So I’m all for Facebook and it’s ilk in a general fashion. In fact I’m spending a lot of my time working out ways for clients to reach customers on these sites; and often advising them that it is the wrong route for their particular campaign.
And I do quite like Facebook and think it’s functionality is excellent. The photo recognition is particulary impressive. But why oh why do very good friends of mine insist on emailing me via Facebook?! They have my usual personal email address and my mobile number so why irritate me by using FB? So I get an email saying such and such has sent you an email via FB when they could’ve just as easily sent the same pub invitation to me via my usual email address.
It’s madness I tell you. Not too mention Facebooks possible identity theft implications that I might get into another day. But you aren’t silly enough to make your profile public now are you?
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I am a bit of a history nut with the whole phrase ‘we study the past to understand the present and throw light upon the future’, reverberating within me whenever I watch the nightly news.
So thought I’d share this interesting fact with you that Martin Kettle wrote about in the Guardian last Saturday. To summarise, it’s generally perceived that the first day of the horrific Battle of the Somme was the bloodiest in our history with 19,200 soldiers falling in just that one day. Apparently though more Englishmen died at the Battle of Towtown on March 29th 1461 with estimates anywhere between 20 and 28,000 killed in just that one day. And killed of course by sword, arrow and spear and not by bullet or shell.
Quite horrific if you imagine then the scale of that slaughter. One in every 100 Englishmen died on that day. So an event with huge impact that doesn’t feature heavily in the teaching of our history and I think certainly deserves some more research from me.
Oh, and the Yorkists won the day against the House of Lancaster in case you didn’t know.
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There has been a lot of comment and fuss over the new branding for the 2012 Olympics in sunny London. These were released to the public yesterday. Have a look at http://www.london2012.com/index.php if you haven’t already seen the papers this morning! Londoners do not seem very happy about this ‘modern’ design. I work in a design studio and the comments and general shrieks of shock from the team were not encouraging. But I am sure we will grow to love it in time.
That aside, I’ve been wondering though whether Wolff Ollins (the brand agency) have been employing a lot of Australian designers? The zero looks a lot like the shape of Australia to me!
Very cheeky if they have managed to get away with that without anyone noticing!
Bruce
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The Cutty Sark was (and hopefully will be again) a majestic ship and very much part of the British maritime history. Not to mention a big draw for people visited Greenwich. I loved going there as a kid and still find joy walking past it on my way to the pub!
The fire is a bit of a tragedy but looks like it can still be saved. Show your support on the Cutty Sark website. It is worth saving.
http://www.cuttysark.org.uk/
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Blue Organizer (I’ll forgive the US spelling!)
http://www.adaptiveblue.com/
This is very interesting and pretty powerful. At the basic level, it understands the context of web page you are viewing and then (upon right-click) gives you access to related links on google, flickr, wikipedia, delicious etc. Also does some very nice stuff for you bloggers out there that I haven’t quite investigated yet.
“What is BlueOrganizer?
BlueOrganizer is the new smart-browsing technology for Firefox. It automatically recognizes things like books, wine, travel destinations and offers contextual shortcuts between your favorite sites. With BlueOrganizer you can instantly send books to your Amazon Wishlist, find wines with similar taste on Wine.com, lookup maps on Google – all from one simple, personalized menu.”
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