act:ualise | what we think

Its good to see level headed thinking in a issue ripe with inflamed exchanges and thin on justice.

Denmark and the Netherlands place the blame firmly on the automobile in accidents, unless it can be proven otherwise.

The idea is simply that the person in the most dangerous vehicle has the most responsibility.

That said, drink the schadenfreude in this rare bulls eye. Touché old girl, the tosser deserved it!

This Mashable piece reminds us that Google’s grand plan is very much in plain view:

“Google’s goal isn’t to have the majority market share. The goal is to force you on the web more and for longer. Why? It’s all part of Google’s simple equation to monetize the world.

Since nearly every website holds a Google ad slot, every impression and every second you spend on the web is revenue for Google. Every second you’re playing a desktop game, using Microsoft Office, or using AOL Instant Messenger, that’s unrealized potential revenue. The equation may be obvious, but that doesn’t diminish its importance.

As long as you’re on the web, Google wins.”

Read the full article here.

After a chat with someone the other day, I recalled that the most commonly given answer when we’d asked clients why we’d won a new business pitch was that we aced the question-and-answer session. On reflection, two key points emerged:

• Ask clients why you won or lost the pitch. I never had a (prospective) client who minded giving feedback (although on a few occasions I had the distinct impression it wasn’t particularly honest), and it gave my teams and me the opportunity to learn from the experience. Clients were usually particularly pleasantly surprised when we asked why we’d won, if there was anything that hadn’t really impressed, and how we could have done better.
• Practice your Q&A session. Prospective clients expect your main presentation to be well-presented, polished, logical and slick; but they view the Q&A as the opportunity to expose the personalities of your pitch team (who they will often request is the team who would work on the project), dig down into the details of the proposal, and really test your team’s expertise; so it’s as important to get this bit right. Towards the end of our pitch preparation process, we used to brief someone from the agency who hadn’t been involved in the pitch, give them the tender documents to read, then run at least one mock Q&A session. This gave us the chance to really tease out which questions would be the most challenging to us, and how best to handle them.

So The Guardian is to begin publishing exclusively to Twitter, which I can only assume will real-time article syndication compared to the existing RSS syndication which heaves 20-30 articles at fixed intervals throughout the day. Given the trouble that the newspaper publishing industries around the globe seem to be having we can safely assume plenty of copycats in the coming months.

UPDATE: Reading the footer “According to unconfirmed rumours, Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, will next month announce plans for a new system of telepathy-based social networking that is expected to render Twitter obsolete within weeks.”

Or in other words, PWNED -> my wife has so often told me to read things entirely, though my friends have always known me to be gullible! Hahaha (thanks @jadelus)

Michael Pollan our new truth-about-food hero, who has done a great deal to bring attention to the Slow Food movement and the Locavore movement, is coming to Vancouver. He is most recently credited with influencing the Obama family with planting a vegetable garden at the White House.

His only stop in Canada, he will be at the University of BC Farm on June 6th. Tickets (scroll to *very bottom*) are $45 each and the price includes a copy of his book, ‘In Defense of Food‘.

I’m a great believer in teams; we all have our horror stories about failing teams, some of us will even have had the good fortune to have worked in great teams. That said, great teams aren’t common nor are they easy to assemble or maintain; any great team will have it’s share of dirt along the way.

“Beautiful Teams takes you behind the scenes with some of the most interesting software teams over the past 30 years. Through a series of fascinating personal stories from many of the industry’s leading programmers, architects, project managers, and thought leaders, you’ll go inside high-profile projects such as the development of Internet Explorer, the Boeing 777, Subversion, and some of the first Agile projects. Learn how extraordinary teams coped with challenges, and how their efforts led to superb — or disastrous — results”

Due out on April 6th ‘Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders‘ has contributions from a broad range of  luminaries from the software world including: Tim O’Reilly, Cory Doctorow, Grady Booch, Steve McConnell, Barry Boehm, Karl Fogel and Johanna Rothman.

This is a long-overdue response to SavageSays’ excellent post rebutting the idea that protectionism (even if in the form of buying local or FairTrade) can ever be a good idea.

He argues that buying local isn’t necessarily better for the environment, citing three pieces of research:

• A study by Lincoln University in New Zealand arguing that producing dairy products, lamb, apples and onions in NZ uses less overall energy than producing them in Britain;
• Cranfield University research which found it is greener for Britons to buy roses from Kenya than the Netherlands because they have to be grown in heated greenhouses in Holland;
• A DEFRA report which showed that half of the food miles associated with British food accrued by the British public travelling to and from shops, and that a local-based system away from the supermarket model could actually increase food miles as food distribution would become less efficient.

Indeed, SavageSays goes a step further and refutes the claim that organic food is better for the environment because “it is extensive, limits pesticides, and bans the use of GM crops, thereby lowering crop yields.” He asks, “surely the less space used the better for our agriculatural [sic] needs (and therefore more space for things such as rainforests), as long as care is taken not to damage the land, or surrounding lands/sea (which isnt something that is beyond farming)?”

Let’s be clear, in my earlier post, I didn’t argue that it is always the case that food grown abroad is less energy efficient than local food. Instead, I argued that giving consumers the ability to make a free and informed choice is the right thing to do. Sometimes, that means arming them with the tools to make an ethical decision, and sometimes that means giving them the ability to make an informed economic decision. The ability to accurately assess which product is (truly) cheaper is where we all need to get to, and that is why exposing hidden costs in retail prices is so critical. There is simply no other way that consumers can be fairly expected to make a reasonable analysis of what is such an incredibly complex issue.

