Bowblog

Brands are our cathedrals

Old St Paul's Cathedral

Can you imagine a world without brands? Does social media (social networking, social content, social shopping, social this and that…) threaten the very idea of a brand (as it does, for some, the very idea of authority in media)? We’re divided, as usual, on this matter. Some – the euphorics (the geek ‘ultras’) reckon that big, slow moving industrial era entities like brands can’t possibly survive. They’ll be swept aside by ‘bottom-up value creation’. Networks – for the ultras – are what come after brands. Others – me included – think that brands will survive because they’re useful and because they embody an economy’s deepest needs and because – sometimes – we fall in love with them.

The thing about brands is that they’re not superficial expressions of a company’s or an economy’s needs. They may look fluffy or insubstantial (they were probably designed to do so) but they are, in almost every case, a company’s primary device for concentrating resources to produce a return on investment. A brand is a storehouse for talent, ideas, competence and, above all, capital: an entity with known inputs and measurable outputs. A brand is a bloody big, complicated economic institution – like a university or a small town or a professional football team: a machine for the production of social, cultural and economic value.

There is (go on, tell me I’m wrong) no realistic candidate for a replacement for the brand as the number one vehicle for value creation in a business. Nothing else can (or will, for the time being) marshal resources, talent, creativity and capital to produce the return that investors need. Visit any supermarket and you’ll meet ten thousand or more brands, every one of which has a measurable value, makes a known contribution to the bottom line of its owner, carries the hopes and dreams of the people who make it. The big brands are our cathedrals: elaborate, slowly built over tens (or hundreds) of years, eccentric, contingent and expensive to maintain. Like those cathedrals, important brands are anchor institutions for economy and community. They will persist.

Mike Butcher, of this parish, captured on video a fat bloke speaking my words on this topic at last week’s Internet World conference.

Random anthropology

My wife is researching a new haircut. So she finds herself typing the phrase ‘graduated bob‘ (that’s a kind of haircut) into Google Images. The first half a page of results are as you’d expect: photographs of haircuts. After that it gets really funny and strangely poignant. Look at all those Bobs! And every one of them graduated.

There’s something touching about this catalogue of (mostly) American success stories. Men of all ages, all of whom managed to get through some kind of course of study (and many of whom have beards).

I suppose there’s something melancholy about a collection of similar but entirely unconnected people: It’s like random anthropology: wouldn’t it be fun to get in touch with them all and survey them? How are things going? What are you up to? Did you get married? Are you happy? Are your kids happy?

Shaving for a living

A couple of months ago I blogged a company called King of Shaves, one whose product I had always admired and whose brand I thought was interesting – unconventional, quite funny, a bit knowing. I sort of thought it was American: a bit too much chutzpah for a UK company, I thought.

Anyway, it turns out I was wrong – they’re from Chesham in Bucks – and now, dear reader, I work there! I’ve taken a job as interim head of digital, working with the company’s founder Will King (the King himself), his MD Andy Hill and the rest of his small but perfectly formed team to – among other things – bring the firm’s already quite successful web presence up to date and to come up with interesting new digital stuff.

I’m going to be thinking about ecommerce sales, site traffic and opt-in data. If you have expertise or an interesting product in any of those areas I would, of course, be happy to hear from you.

More Norman Wisdom than Osama Bin Laden

Nigerian truck bomb, 21 April 2007

They had an election in Nigeria. While they were getting ready to vote someone tried to blow up the Electoral Commission with a truck bomb. Truck bombs are pretty common these days. In Iraq and Afghanistan and a dozen other countries a truckload of flammable gas is a 100% effective, 100% lethal weapon.

Truck bombs are the insurgent’s weapon of choice now because – conveniently – there’s always a nutcase ready to get behind the wheel, a man who’s decided he’s happy to die for his meaningless cause, a martyr who’ll guide the thing all the way to its intended target.

The Nigerian truck bomb failed – let’s be honest – because a bunch of blokes shoved it down a hill before running away as fast as they could. Their potentially lethal, election-derailing truck bomb crashed into a telegraph pole, causing a small fire which was quickly extinguished.

These blokes just didn’t have a suicidal bone in their bodies. They jammed the biggest rock they could find onto the truck’s accelerator and hoped for the best. “Suicide mission? You never told me it was a suicide mission! Let’s just push it down the hill and bugger off…” In this fevered time of perfect, unimpeachable, hermetic fanaticism, this kind of 100% ineffective, Norman Wisdom-style insurgent action is almost comic relief. If only they were all like that.

