Hi my name is Ulrik Hogrebe. This is a random collection of stuff that occupies my mind at any given moment. Probably something to do with design, art, music and pop culture. For examples of my work, go here.

The Beeb, my own projects (updates on this soon!), the radio show, a festival and several minor and major life changes later, I’ve realized that I haven’t done this for a while. Although I swore I’d never do the “sorry for not updating, all my faithful readers” thing – I now find myself doing just that. In other words, sorry Jonas. I’ll do better.

Interview: Hunter Hunt-Hendrix Of Liturgy
tags: music, black metal, creativity
Responsible for the so-called 3rd wave of Black Metal, this is a must-read if you are into transcendental black metal or generally the more extreme sides of music.
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix talks blast vs. burst beat, the intellectual side of Black Metal and the destruction of form as a creative act. Actually, if you are creative in general, this is worth a skim at the very least. Preferably while listening to this: Liturgy – Renihilation

Essay: The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan
tags: media, mcluhan, future of everything, mindmelt
You will need to make yourself a coffee and make sure you are sitting comfortably for this one. Playboy (when Playboy was cool and smart) interviews Mr. McLuhan in 1969, with the mission to let him express and explain his theories in his own words – with as much space as he needs. What follows is an extensive but terribly articulate romp through McLuhan’s thoughts, from the usual mankind’s relationship with technology, to the re-tribalization of man, sex, drugs and even race. Veering from the brilliant to the slightly… errh… odd, this is a fascinating look into one of the greatest minds of our technological era. HIGHLY recommended, if nothing just for having your mind blown on a sunday morning.

A Life Worth Ending
tags: health, ageing, death, future of medicare
This one is hardcore, but certainly though-provoking. Michael Wolff talks about his mothers final years with a body that was physically fine but a mind that had slipped into advanced dementia. With our increasingly healthy lifestyles we might live longer, but the flip side of this is that it might be harder to die – and that sometimes, with the onset of dementia and depends, life may become a curse and death a blessing. As Mr. Wolff puts it: “The traditional exits, of a sudden heart attack, of dying in one’s sleep, of unreasonably dropping dead in the street, of even a terminal illness, are now exotic ways of going. The longer you live the longer it will take to die. The better you have lived the worse you may die. The healthier you are—through careful diet, diligent exercise, and attentive medical scrutiny—the harder it is to die.”.

Welcome to the Future Nauseous
tags: future of everything, futurism,
Essential reading for anyone who has ever dabbled in predicting what the future will be – and I know most of you probably have jobs where this is a large part of what you do. Venkatesh Rao believes the future is here but invisible to us. Or as he puts it “we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.”

The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Diamond Heist
tags: heist, crime, awesome
OK, seriously! Best heist story eva! You saw Oceans 11 right? Well this is better – and it’s real. Somehow, it is supremely comforting to know, that people who are capable of breaching a three ton steel vault with a state-of-the-art alarm system still exist in our otherwise super-regulated society. They even have cool nick-names like “The Genius”, “The Monster” and “Speedy”. Awesome!

The Facebook Fallacy
tags: advertising, facebook, business models
Albeit a bit doom and gloom, Mr. Wolff does make a strong argument for why Facebook – and ultimately the web – needs to find a new and better business model than relying on advertising.

Information Design for an Instrumented World
tags: user data, big data, visualization, design
I seem to be forever stuck in the user data space. Don’t get me wrong, it continues to be an exceptionally interesting thing to get ones head around. This deck of slides from Hannah Donovan, which essentially deals with how to make user data meaningful to users, is really simple, useful and generally worthwhile for anyone who has anything to do with “the comet tales of personal history trailing in our wake”. Awww thats a nice mental image isn’t it?

Charles Manson interview with Charlie Rose
tags: manson, 60s, counterculture, murder
Mr. Manson at his most and least lucid in this video interview. Manson has been a pet-fascination of mine for a while (no, I don’t plan on moving to a ranch and starting a “family”) and this interview is one of the better ones out there. As the killer of the american dream (What? Nice middle-class girls taking up knives, butchering innocents???) and destroyer of the hippy movement (What? Nice long-haired hippies taking up knives, butchering innocents???), Manson frames himself as the ultimate product of society – to paraphrase Manson himself “I was fathered by all men who came before me”. Agree, disagree, think what you want – Manson marked the beginning and end of eras.

The Nature of Consciousness: How the Internet Could Learn to Feel
tags: artificial intelligence, sci-fi, HAL, complexity
Great article on consciousness that quite frankly boggles the mind. From the incredible complexity of the human mind (look out for the part where Christof Koch explains the complexity of the wiring of the human mind), to why the internet might feel sad, this is the stuff of pure science fiction – except it’s real and happening all around us. Beautiful.

