Mila’s Daydreams – Thanks to Pete Ashton for alerting me to this blog from Adele Enerson of her well cute baby photos:
This blog is my maternity leave hobby. While my baby is taking her nap, I create scene around her and take quick snap photos.
Which is gorgeous. But what I was struck by was the way Adele’s found a really simple way to exercise her creative juices every day – without leaving the house, using the bits and bobs that happen to be lying around for props and her camera. Each baby-naptime, Adele has a quick go at creating and telling a simple story with a picture, with some amazing results.
It made me want to do something similar in some sort of attempt to keep the creative bit of my brain alive, be it by letting Tyrone (who’s not been on any travels of late) see the world from within my home or by taking a stab at some Hint Fiction (hat tip Nick Lockey). Just something nice and simple to creak the cogs in my head and stop them from completely seizing up.
YouTube – grey fluffy clouds – I’m sure this will be old news to many, but this spoof of The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds made me laugh like a drain. Courtesy of The League Against Tedium (via Sandra Hall). This guy’s video of it gets extra speshul points for mishearing ‘Watford’ as ‘Walford’.
Post the text of the sentence along with these instructions
Don’t dig for your favourite book, the coolest book, or the most intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST
The closest to me is Will Buckingham’s Cargo Fever, which I read ages ago so I’m not sure why it’s on my coffee table. Maybe I was thinking about lending it to someone. It’s a great novel about a highly sexed yeti-type creature romping his way through Kenukecil. Anyway, fifth sentence on page 56 is:
NOTHING. Page 56 is blank. I swear I’m not making this up. I stuck strictly to the rules of the meme and this is what happens.
It’s a well good book though. The pages with typing on are great.
Suppose you’ve got a Council or public body wanting to support social media and you’ve got some activists there: what would you say to them…?
Will puts things best when he simply says, “there are risks in not doing it.” Talk About Local gets spoken about, as does Nick Booth’s Social Media Surgeries as an perfect example of what can be achieved. I declared that, “I’m not a Brain Scientist,” managing to mix ‘rocket scientist’ and ‘brain surgeon’. Proof if any be needed, that you don’t have to be a genius to learn how to use social media tools to talk about things that matter to you.
David Wilcox, total gentlemen that he is, has since managed to find out that there is such a thing.
Will Perrin’s Kings Cross tour – Here’s a Flickr set of photos I took whilst being given a tour of Kings Cross by the lovely Will Perrin. My favourite is the above picture of Crumbles Castle, which put the bricks of local demolition to great use by creating a children’s playground with them. It really illustrated how Will has come to social media from a community activism perspective, using it and other means to make very real, physical changes to the local neighbourhood.
Join us in a UK hyperlocal alliance… « Talk About Local – Will Perrin wants to know if there’s sufficient support for this:
…we want to know if hyperlocal people in the UK are up for some sort of ‘UK Hyperlocal Alliance’ (working title) dedicated to a positive future for hyperlocal content in the UK. This isn’t an attempt to form a trade body or a union or a lobby group, just a simple web resource where we can sign up to a simple statement of intent, get in touch with each other and tell our stories.
Hyperlocalsongs – An aggregator of hyperlocal songs from your street, postcode, suburb, town or city. Got a song in mind with some very local mentions? Let Fiona Cullinan know!
Local news, but not as we know it – reviewing media histrionics about local news « Ultra Local Voice: communities, communicating – William Perrin reacts very articulately to Polly Tonybee declaring ‘This is an emergency. Act now, or local news will die’, stating that it needn’t die, just adapt:
There have been many media transitions before, this is just another one. The transitions from print to radio in the 1930s, from radio to TV in the 1950s-70s and from static to rolling news in the 1990s. In no case did the preceding media disappear, it just adapted and learned to live alongside the new medium that eventually stole much of the limelight. People thrived who adapted their skills from one medium to the next. The world did not end, it just changed.
I went without having heard of her – my Dad suggested we go after being impressed by some the reviews he’d read about her and I’m very glad he did, she was bloody brilliant. She has an astounding voice – kind of reminded me of Kate Bush and Tori Amos but no indulgent or annoying wailing and wallowing. She rocked. It’s one of the best concerts I’ve been to in a long time and gave me a good kick up the arse in reminding me why I should make the effort to go to a lot more – because once in a while I’ll get lovely surprises like this.
Simply Understand is a unique translation service. Are you fed up with gobblydegook and jargon? Are you frustrated by endless sentences and hundred-page documents? Simply Understand aim to cut your policy papers, manuals and programmes down to size! When everything is simply readable, you can simply understand.
It sounds a lot like what we did at Big City Talk, but on a broader scale. Corrine hasn’t received any paid commissions for her work yet, which she currently does on a purely voluntary basis. Hopefully Local Authorities will soon recognise the value of this type of work and start putting all public consultation documents trough the Plain English mill.