More twitter notes

UPDATE: This post recently passed its FIFTH BIRTHDAY!

Twitter is a simple application with one real function: notification. Twitter posts are called ‘updates’ (or sometimes ‘tweets’). People use Twitter to tell the world practically anything but usually what they’re up to right now.

Twitter is clever because it’s a platform. Dozens of applications already use it as a service. Businesses and individuals are using it to distribute notifications, links, reminders, press releases, even new content – stuff created specially for distribution via twitter (which is going to be very interesting). People are going to build businesses on top of it, just as they’re doing now on top of Google and other web 2.0 businesses.

Strictly, in fact, Twitter is clever because it’s a metaplatform, since it sits on top of a bunch of other platforms: networks, operating systems, applications. It’s all about the evolution of the ‘stack’: services like Twitter are slotted into the hierarchy of communications services above and below existing ones – between the bare wires at the bottom and the highly organised content and ideas at the top – making the whole thing richer and more useful.

Twitter is clever because it works on mobile, web and IM (And some other places too). Being at home in several different environments is quite a trick. Really, the only way to achieve this is to be very simple. Twitter is very simple: 140 characters of text. No pictures, no rich media, no metadata, no nothing. It’s lowest common denominator media (in a good way). Twitter’s richness is all in the contributions of its users

Twitter is clever because it’s social – participation involves building a network. Being successful on Twitter will require you to be popular or at least interesting.

Twitter is clever because it’s human. ‘Following’ someone who’s got something interesting or clever or useful or beautiful to say feels like a real privilege. As a follower you’re permitted access to something intimate and personal – you’re an insider. Getting a Twitter update from someone interesting is a real treat. Coming back to your mobile after a meeting to find a dozen is even better.

Twitter is clever because it’s made by its users. It’s a 100% user-generated form. Twitter is an unobtrusive (‘dumb’) carrier for the words of its users. Twitter – at least for the time being – promises no rich media additions, no video, no chat and no music. Twitter hackers, though, will probably provide all of the above.

Twitter is clever because it’s up-to-date. Attention spans are collapsing, content is distributed in ever smaller chunks, immediacy is a critical value for dozens of products. Twitter’s got the lot.

Widows

My Mother, Bridie Bowbrick, in The Mercy Hospital, Cork, Ireland in April 2007

Three weeks ago my Mum lost her husband. That makes her a widow. She’s joined the universal club of the widows. The thing about widows, once you notice, is that they’re everywhere. They surround us but we hardly see them. Join any queue at the post office or ride on the lower deck of a daytime bus, though, and you’ll be among them. We ignore them because if we didn’t they’d break our hearts.

These widows are a kind of global storehouse of grief. They keep it for us so we don’t have to. Mum spent 50 years (minus two weeks) married to my Dad. Her job now, now that he’s gone, is to not have him, to be without him. She’s quietly inherited the melancholy role of the millions who preceded her. She articulates and embodies loss for the rest of us.

She’s a clever and independent person, my Mum – not a cipher or a shadow or a proxy for a dead man – but the implacable logic of widowhood has her. She’ll move now through a world where she’s grudgingly cared for but quietly resented for surviving. Our societies hate widows because of everything their existence says about our mortality and about the foreshortened vitality of the men they survive.

Women live longer but only so that we can despise their longevity, make jokes about them, patronise and ignore them. We’re mean and miserable about widows. We waste their wisdom and their insight. We falsely categorise them as dotty or wicked: little old ladies. We should love and respect widows but we can’t because they remind us of where we’re going. And for that we can’t forgive them.

The inevitable Twitter post

I’ve been twittering for a couple of months now. I’m not actually addicted (I could give it up any time) but I’m up to a couple of hundred updates and I’ve got two separate accounts going. I suppose you’ve been reading about it all over the place so I’ll stick to what I’ve learnt:

It’s a micropublishing platform. My own mini twitter venture, Listen With Bowbrick, teaches me it’s a great way to describe/curate/link to media resources and that these resources ought to be ‘in-line’. I mean reviewing theatre performances or restaurants might work but really you want to be quickly describing and linking to stuff your followers can view or listen to or interact with right now. Listen With Bowbrick points at Real streams of radio shows, for instance.

It’s a universal command line. It’s early days but we’re already seeing people hooking up twitter IDs to web services of various kinds. A news or weather service can just passively message followers or, more interesting, followers could ‘direct message’ a twitter ID to trigger a personalised response. I don’t see any difficulty at all in grafting an economic model onto this kind of service either, especially since mobile operators are already making money from twitter via txt revenues. In fact, I wonder if twitter is the kind of service that has such universal, cross-network appeal that it might start to bust up the operators’ partial monopolies.

