Having spent quite a lot of the last two years thinking about timelines, Dipity appears to be a fantastic tool for playing with your social activity across a timeline. The site also allows you to view your activity in other ways, including a map view or a flip-book.

Nice…

In one week’s time I, and 11 colleagues from LBi will be travelling to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates to work with Etihad, the national carrier…should be a fun trip, and I’m going to document it on my fresh new photoblog. I’m aiming for a picture a day but we’ll see…there’s going to be plenty of work to do as well…

Ah, Christmas…seems so long ago now. Especially after a working week at LBi. We headed down to Fifehead Magdalen in Dorset to spend some time amongst the cows and horses – and enjoy some fine food along the way. I managed to squeeze in some photography and some guitar amongst other things. Fab…

Well I wish it hadn’t happened, but it has. The other day at work I was checking out the prices for full frame Canon cameras and had started getting a little teeny bit interested in the Canon D5 Mark I – especially now that Amazon have knocked £600 from the price.

Then someone showed me this piece of video, shot by Vincent Laforet with the upcoming Mark II D5. Stunningly good looking, but the camera is £2000….slightly out of my range but techno-lust does strange things to a person…

Damn. Want one.

UPDATE: another piece of video here. Possibly more realistic (and more shaky :)

Interesting piece that positions traditional views of reputation against a sense of history. In a world where everything is increasingly recorded, it asks if this is more important than an ephemeral sense of someone’s worth. Facts versus ‘opinion’…

It seems my return to blogging is out of time. The blogosphere is now rife with professional bloggers, online magazines and long-form writers, according to Wired. Instead it’s much easier to post pictures to Flickr and send Twitter updates.

True ‘dat.

But I guess it depends what you want or need out of writing in public…and if audience size ain’t your prerogative or you’re not eking out a living from your bloggy skills then what the hell. It’s not gonna stop me, I tell you…

UPDATE: Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 seems to point the same way, although it’s interesting that it backs up blogging as being a more reflective approach to writing than many of the upstart microblogging tools allow.

I agree – blogging for me has always been about the ritual of deepening my knowledge in a particular issue. It forces you to critique, to have a position and to enter the conversation…assuming that you have an engaged audience, of course. Otherwise you’re blowing smoke into a gale…

An odd feeling, nostalgia. And when it’s brought back by someone else’s perspective I’m not sure how to react. Anyways, it was interesting to read a post on Left and To the Back about some music that I was once involved with. Especially as playing the guitar is starting to become a part of my life again…

It’s been a while since I’ve posted to this blog, and it’s time I got writing again. No excuses for why I’ve been neglecting it, but I guess I kind of fell out of love with the things I used to write about. A little bit of boredom. Malaise even.

So while I’ve been away, some of the things I’ve been up to:

:: I spent a weekend near Toulouse, at Le Chateaux de St Martory, at the wedding of two old friends

:: had a fab weekend at the End of the Road festival, in Dorset. Some pics of a semi-wet, but mostly lovely weekend in the country.

:: I became a semi-pro photographer, by taking photos at one wedding and one party full of people interested in luxury bathroom fittings. I tell ya, it was surely a rock’n'roll evening.

:: I’ve been working on some interesting projects for LBi, and getting involved in lots of other work too. Nice to be back in the East though.

So, more to folllow…

So now Google jumps into the fray with their Friend Connect, a universal profile that will allow people to maintain one single profile across a number of different social sites. This concept has been talked about for ages now, and I guess it’s good that we’re seeing it come into fruition, with a number of other high profile sites such as Facebook and Myspace making similar plays.

It’s all about data portability, and that has to be a Good Thing, but I really do wonder how each of these sites intend to capture those ‘first use’ users that haven’t stepped into the social web world? Surely the valuations of all the major social players are based on the numbers of people registering with them, their data, and the friends that they bring with them – and as such, are we going to see a shift in how we measure their success on the back of this?

Via: Mashable

Wow. I happened across a white paper produced by IBM & Cambridge University, with the title ‘Succeeding Though Service Innovation‘. It’s a first stab at trying to draw some shape onto what is essentially a fragmented, cross-disciplinary domain, and I have to say, it’s pretty bloody good.

We’ve (at LBi) been talking about service design for a couple of years now, but in that time, I can honestly say that noone has come close to defining exactly what it means, how to do it effectively, or how we hire good people to do it with us. Instead, we see components of ’service thinking’ crop up within discrete projects, aligned to the ascendent position that digital thinking tends to have nowadays. And that can be quite frustrating – especially if you take a more holistic view to solving design challenges.

This paper throws a couple more challenges (and while I can relate to this in the context of working for an uber-agency, it’s just as relevant for small businesses, manufacturers, government, etc):

• one of the things that I feel, now I’m all grown up and working in the industry, is the overwhelming sense of ‘misfit’ within most of the organisations I come into contact with. I’ve a diverse background that spans the arts and science, and I have also been busy developing specialisms within the area I’ve been working within for the last 10 years. But what this means is that I could apply for a number of different roles within different departments in my company – and actually, would be pretty well stimulated by be able to do this. But that breaks the model. So…I’m T-shaped when most companies either want you to be I-shaped, or go into management. This paper points at the need for organisations to mature, and support broader, polymathic skillsets, and indeed, allow them to increase the value they can give back to the business
• Service science / design / thinking requires a truly robust and eclectic model for partnering, if you’re serious about delivering anything. Most businesses tend to operate within sectors or value chains, and this means we need to break out of our silos and start engaging with partners in places we wouldn’t ordinarily look.
• More soon!

But really, the bit I love most about all this stuff is the potential for designing around problems that are rooted in issues caused by our failing environment. It’s gonna take some brave and ambitious souls to start solving some of these problems, for sure. Anyone want to start a business?