face hardboiling eggs this morning at 5.30 so have eaten an omelette from Bene Bene and now I feel sick. I'm not sure doing what they do to eggs with a grilling machine should be called an omelette.

Consolidated

I blended the two sadly ignored blogs into one. I promise to start writing. After a nap. Then maybe some lunch.

I'm not a very good gay. I know a few show tunes and own some diva CDs and like watching naked men on the net, but in general I have very little interaction with the culture. Few gay male friends. Fewer nights out doing gay things.. I don't know what we're meant to be wearing or listening to or reading or doing or debating or supporting or kvetching about. how does a middle-aged man dive back into gay culture. I'm not one for club music and taking my shirt off to gyrate to anything isn't going to win me legions of new friends? Gay film festivals? I'd spend the night wondering if its better I nod with esoteric consent or lament the inanity of most of the storylines. I'm worried I no longer understand the culture. When I was really gay it was easy - culture was dualistic. One raved or one leathered. Now I don't know. How to dive back in. Any suggestions?

August is the cruellest month

Grim is the best word. From the weather to the things that are happening to my family. My Uncle who went far too quickly. Only 42 days from the diagnosis of throat cancer to his death from the effects of chemotherapy. The race my mum and aunt made from Wisconsin to South Dakota and back only to return later that day when news reached them he had died. My mum awaiting results of a mammogram she didn't tell us she was having. The eventual and dispiriting diagnosis of breast cancer while she grieved the death of her brother. The helpless watch from a distant country.



One couldn't have made up this horrible story. But we banish feelings of despair to build positive momentum for my mum's surgery. The experts are decidedly positive. Caught in early stages. Options for treatment. My mum arming herself with understanding and support resources. Her children rallying. Communities of people she's touched arming her with their prayers. Her agnostic son willing to come to a truce with her God if he delivers the healing karma she's earned. We believe I can be here in body and there in spirit and count the days until I can be both together.



There are some storms which do not pass so quickly and which haunt the memory of the heart for much longer.

Gratitude: unexpected free time.

Today I got up early and went out to Heathrow for a client meeting. Meanwhile, my client got up early and went to Canary Wharf.

Ooops.

The first temptation is to curse the inconvenience but I chose not to. Instead, I focussed on the free time I would have to read. I never go anywhere without a book, or rather, many ebooks on my Kindle. It makes delays and unexpected journeys a gift.

What goes into an experience strategy?

I'm often asked what goes into digital strategy. I usually steer the question towards 'experience' so that we aren't limited to encounters in digital media and channels and recognise that people travel from off- to online seamlessly.

So what goes into an experience strategy? In it's most basic form:

What are we trying to achieve?
What are our participants trying to achieve?
What do we know about their needs and behaviours?
What content and functionality do we need?
What is the journey to, through, and from the experience?
What is the best way to structure it?
How can it be phased?
How can it evolve?
How do we manage it?
How do we measure it?

Will write soon about Pompeii, Sorrento and Berlin, but in the meantime:

How to make the perfect poached egg. The vortex method really works!

Can't wait. Yazoo - Reconnected Live (sampler) by MuteRecords

Can't believe this is still even here. Don't believe anyone is reading it, but must get back into the habit of reflecting on things.

I recently downloaded, Sleep Cycle, an application for my mobile iPhone that monitors my sleep. Because the phone itself is sensitive to movement, you place it on your mattress, near the pillow (with the network turned off) and it monitors movement; the idea being that the deeper the sleep, the less tossing and turning one does. It then looks at the cycles of light and deep sleep to determine when the best time for the alarm to go off. For example, if I set the alarm at 6am, but that would the deepest part of the sleep cycle, it goes off instead at 5.45 when my sleep would be light. It's kind of fun/ creepy to watch graphs of one's own sleep cycles. I seem to sleep well for five hours (say, 10-3am) and then have lots of light/deep cycles from 3-6. Anyway, I find it fascinating, sad git that I am.

State of anxiety

This week, I am in Bangkok. I thought the worst thing may be the heat. It's 100 degrees and humid. But turns out, I was venturing into political instability.

