Every now and then you do have to take your hat off to a new mash up.

This time the cunning people at Vodafone have hooked up with Ben Marsh who created the #uksnow map a few months ago. The new map uses Twitter hash tags to create a map that shows where Brits plan to take their 2009 holidays. 

The smart bit? You simply update your Twitter account with with the #ukhols tag along with a holiday destination.  But you are also asked to enter age, gender and postcode. Valuable data for Vodafone, which is using the site to promote changes to roaming charges this summer.

It's also significant that in the wake of the recent Harvard report into Twitter usage, one global organisation is using a smart campaign to promote an offer AND capture reliable Twitter demographic data. As Steve Ellis points out in his recent post, its all about understanding rather than broad perceptions.

Disclosure: Vodafone is a client, but not this part of their business.

 

Back posting after a month or so. What happened? Six weeks out of the loop these days and it might as well be 60 years or more in terms of online content. But sometimes there's value in looking at events over longer intervals of time. It's clear, for example, that the debate about print journalism has moved from extinction to evolution. I liked these articles that illustrate how journalism schools plan to train the next generation of hacks. School of Journalism to require iPod touch, iPhone for students: http://tinyurl.com/cgqukn A new generation of entrepreneurial journalists is emerging: http://tinyurl.com/cqdl5z Finally, if you're a student How to Afford a Kindle DX: Wait Three Years, Stay Away From Beer: http://tinyurl.com/p9xdzv

Where were you when the Berlin Wall came down? Apologies to anyone under the age of 25 or so, but it was an unforgettable moment, reinforced by the images of Berliners vigorously demolishing the barrier that symbolised the cold war.

So when will the current crisis have its 'where were you' moment? Perhaps our news channels are so fragmented that such episodes will never occur again. Alternatively, it's already happened but we're still waiting for hindsight - and the archive libraries - to remind us how to remember.

When my glass is half full, I reckon that the only such moments in recent months occured on November 4 last year and January 20.  

When things aren't so bright I figure that it just hasn't happened yet. Will Downing Street Twitter the nationalisation of RBS? Let's hope not.

Apologies for the delay in posting recently. I'm still recovering from the shock of discovering that servers in datacentres run on electricity and aren't powered by the Internet pixies.

Anyway, now that I'm offsetting my online searches by drinking cold tea, it's interesting to note that our clients are increasingly paying attention to the environmental concerns of their customers.

I'm the first to admit that I thought green strategies would go out of the window with the credit-crunch bathwater, but it seems that today more and more businesses equate environmental awareness with operational excellence.

To put it more bluntly, cutting back on energy consumption reduces costs, while increasing accountability to stakeholders from investors, to government to citizens.

It's certainly a diverse and challenging topic when it comes to delivering content. To paraphrase one client in charge of sustainability: "When I go to talk to the COO, I want you to make sure that he doesn't look at me like a tree-hugging loon."

Joking aside, it means that we have to understand - in depth - the implications for industries as diverse as hardware manufacturers, software, government, logistics and hosted service providers.  

It also means that we now have an experienced sustainability practice that is delivering white papers, evidence and online content explaining how environmental awareness and business can now go hand-in-hand.

And not a pixie in sight.

Christmas is a great time for reflection. No more so than if you work with your head in an increasingly fluffy cloud of digital content. For those of us lucky to be with our extended families, the Winter holiday forces you to spend time in the company of people who have their technology toes on the ground,and use the internet at their convenience, not every twittering minute of the day.

Which is why this story caught my eye this afternoon. It's a survey that reveals that more people use the internet to keep up with the latest news than ever. As reported by John Paczkowski in All Things Digital, "40 percent identified the Internet as their primary source for national and international news. Thirty-five percent identified newspapers and 70 percent identified television."

Sounds impressive, but this is very much a 'dog bites man' moment.  I reckon it's a safe guess that most people still read their internet newspapers in the same way they read traditional print media. That is, they open the pages, read, link out to another story, and that's about it. There's no real behavioural shift and certainly little use of RSS readers and any other push model. The numbers are impressive, it's just that we're still very much in the Web 1.0 (if that's the expression) world, especially when you are home for the holidays.