It’s hyper-constrained: 140 characters (the 160 characters of a txt message minus 20 for your twitter ID) and that’s it. No pictures, no sound, even URLs are difficult (hence the heavy reliance on tinyurl.com). This turns out to be a good thing: simplicity drives ubiquity, limitations promote creativity. There will be pressure to add stuff – imagine a shozu/twitter mashup or a twitter/flickr hybrid, or playlist distribution for music retailers, or a some kind of twitter plugin for MySpace. Blah blah blah. but I’m pretty sure this kind of pressure will be resisted for the time being and that new functionality will be confined to the ‘lingo’ (twitter’s command set) and to exposing more of the application via the API – that’s how you get a big network going.

It’s socially fascinating. I think the statistical social anthropologists will have a field day here: a sort of automated version of sitting watching twittervision. Parsing twitter updates should expose underlying patterns and trends (at least for participating communities) on a more-or-less real-time basis. Instant archaeology. I hope somebody’s keeping all this stuff. Mining twitter data will be a big area for grad school archaeologists in the 22nd Century.

Incidentally, it’s a pretty good place to do an informal survey or a poll (a twurvey or a twoll). I did one yesterday – five questions to Listen With Bowbrick followers that produced dozens of useful responses in ten minutes. Remarkable.

A dictionary of my Dad

Last Wednesday my dad, George Bowbrick, died. He died in a hospital in Dublin a week after we learnt he had a bone tumor and a secondary lung cancer. He’d been in real pain for quite a long time and various stupid doctors had diagnosed this pain as ‘frozen shoulder’, which is common and non-fatal. That’s another story.

My Dad belonged to the generation that reached adulthood right after the Second World War. He lived through the war – and right in the thick of the blitz – in Blackfriars, close to the river. His father died young after years of illness and incapacity, caused in part by the privations of his first world war service. His mother, Nora, by my dad’s account a funny and indomitable woman, from the far end of the Western end of Ireland, fed and clothed and sheltered the seven of them entirely on her own (she died early herself – diabetes and decades of hard work – so I never met her).

Like his brothers and sisters he left school at fourteen and went to work (at Bennie Lifts, now defunct). Later, having done his National Service in Japan and Hong Kong, he got a job on the buses, at Vauxhall Bus Garage (on the 10s and the 73s if I’m remembering it right). That’s where he met my Mum – she was a conductor too, a couple of years older than him and not long out of the army (the ATS) herself. She’d come to Britain as a teenager from rural Kilkenny in the green middle of Ireland before the end of the war.

Along the way he acquired a love of learning and began to improve himself. He would always credit his extraordinary Aunt Emma for this. Even as a kid, his brothers and sisters thought he was funny, a bit unworldly. These days we might have called him a nerd. He collected stamps (once Terry and Laurie, the tearaway younger brothers, sold his whole collection for a shilling and he cried). Books became a passion: in his study in West Cork, where I’m writing this, I just counted 55 dictionaries (I’m not counting the dozens of encyclopaedias, guides, handbooks, companions, yearbooks, almanacs and gazetteers either).

Knowledge – proper, factual knowledge – stood, for my Dad, for freedom. Freedom from ignorance and poverty and the arbitrary nature of existence. We shared that love of knowledge but I think the difference is a lack of urgency: I guess I can take it or leave it. For him it was life or death.

His commitment to learning went a long way. He always used to tell us that he was leaving his body to medical science and I suppose I thought he was at least half serious. It turns out, of course, that he was wholly serious and, as I write, he’s serving a useful purpose at the University Hospital in Cork City.

After he died we learnt that a condition of his deal with the medics was that we had to provide a coffin – a coffin we’d never see – for his journey in a van from Dublin to Cork. The fact that we wound up paying the bloody undertakers a thousand Euro for this pointless box would have made him laugh and shout, I’m sure.

The Irish friends and family who adopted him here in Cork – good Catholics all – are pretty sure he’s up in heaven looking down on us now and they reckon this would serve the old atheist right.

He was strong and happy and loving and resourceful and never without an opinion. Me and my Mum, my family and all his friends, old and new, will miss him madly.

George Joseph Bowbrick, 6th November 1931 – 7th March 2007.

Those dictionaries

A list of the 55 dictionaries that I found amongst my dad’s books when he died. Back to my blog post about him.