Red Shirts are a group of rural poor who are faithful
to the last PM who was overthrown in 2008 and want him reinstated.
They have been protesting in central Bangkok for the last six weeks,
but peacefully, and as such, the PM declared them a legal
demonstration and vowed no violence which the army and Red Shirts also
vowed. They then stepped up the protest and stormed Parliament on
Wednesday. As such, the PM declared a state of emergency, but no one
really knows what that means. They are trying to shift the Red Shirts
out of Bangkok and the PM has now declared them an illegal protest. He
is still vowing no violence, but has said that the march on Parliament
was an act of violence itself, although no one was hurt. There's a
feeling on all sides that the media is playing it all up but everyone
is watching what's going on. The PM is seen as being very by the book
and cautious and the Thais I spoke to don't think much will come of
it.

Saturday starts the nine-day celebration for Thai New Year and all
parties want it to be resolved by then so that the Red Shirts can go
home to celebrate with their families. People feel tomorrow therefore
will either be a climax or the end of it. We're being told to stay
away from the centre of town and have been assured by Global Unilever
that we are safe where we are (not being near any government or army
areas and, being a laundry detergent conference, not likely to be seen
as very political. Luckily, I didn't pack anything red). And like I
said, no one seems anxious about it including the British Consulate.
And the two Brits who have lived here for a while.

If things do escalate tomorrow, they are almost sure to close the
airport (they did it last year for five days during a similar
protest.) which means I may not be going home on Saturday and may
instead be lounging by the pool.

I think the worst thing that's going to happen is that I won't be able
to go shopping at Siam Paragon which everyone recommended. And as the
5-star hotel is a fort-like complex with six restaurants, two pools
and a cheeky Thai Jazz star named Lilibeth playing in the bar it seems
utterly civilised. It would be a shame not to get to sight see, but
better to be safe for the time being.

So, little apparently to fret about besides which Thai curry to try
next. I'll keep you updated but in the meantime don't worry. No one
here seems to - they haven't even interrupted the TV with it.

Businesses need social strategy not social media strategy

Yet, most "social media" strategies have one or more of three goals: to "push product," "build buzz," or "engage consumers." None of these lives up to the Internet's promise of meaning. They're just slightly cleverer ways to sell more of the same old junk. But the great challenge of the 21st century is making stuff radically better in the first place — stuff that creates what I've been calling thicker value.

Organizations don't need "social media" strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning. The right end of social tools is to help organizations stop being antisocial. In fact, it's the key to advantage in the 2010s and beyond.'

Umair Haque, HBR

State of anxiety

I came all the way to Bangkok and all I got was a stay at a 5-star hotel.

Bangkok, as you may know, is under a state of emergency. Delcared yesterday by the Prime Minister,

I love the phrase and the sentiment of 'three dimensional consumer-brand interaction' that VandenBosch describes:

You know, the real geniuses out there are the unsung talent at a lot of digital ad agencies. They may go by a variety of titles -- interaction designers, user experience designers, information architects -- but what they really do is connect the dots, they think about how the consumer is really behaving; and if they're really big thinkers, they can extrapolate that into designing how consumers interact with brands in real life. So from a strategy standpoint, it's about being one of those people who can think and plan for a three-dimensional consumer-brand interaction. If I could start my career over again, I think I'd like to be one of those people.

Beautiful images from the Indian Portrait exhibition opening at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Russell Davies' brilliant quips at the Ogilvy planning conference

I'm back! And determined to use this blog to relieve the manic feed in my brain. Mostly to practice writing things in a clear and digestable way without Powerpoint.

Welcome to Experienced redux (or dux)

This week I'm in Istanbul for a worldwide Ogilvy conference and the planning community got to experience a talk on 'interesting' things that Russell Davies so well threads - giving not only a gentle Sunday morning introduction to the week, but also some immensely relevant challenges for an organisation with the size, history and ambition of Ogilvy.

Rather than transcribe the brilliant talk, I'm sharing my random notes.

............................................................

In an example of analog objects with digital identities, lamposts in Gateshead have unique numbers so that people can call up the council and report outtages...

According to Gartner (?) 1/3 of Internet traffic to belong to 'objects' -- analog objects with digital feeds.

