Posts from smithery for 01/07/2013
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Christmas Tales #2 – The Mid Sussex Times Jan 04, 2013 04:48 pm | john v willshire
Just after Christmas, I’d to send something back to Amazon to exchange it. The Home Delivery Network, one of Amazon’s many random delivery merchants, had seen fit to leave a package out in the rain overnight (despite the fact that we must have been in when they called that evening), and so ruined a book.
No problem, said Amazon, we’ll send you another one, but you’ve got to send us that one back.
We duly trotted across Sussex to the nearest newsagent that offered the returns service, in a place called Newick. We couldn’t find it though, despite Newick being a fairly small village. I parked up, and went wandering round with my phone map instead. When I finally found it, the sign outside took me back twelve years…
Mid Sussex Times sign (http://smithery.co/marketing-2/christmas-tales-2-the-mid-sussex-times/attachment/img_4606/)
My first media job was as a graduate at BJM, a market research agency which was on 4-5 Bonhill Street in the City…
…by some slight coincidence, in exactly the same building where the Google Campus (http://www.campuslondon.com/) now is. I barely recognise the place now, of course. It’s been all Googlified.
I’d applied for the job after seeing the ad for a Graduate Media Researcher – I’d written a dissertation which went under the user-friendly name of An Econometric Evaluation Of The Demand For Cinema 1959-1995. Media research, yeah?
Anyway, as it turned out, it wasn’t that sort of media research. BJM did a lot of research for regional press titles, auditing their circulation for JICREG (http://www.jicreg.co.uk/) and the like.
I spent about six months working on a Mid Sussex Times project. Part of my job, indeed quite a large part of my job it seemed, was to cut mastheads out of regional papers, photocopy them dozens of times, stick them to A4 paper in different rotations, making visual prompts for market researchers to roam round the streets and ask “and which of these newspapers do you regularly read… and most often…?”
As I tramped back through those same streets to the car, I wandered past all the identikit houses that those mastheads I’d photocopied had perhaps visited.
IMG_4609 (http://smithery.co/marketing-2/christmas-tales-2-the-mid-sussex-times/attachment/img_4609/)
Media nowadays means that people are completely unlikely to be as similar as their houses suggest, yet still there’s still media that tries to cater for them all equally. As much as things have changed, there’s still a lot media around that’s been around for a century or more. Perhaps the hardest thing marketers have to do now is balancing the old and the new.
I wonder what’s going to be on the local shop awning in another 12 years time?
Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/r/Smithery/3/S2nyhrYjFHI/ Comments: http://smithery.co/marketing-2/christmas-tales-2-the-mid-sussex-times/#comments
Christmas Tales #1 – My Dad’s Jack Brabham photo Jan 04, 2013 12:03 pm | john v willshire
There was a marvellous programme on the telly at Christmas with Stirling Moss being in equal parts accompanied, probed and worshipped by Patrick Stewart. It’s still up on iPlayer, and is available till midnight on Friday 4th (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01pm87p/Racing_Legends_Stirling_Moss/) .
Stirling Moss and Patrick Stewart (http://smithery.co/random-inspiration-2/christmas-tales-1-my-dads-jack-brabham-photo/attachment/stirling-moss-and-patrick-stewart/)
Whilst we were watching it, my Dad turned to me and said ‘I met him once, you know’. Dad’s uncle had been a motoring journalist and photographer, a guy called David Phipps, and had taken Dad along to Brands Hatch once when he was about twelve.
They were meeting Stirling Moss there where he was testing a Porsche round the track. Then Jack Brabham (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Brabham) , Aussie motor racing legend, turned up. Neither Brabham nor Moss knew the other would be there, and given the rivalry were none best pleased either, though Dad says given he was only twelve at the time, all that passed him by.
Dad took this photo below of Brabham, his mechanic and another driver, inspecting a car.
Jack Brabham, Brands Hatch by Brian Willshire (http://smithery.co/random-inspiration-2/christmas-tales-1-my-dads-jack-brabham-photo/attachment/jack-brabham-brands-hatch-by-brian-willshire/)
It’s one of several Dad took on the day (he’s digging the rest out, and if he finds them I’ll add them up here).
For whatever cavalier nineteen-fifties reason, they also let him Dad down on the grass on the inside of one of the track bends, taking photos of the racing cars as they sped round.
That sounds eminently sensible, doesn’t it?
Photos like these nowadays (especially the candid, close up ones with your heroes) get upload straight to Flickr, Facebook, Instagram or wherever. It’s not so much that there are more cameras around nowadays; there are, but perhaps the different between every house having a camera and a camera phone isn’t that pronounced.
It’s just that there’s somewhere to share them quickly, instantly, widely. Whereas they used to end up in albums on a shelf, or a box in the loft. The connection between people is more important than the things they share.
Maybe more often than not, photos are a people thing, and not a thing thing, as Mark talks about (http://herd.typepad.com/herd_the_hidden_truth_abo/2012/12/the-thing-thing-and-the-people-thing.html) .
Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/r/Smithery/3/kpX-8zcw12g/ Comments: http://smithery.co/random-inspiration-2/christmas-tales-1-my-dads-jack-brabham-photo/#comments
All New Rivetings Jan 03, 2013 12:10 pm | john v willshire
Happy New Year, one and all. Hope you’re all raring to go for a marvellous 2013.
At some stage, I’ll be writing up a “year ahead” post as I did last year with the ‘2012 – Making Things (http://smithery.co/making/2012-projects-making-things/) ‘ post. And may well even review that, and give the a mark for each section.
But first of all, quickly, I thought I’d talk about Rivetings.
Rivetings was a tag I used in Instagram over the last year or so, to automatically post things from there to here (using IFTTT, of course). Its purpose was to gather scraps of ideas and put them somewhere that helped fit into the larger pieces of Smithery work and streams of thought; rivets that hold bigger ideas together. That was the idea, at least.
A couple of things came together to change how I thought about it.
Firstly, somebody observed that the blog feed had become too reliant on the rivets; it wasn’t holding anything together, just a collection of small ephemera. It might have meant something to me, but without the bigger pieces, it meant little to anyone else. It was boring. Which isn’t good.
Secondly, I left Instagram, after the whole stramash with the terms of service.
There’s plenty being written about all that, and why people are leaving and the like (the Ryan Block piece (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/126113/) is fairly sensible on all that), so I needn’t add much more, save to say that Facebook achieved something seemingly impossible in making me trust them even less.
The idea of Rivetings then remains important, but I had to find a way to collect the rivetings together with some greater degree of sophistication and tagging, and stream the collection separately, so people could dip in and out as they saw fit.
As of today, you’ll see a separate rivetings page (http://smithery.co/rivetings/) in the menu here on the site, which is powered by a new public flickr account (http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnvwillshire/) I’ve set up (and, incidentally, imported all of my Instagram pictures into).
The gallery on the rivetings page is powered by a great WordPress plugin called, fittingly, Awesome Flickr Gallery (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/awesome-flickr-gallery-plugin/) .
If you still want to follow that separately, you can add me as a contact in Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnvwillshire/) , or following the RSS feed for the photostream (http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=91179257@N02〈=en-us&format=rss_200) .
Ok, let’s get on with the year…
Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/r/Smithery/3/M2hPHLBuV9Q/ Comments: http://smithery.co/rivetings/all-new-rivetings/#comments
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