To understand how complex the range of issues that need to be analysed is, consider the following:

• Ronald R. Davis from the Biochemical Institute of the University of Texas found inverse relationships between crop yields and the nutritional concentrations within that food, ie, fertilisers and pesticides may be giving us more food, but the resulting food may be as much as 40% less nutritious.
• A study at Cornell University’s Department of Agronomy considered the effects of modern agriculture on its environment, identifying the following detrimental effects of intensive, industrial-scale farming: soil erosion, impaired air quality, sedimentation of water courses and destruction of marine species habitat, contaminated drinking water supplies, pesticide and herbicide runoff to streams and lakes causing contamination, soil trace element depletion, indiscriminate destruction of wildlife species owing to pesticide use, and the persistence of pesticide compounds in animal tissues.
• Modern intensive monoculture farming has led to a reliance on a very small number of animal, vegetable and fruit breeds and the loss of thousands of heritage breeds, many of which had natural defences against pests, but may have produced a lower yield than desired.
•  As they lose breeds and ancient techniques, farmers lose knowledge and become dependent on global multinationals to even farm the same crop from one year to the next.

These issues don’t even start to consider energy consumption in farming, or the food miles involved. But they do go to show that higher yield isn’t necessarily better for human food production.

Again, to be explicit, I am not (here anyway) arguing that organic, local food production is always better for humanity than conventional farming. Instead, my argument is that we need to have a way to evaluate all of these combined effects together if consumers are ever going to be able to make informed purchasing decisions. And only by being well-informed can we be justified in any individual-level protectionism on which we might choose to embark.

Michael Pollan, author of ‘Omnivores Dillemma‘ and ‘In Defense Of Food,’ on NPR discussing the reasons why the US must modify its food policies given the impact of food production has on climate change, national security, energy independence and healthcare.

Much has been made of Iceland’s economic demise and the stepping down of the then government leadership. Their dramatic and undignified end was widely reported, the male bankers and ministers all shown leaving in a flashbulb frenzy, scurrying back to their multi-million Krona homes.

What a surprise then that little to no mention is made in the North American media of the administration to have taken their place; could it perhaps be because Iceland now holds the crown of having the worlds first openly gay Premier? Perhaps it’s also that Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir, 66 years old and openly lesbian, is working with Björk, famous not just for her music but also for her temperament, creating a Green investment fund.

Perhaps all that combined is just too much, too left leaning, too Green, too far, far out for any ‘serious media’ in N America to bear relating to their precious coddled audience. I’m not certain but in this case my cynicism prevails.

The fact is Sigurdardóttir is the first leader I’ve encountered who is attempting to create a democratic, capitalist model based on a balanced economy which incorporates overtly feminine values. She outlines these feminine values in a recent Guardian article:

“We have five core feminine values. First, risk awareness: we will not invest in things we don’t understand. Second, profit with principles – we like a wider definition so it is not just economic profit, but a positive social and environmental impact. Third, emotional capital. When we invest, we do an emotional due diligence – or check on the company – we look at the people, at whether the corporate culture is an asset or a liability. Fourth, straight talking. We believe the language of finance should be accessible, and not part of the alienating nature of banking culture. Fifth, independence. We would like to see women increasingly financially independent, because with that comes the greatest freedom to be who you want to be, but also unbiased advice.”

Frankly, these values sound no more feminist than they just sound right. Her acknowledgement that economies must be developed from sustainable foundations, operating on sustainable principles is paramount to the future of the entire world economy and not just a feminine viewpoint.

That social responsibility is so intrinsically part of economics itself is something the world should be reflecting on much more seriously than it is.

The failure to begin to address the disparity between industrialised nations access/control to food and water compared to the third-world, and successive failures to truly address climate change and human consumption, all have their roots in social responsiblity: ours to each other on this planet now and to successive generations.

That women should have the benefit of a more equal say in the running of the economy, the planet, is something which i applaud and encourage, however in practice it’s an idea so patently restricted by so many cultures as to remain a dream of generations yet to come.

Sigurdardóttir wants to develop a balanced economy which is based on it’s whole true costs and for that alone she deserves proper recognition. The fact that the worlds media are paying her scant attention could just be because she’ s yet to succeed; it could be because Iceland is too small; the cynic in me thinks it’s much more to do with her being far more heretical than the media know how to handle.

As a two week young initiate to Twitter and an erstwhile resister of the preceding social media wave - Facebook, MySpace, Bebo - I’m a long way off hyping (or hoping) that Twitter will change our lives or some such.

Yet, this fast growing, highly emulsified blend of social hubbub and content is expanding – pulsing – at a stunning rate. 

However, its not only the network, or the groups, or the search timelines, or Stephen Fry whose army of followers routinely bring down internet sites which he tweets about. 

No. Beyond that, what impresses me is the explosion of complementary applications bursting out along the rivulets of Twitterdom, a Matrix (cue Keanu) of real-time messaging scatter-guns between apps, between people…. and there’s a lot of stuff out there jacking in.

Nova Spivak makes a good summation of why and goes further to say it changes everything. His key points about the differences between Twitter and anything before it are correct and as with every new digital dimension before comes a need to hoist another corporate patard. It seems reasonable to suppose that for existing social media concerns not to assimilate themselves would certainly be shortsighted, at worst arrogant.

With Twitter’s own annualised growth at 35% per month and up to 50% per month for some affiliate apps, it’s evident that the chase to monetise on Twitter is well and truly on (not least by themselves at some point). Indeed there’s a great many companies well ahead of me in seeing this coming, so perhaps it’s just my turn to take notice and that’s the surprise.

And then what… For now Twitter stands as internet Wunderkind and social media Utility company in the making.. the kind of internet property which Google itself might itself assimilate. 

Whatever happens, it will be great show of sprawling, mashup-worthy proportions as it all wires up… Just one question… where shall I plug in my fibre optic lamp?