DigitalAgency

Belated Christmas Greetings:

(Update, nice response to card from me old mucker, uber Copywriter Chris Miller:)

Video quality test:

Please ignore this, it's the same movie as before, but using a different codec/video host to previous YouTube iteration.

Just a test for me:

CoffeeMorningBirthday
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Lloyd's bank offline:

I'm in a rush, getting ready for a busy day.

I need to pay a bill online sharpish though.

Will some one tell Lloyds to reset their clocks, (and perhaps even their attitude), when they get chance please?

As you cab see from my computer clock it's actually 6.44 in the morning. But Lloyds think it's still sometime between 12:00 am and 4:00 am.

"Hello, Lloyds, is anybody there?"

Probably not.

If you get the impression that I'm less than impressed by my bank Lloyds, you'd be right.

(And I'm not the only one.)

Time to move on methinks.

Business and Pleasure:

A travelling week.

Fly to Newquay in Cornwall today.

Stay with pals Tim, Amanda and their son; 'Man of Steel' tonight in St Tudy.

Then off to Shepton Mallet tomorrow to see brand new clients; Alex and Jane Nicol of the small, but beautifully-formed, Spencerfield Spirit company at the Bath & West Show.

Then onward to Paddington for Friday meeting with Charlie, Chrissy & Paul of the very wonderful; Red Spider.

Back down to Cornwall for weekend R&R, then return to Edinburgh Monday.

Back from holiday:

Fully restored.

Marvellous 18th birthday barbie for Joe, our hosts son.

Long-overdue catch-ups with old pals.

Sensational meals at Rick Stein's Seafood Restaurant and St Petroc's.

Clumped in with terrific coastal path walks, good weather, (eventually), patchy internet/mobile phone access, (hurrah!), and truly magnificent Sharps locally brewed beer.

Perfect, perfect, perfect.

Off on holiday for a few days:

Going down to see old pals in Cornwall for their kids 18th birthday bash.

Back Wednesday next week.

Picture from Sharps Brewery website, purveyors of truly magical Cornish beer.

Last night Red Bull gave the Edinburgh New Town Hashers wiings:

Thanks to liquide, distributors of Red Bull, The New Town Hash Runners had an extra spring in their collective steps last night at their charity run in aid of StreetSmart.

Wearing obligatory Red Dresses, and fuelled by copious amounts of Red Bull, many a runner looked forward to chalking up a personal best, were it not for an obligatory beer stop one mile from the finish.

See the flickr set here.

Watching cheese mature:

Well it sure beats watching paint dry.

I was listening to the Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning, when they did a feature on a Somerset Cheese maker who'd put a web cam up for a few months looking at a cheese maturing.

What I thought was brilliant was that this centuries old tradition was using present day marketing to great effect. (A 5 minute slot on the Today programme all about the brand? That'll do nicely.)

If they hadn't put a web cam up, if they didn't have a myspace page, (which I hasten to add they do, with hundreds of cheesy friends,) then this would have been a non-story.

The presenters of Today even gave out the url and invited listeners to go and look at the webcam.

As your humble reporter, I diligently did so, it was wonderfully low-fi and ever so slightly Monty Pythonish, but I noticed that 500,000 other visits to the site had already been racked up.

Yep. HALF A MILLION. To a Shepton Mallett cheese producer's web site.

My guess is that the figures will go even more stratospheric after the Today airing. (Not to mention the long tail benefits and indeed Google ranking effect, thanks to the BBC's links.)

But they might want to revisit their allocation of server capacity, in order to meet demand. After giving out the url on air today, the servers crashed.

Marvellous, name making stuff, and only possible methinks via Web 2.0 enthusiasms.

ps. On visiting the cheese site, I couldn't help but notice a striking resemblance to the TV set graphic the company my Missus works for, whitespace. I wonder if they could be related?

(Cheesecam)

(Whitespace home page.)

UPDATE: I'm told by the Whitespacers that the image was sourced from iStockPhoto, which explains the co-incidental useage.

pps. The cheesecam reminded me affectionately of the Cambridge Coffee Cam many years ago.(But you're probably to young to remember that.)

Blogging platform:

I really like Typepad as my blogging platform du jour, but there are some things I prefer in Wordpress.

(And some things I hate, like not opening a new tab or window to view a post as I write, forcing me instead to do the 'back button samba'.)

Recently I have been working on a blog for a client using Wordpress, last night, well up against a deadline, there was a server problem at Wordpress and things went a bit weird.

Not the time for the site to go down.

However with a 404 error message like this, you can't keep a smile from your face for long:

Think Humanist:

Juliet, one of our Friday Coffee Morningers, has been doing some media work for the Humanist Society of Scotland.

She had the rather Web 2.0 idea of matching Radio Four's non-secular; 'Thought for the Day', with a series of podcasts from the Humanist, secular perspective.

Here's what Juliet had to say about the idea:

'When I started doing the media work for the Humanist Society of Scotland one of my firsts thoughts was to call up the people who produce thought for the day on Good morning Scotland and the Today programme and ask if they would have humanists on. they said no, they wouldn't. I thought that was a shame then saw a good opportunity for PR. So I decided to set up a website where we could podcast secular thoughts for the day and launch it with five notable figures podcasting for the first week, launching the site on Darwin day.

Tim (Mr Juliet. Ed.) came up with Think Humanist as a name and we have Stewart Lee (Jerry Springer the Opera creator), Kate Hudson (Chair CND) and Humanist philosophers AC Grayling, Julian Baggini, Nigel Warburton podcasting this week.

The site has been linked to over 7000 humanist orientated organisations throughout the world.

Obviously we hope to get on Thought for the Day at some point but we intend to keep the site going and invite thinkers from around the world to podcast and will continue to try and get notable people to podcast too. Humanists such as Stephen Fry, Harold Pinter and Iain Banks are all on our wishlist.'

(Mike again:) What I particularly like about these podcasts, apart from the rivetingly intelligent perspective of course, are the high production values, which let's be honest, are often lacking in many a podcast.

Lots of people bang on about consumer/user generated media, and that it's 'the future', but it takes a professional ear, and a lot of skill to make broadcasts like these. Something most of the 'user generators' haven't a scooby about.