Digital-skinned architecture is the new preoccupation of architecture graduates (and it's only a matter of time before Coca-Cola will be asking to brand it.)

Instapaper is a simple tool that will store online articles and text into a PDF so that it can be read later. And, obviously, it can be printed.

Other analog objects with digital feeds?
Botanicalls a plant sensor that texts you when it needs watering.
Watson home energy monitor which estimates the annual cost of your eletricity as you use it.
Tower Bridge Twitter feed. The bridge goes up, there's a tweet...it goes down, well. you get the idea.

In the Nature of Technology, W. Brian Arthur delcares that as a rule, 'what starts as a group of loosely arranged objects becomes solidified into a single thing. But that thing becomes encrusted with systems and assemblies over time meaning that if you really want to innovate with it, you need to 'redomain' -- go back to another group of loosely arranged objects.

In the Robotic theory of the uncanny valley,

'The uncanny valley is a hypothesis regarding the field of robotics.[1] The theory holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness.'

(How will we make this more friendly? Pink rounded type.)

So while we strive for ever closer targetting and personlisation, would we be better going for mass likeability?

The excitement of digital and the sentiment for analog will lessen over time. What can we do? Look for the legacy systems that the analog industry has left behind and use it to our advantage. Example: it wasn't downloads which finished off Blockbuster, it was ordering DVDs via the post (like Lovefilm or Netflix)

Analog products with digital identities also have a a built in comms channel and give relevant and action-based messaging that people can use. It gives us a not all-ways, but best-time on channel. (Think Nike Plus)

San Francisco wanted to turn the dead corner near the Tram stop at Castro and 17th Street into a pedestrian zone. Rather than wait years to file for the necessary permits, the city bought some paint and some chairs from Ikea, created the zone, and said that if anyone complained they would quickly remove it. Instead, it's become a pedestrian plaza. They call is the 'reversible pilot'. Trying something cheaply that can be easily undone if it doesn't work. This is what digital can be.


Great talk. Have been ruminating on digital's relationship with physical objects and this has fired me up... but then so has the thought of dinner....

The Berlin Wall and me.

I remember standing in the middle of the front room of our college flat watching the news that the Berlin Wall was being taken down. I remember being dumbfounded. It was inconceivable and fantastical. You see, just 11 months earlier I'd seen the wall. I had taken a long weekend off from my studies in London to visit my cousin and her husband who were stationed in the US military in Berlin. They agreed to take me into East Berlin for the day. It was December, bitterly cold, a pregnant East German woman had just escaped across the river Spree and miraculously survived. But the East German government was bruised by the news and were on alert. My cousin's husband was required to wear his US military uniform when we went into East Berlin. I was told when we crossed the border to hold my passport up to the window but keep my eyes straight ahead and not make eye contact with the East German guard - it would be seen suspiciously as a slight or an attempt to communicate and we would be questioned. Indeed, a car ahead of us was pulled over for that reason.

Crossing into East Berlin was chilling. We were on alert about what could or could not be photographed. Who we could or couldn't speak to. Where in East Berlin we dare not go. The city, stripped of the advertising, commercial signs and neon was grey and seemingly deserted. We went into stores barely stocked with decades old furniture, shabby textiles and wooden toys. This was the 80s, mind and Western shops were garishly stocked with patterns and fluorescent colours. We bought a few wooden toys, had an extravagant meal of stodgy German food in a East Berlin restaurant, visited the Tomb of the Unknown Solider and made our way back to West Berlin. I later returned to a cold but somehow more festive London and finished my exams.

11 months later I watched as it all came down. As East Germans strolled freely through Checkpoint Charlie at once exhilarated and full of sadness that such a divide had been allowed to tear a country apart. The pictures of East Berlin and the Wall, now gone, stick in my head to this day and a visit years later to a reunified Berlin made them seem even more dreamlike.

Now, we celebrate 20 years of reunification and the freedoms and challenges that brought. But we must remember that these territorial walls exist today, tearing apart families, communities and cultures with no more justice than the Berlin Wall embodied. And be hopeful that, like the Berlin Wall, oppressive regimes and the controls they institute do not have to be permanent.

Those were the years...

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Arpanet, Guardian publishes a year-by-year people's history of the Internet.