Dictionary of Gastronomy

Collins Cobuild Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs

Dictionnaire des Noms Propres

A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names

Dictionary of Inventions

Dictionary of Pub Names

A Dictionary of Eponyms

The Oxford Mini Dictionary of Twentieth-Century World History

BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names

The Penguin Concise Dictionary of Biographical Quotation

A Biographical Dictionary of Scientists

A Dictionary of Building

Dictionary of British Natural History

The Penguin Dictionary of Commerce

A Dictionary of Science

The Penguin Dictionary of Astronomy

The Dictionary of Art and Artists

A Dictionary of Civil Engineering

The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology

Oxford Concise English Dictionary

A Dictionary of HIstorical Slang

A Dictionary of Political Thought

Dictionary of the Bible

Dictionary of the Environment

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music

Smaller Slang Dictionary

The Rhyming Dictionary

Dictionary of Wines and Spirits

The Chambers Dictionary of Science and Technology (vols 1 & 2)

The Penguin Dictionary of Twentieth Century History

The Penguin Dictionary of English and European History

American Heritage Dictionary

Collins Robert French Dictionary

Concise Russian and English Dictionary

Dictionary of Mathematics

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music

Everyman’s Dictionary of Economics

Everyman’s Dictionary of Dates

Everyman’s Dictionary of European Writers

Collins Authors and Printers Dictionary

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera

Dictionary of English Usage

Dictionaire National des Communes de France

The Oxford Classical Dictionary

The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs

A Dictionary of Famous Quotations

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary

Dictionary of Differences

Langenscheidt’s Pocket Dictionary (German)

American Pocket Medical Dictionary

Dictionary of the Human Body

A Visual Dictionary of Art

The Compact Edition of the Dictionary of National Biography

A Dictionary of Contemporaries

Back to A Dictionary of my Dad.

Radio twittering

Be my Twitter friend if you want to know what I’m listening to on the radio.

I know I’m always going on about BBC Radio 4 here: ‘jewel in the crown’, ‘best speech radio in the world’, ‘liberal education in a box’ and all that. Forgive me but here I go again. The network is 40 years old this year but really much older. Radio 4 replaced The Home Service which itself replaced a bunch of earlier national and regional stations, one of which was 2LO, the first proper British radio station, launched by the fledgling BBC in 1922. So, when you tune into Radio 4 you’re really listening to 80-odd years of continuous British radio history – there are even several shows on the network that have been running for longer than 50 years.

Radio 4 and the BBC in general are funded from a licence fee, a gloriously anachronistic compulsory levy on every household with a TV that really annoys libertarians and free market ultras but seems, somehow, to make perfect sense to the British public. So we – those of us with TVs anyway – pay directly for the corporation’s output and that gives us certain rights over it. It’s ours. This is why I quite often rip a Real Media stream from bbc.co.uk and stick it up on my server without worrying about the tap on the door in the dawn. Although I probably shouldn’t, nobody’s going to stop me.

One thing I’ve always wanted to do, though, is find a way of reviewing and linking to radio progs in a slightly more spontaneous way than blogging them, which is a bit of a pain at the best of times. So now I’ve found it. I’m going to use Twitter – the brilliant hybrid of messaging and publishing that’s got the geeks’ thumbs twitching. I’ve been enjoying Twitter for a couple of weeks already – one of those genuinely fertile consumer tech innovations whose various parts have existed here and there for years but which really makes sense now that they’re all joined together.

I’ve created a Twitter account called LWB (Listen With Bowbrick) which I’m going to use exclusively for micro-reviews and, where available, links to Real Streams or web sites for radio shows I really enjoy. If you want to know what I’m listening to on the radio you just need to add me as a friend. Click here to do so (you’ll obviously need a free Twitter account).

The reason I like Twitter for this job is because, like I said, it’s spontaneous and you can do it from your mobile but also because it’s ephemeral. If I tell you that I’m listening to The World Tonight (which I am) then I can provide a link to the stream without worrying about the fact that it will overwritten by the next one in seven days (which is why I hoovered up all those Real streams in the first place).

I’m going to try, where I provide links, to make sure they go to stable pages in the BBC’s nifty programme directory – they look like this one and have a unique ID at the end of the URL. From there you should be able to learn about the show while getting to a Real Stream if it still exists. I’m kind of assuming that the go-ahead geeks at the Beeb will want to offer some kind of slightly more formal Beeb/Twitter mashup soon enough – like something, for instance, that will allow you to embed a short URL automatically or something that would work from a mobile (wouldn’t it be entirely cool if you could receive a tweet referencing a Radio 4 show on your mobile and then click to listen to it?).