Again, it's important not to get all smug about the fact that those of us in the media were getting our news this way half-a-dozen years ago or longer. The reason that there's a mass online readership today is that the technology is now cheap, it works, and there's a vast amount of authoratative content out there being updated minute-by-minute. So let's be grateful for this achievement, just for a moment. And here's wishing for a little less hype in 2009. We can but hope.

 

Apologies for the quality of the mobile phone photo, but when I read this paragraph in a UK railway station, just south of London, my heart leapt. It's the little things that bring delight to copywriters, especially when the organisation in question has been guilty of countless crimes against the English language.

It doesn't say very much, but that's the point. Back in the day, it would have taken 10 paragraphs of jargonese to get you to a timetable of mindbending complexity before you even realised that there were two trains per hour.

Instead, here are 25 words and apart from the proper nouns, there are only two words of more than one syllable.

It's easy to read, informative and helpful. So why don't we see more copy like this the length and breadth of the railways? Why do we have to 'alight here' when we could simply 'get off the train'? Perhaps the Plain English Campaign has found a friend in deepest Surrey. People of Bookham, be proud.

 

Back in London this weekend I was persuaded to visit the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern. It was a good show, but with a bizarre and slightly sinister follow up.

About 24 hours later I acquired another Twitter follower, this time a Mr Mark Rothko. A quick dash to his posts revealed that the artist, who died in 1970, is still hard at work in his studio and posting updates to 30-odd followers.

So what's sinister about all this? Not the presence of deceased celebrities on Twitter for sure. A quick search reveals Dr Benjamin Spock and Anais Nin amongst others haunting the Twittersphere  - no doubt sharing cloud computing anecdotes with Francis Bacon and Stirling Moss.

I'm more perturbed by the way in which I'm being haunted just a day after visiting the show. I can't believe that this is coincidence any more than I believe that one of the world's most accomplished abstract-expressionists has chosen to channel his oeuvre from beyond the grave via the world's fastest growing presence awareness application.

So what's the answer? I paid for the exhibition tickets with my credit card and I think my name appeared on the ticket. Did someone eyeball these details? Is this a cunning marketing exercise by Serota and co? No answer so far from Tate Modern press office, which remains curiously silent on the topic. Spooky.

 

 

 

It was my birthday last week. I’m well beyond counting but the number was significant in a nice way. Modesty prevents me from stating the truth, but the digits added up to six. I reckon I should let you do the maths.

If you need another hint, how about the Large Hadron Collider? I’ve seen enough black hole gags this past week to take me from here to eternity. But the best ones definitely involve Deep Thought, the supercomputer imagined by Douglas Adams in ‘The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. 42 black holes in Blackburn Lancashire indeed. Actually if you are interested in this stuff, check out the Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. It makes things a lot clearer, even to this layman.

The other news is that I've just moved to Germany. Relocation is always an opportunity to reminisce and the journey to Bonn took me back more than 20 years to when I last lived abroad in France. Like now, I was only about 400 miles from the UK, but I might as well have been on the other side of the world when it came to staying in touch with Blighty.

Like many of a certain generation, I’m proud of the fact that I can bore for England on the subject of life before email and the simple pleasures of posting letters and drawing water from a well. Ah, the thrill of booking a five minute international phone call with your folks in Singapore every Christmas. The wonder at paying £1 a minute for the privilege. How we counted our blessings as we counted our pennies.

But that, surely, is the point. If I could whizz back a couple of decades and demonstrate a video call on my laptop there’d certainly be many raised eyebrows. But a few shrugs of the shoulder too. After all, we were promised this sort of thing at the start of the last century:

 But if I told them that once you had the computer and a connection, you could see and talk to your pal on the other side of the world – for nothing – then they really would be amazed. You can buy a jet pack today, but it will set you back nearly a quarter of a million dollars if you get my drift.

Still, I’m not all that optimistic about time travel. Although a free Tardis with your phone line probably sounds no more absurd than a free computer to someone living in the 80s. But give me hindsight over time travel any time. Far less stress on the hadrons.