Stop publishing web pages
tags: content, web, design, topics, streams
I had a (highly theoretical and in no way indicative of anything) conversation with a colleague a while ago, which basically ran along the lines of “What if we stopped sending people to new pages all the time and tried to keep them on page. Say we turned the whole thing into a tumblr page? What if the history section of the BBC was just one page? What would that do?” This seems to tie in with the current buzz around topic pages, categorization as the new organizing principle and of course streams, glorious streams. This is an interesting read – to go with a somewhat painful implementation. However, many of the principles are good, yet the strain the Washington Post puts on the User in terms of actual discovery, is too much I think. Maybe if you just flipped the principle – start with the most relevant, allow users to add sources rather than deselect them?

One morning I woke up with this image on my phone. I don’t know whence it came. As usual, it is completely unrelated to anything at all.

The future of advertising: Many, lightweight interactions over time
Tags: advertising, interactions, design
Paul Adams works with Facebook. He has some interesting thoughts on how advertising should think many sustained interactions rather than traditional “big splash” type advertising. Strangely I have been thinking something along the same lines with my own job in UX&D at the BBC. We tend to design for finite interactions manifest as “grand narratives”. Users come to the site, perform a number of tasks – usually in sequence – in order to complete some sort of goal. I think reality is often much more fragmented, as people jump between tabs, screens, experiences, content etc., over both long and short periods of time. We should be designing for this sort of non-linear and undirected interaction – which probably also involves taking a long hard look at our toolsets – user journeys, scamps, etc. Non of this is fully formed in my mind yet – and some may turn out to be supplemental to what we have now, rather than an actual paradigm shift. But it is none the less interesting. Now stop listening to me pontificate and go read Paul Adam´s thing.

Myself Quantified
Tags: the quantifiable self, data, prevention, health
The most compelling case for personal data tracking /the “quantifiable self” type activity I have read, as Dan Hon takes you through his experience with Diabetes and data. It’s personal and real – and hints at the sheer awesomeness of what this could mean for treatment and prevention. Both for individuals and for society as a whole. Also, a passionate plea against data silos, wether intentional or not.

Mail Supremacy – the newspaper that rules Britain
Tags: daily mail, everything that is wrong with the world, news, media
I have a healthy loathing of the Daily Mail (Quick! See that disclaimer about opinions being my own and not my employers, please) and I believe that they pander specifically to everything that is wrong and low in human beings. I also have a healthy respect for them – you have to be pretty tight with your operation to exceed the New York Times in web visits which Mail Online did in January this year. This is a good read from The New Yorker on The Daily Mail, Mail Online, Editor Paul Dacre (who is a bizarre character upon himself) and everything in between. Must read.

Technology, art, and why the future of branding is nonfiction
Tags: future of some more stuff, branding, art, technology
A short but thought provoking read where Douglas Rushkoff amongst other things talks about the reversal of roles between artists and technologists. It’s the good five minute read to set you up for a good long ponder.

Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing
Tags: organization, management, games
A peak into what it’s like working for Valve (creators of gaming greats like Half-Life and Portal amongst others). No hierarchies, do what you think is most valuable for the company, no managers and so on – a completely new form of corporate management. Or rather, lack there of. I have a bit of a fascination about this for several reasons – partly because I instinctively – and ideologically – believe in this form of non-organized organization, partly because I think it might be a emerging business paradigm that people need to take seriously. Related to this – check Paul Thomas, the “BBC Business Doctor” who operates along the same lines. There is a documentary here, which I admittedly haven’t watched. However, having seen him speak I am pretty sure it’s worth a watch.

The liberal betrayal of Bradley Manning
Tags: Bradley Manning, Wikileaks, whistleblower, liberals, hypocrisy
Bradley Manning is the young soldier who leaked classified details of the Irak war to Wikileaks, exposing everything from the killing of Iraqi civilians to complicity in torture. To my mind, he did his civil duty – to blow the whistle when something is going on that needs to be in the eye of the public. Although much of what Manning revealed went on during the Bush years, it is the Obama administration that has imprisoned him, detained him for almost two years without trial under circumstances that are questionable at best and Obama himself has even proclaimed his guilt without proper trial. This article deals with liberal double standards and why Manning isn’t, paradoxically, a national hero in line with Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

Hacks of Valor – Why Anonymous Is Not a Threat to National Security
Tags: Anonymous, civil disobedience, internets,
Yay Anonymous! This quote should cover it “That is power — a species of soft power that allows millions of people, often in different countries, each of whom is individually weak, to surge in opposition to a given program or project enough to shape the outcome. In this sense, Anonymous has become a potent symbol of popular dissatisfaction with the concentration of political and corporate power in fewer and fewer hands.” Good read.

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
Tags: NSA, secrets, crypto
The NSA will break all your codes and listen to everything you say. It’s like Cold War surveillance, turned inward… and outward. Actually toward everybody. Also they use words like yottabytes.

Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? -Full Post
Tags: music industry, copyright, technology, artists
I love banging on about the music industry and Hollywood. This article is, however, a defense of the music industry – and a somewhat compelling one at that. Personally, I dont think it justifies the business models of old, but I do think it makes a strong argument for looking at the business models of now with a bit more criticism – and especially at Amazon, Apple, Google etc., who arent doing a great job of reinvesting in the content makers whose content they build their distribution systems on. Also I think this reveals something which I think is becoming more and more apparent – which is basically, that our new corporate tech overlords are quickly evolving into just as shitty a deal as what we had before. Shame on you!

Bonus
Crossed – wish you were here
Tags: just plain ol’ weird
I like web comics. I read a ton of them. This one opens with a man shagging a dolphin through it’s blowhole – and then goes on to describe a post-apocalyptic Britain where people have run amok in a sex-crazed kill frenzy, while a small bunch of survivors seek refuge on an island of the coast of Scotland (I think). What’s not to like? BTW I am aware that reading web comics makes you an instant geek. Obviously I stand proud by my geekery.

Unrelated picture of the cool rigging in one of the BBC studios

This has proved popular (i had a comment!!!), so I will make it a recurring thing. 10 or so articles that I have read and enjoyed in February. Less directly work-related stuff this month, but lots of nice long form journalism. Enjoy over coffee on a Sunday – maybe with some Arthur Russel which has been haunting my iTunes a lot lately.

The Great Tech War Of 2012
Tags: innovation, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple
Fast Company has a thorough breakdown of the battle of the Titans. You can almost hear the “In this corner…” announcements and the roar of the crowds. Will this be the year we announce a winner? Or a at least an early frontrunner? Scarily enough, who wins the tech wars feels almost as urgent as the US Presidential primaries.

Newspapers, paywalls and core users
Tags: print,media, pay walls, revenue models
Having worked for e-Types and having done a fair share of thinking about newspapers and the future of print media in general, this article by  Clay Shirky was an interesting and illuminating read, full of concise and visionary thinking, Mr. Shirky rounds things like the death of bundled media, pay wall versus free, why papers need to think twice about taking the Murdochian approach and finally how papers need to wrap their head around rewarding, rather than penalizing their Users for wanting their content.

One Town’s War on Gay Teens
Tags: Queer, teens, Michelle Bachmann, conservative christians, suicide
The tragic results of bigotry and hate and the causalities of the Christian right’s campaign against LGTBs . Heartrending, infuriating and sad. Highly recommended, just for being a great piece of long form journalism. Even more for shedding light on such an urgent and important story.

Netflix’s Head of Content Sarandos queues up an original programming strategy
Tags: recommendation engines, biz models, user data, content
Recommendation engines and user data has become a bit of a pet hobby with me because of my current work. This is a great article for content producers, commissioners, designers, biz devs and anybody else who works in the video/TV field on why they should think about user data.

Cute Inc.
Tags: Japan, cute, kawaii
Funny article on Japan and the proliferation (and monetization) of cute. It’s old (1994 I think) but still worth the read. Contains references to Pikachu 747s and Hello Kitty weddings and men’s couture lines.

Drones and Democracy & The Crash and Burn Future of Robot Warfare
Tags: drone wars, skynet, democracy, #fail
It’s a double-header on the Drone Wars and the military, political and civilian consequences of our new killing machines. Also, the thing about them going rogue gives me the willies #AllHailOurRobotOverlords

How Companies Learn Your Secrets
Tags: user data, tracking, Target
Definitely this months must-read – a glorious romp through corporate data targeting land and the story of how Target figured out you are pregnant. Explains exactly how powerful and pervasive personal data is these days. And extremely well written too.

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
Tags: warehouses, sweatshops, e-commerce, darkside
Wow, this is hardcore. I had heard these places were bad, but I had no idea. Something to think on next time you grumble about the cost of shipping. This is what it’s like packaging up all the stuff you buy on teh interwebz. Like an evil Santa’s workshop.

The Boy Who Played with Fusion
Tags: fusion, reactor, teenager
The feel-good story of the bunch. A 15-year old Super-Brain builds his own fusion reactor, creating a plasma core 40 times hotter than the core of the sun. Wish I had thought of that when I was 15… And if that’s not your taste, here is an article about white supremacists and prison violence.

This is a completely unrelated picture, but it looks kinda kewl…

Since I read a lot of these – and since other people seem to find my tweets about them interesting – I will try to summarize 10 of the best/ most noteworthy each month. Which will also hopefully give people (another?) reason to return to my ramblings every now and then.

It’s Not Your Face, It’s Ours
Tags – face recognition, technology, New World Order
Jan Chipchase, The Indiana Jones of ethnography offers a rather dystopian view of face recognition. Personally, I think face recognition is kind of cool, but hard not to agree with Chipchase on what has the potential to become a fundamentally Orwellian technology. Am already looking forward to the various legal battles, scandals and general chaos that will ensue when this stuff becomes ubiquitous.

QR Codes Are the Roller-Skating Horses of Advertising
Tags – QR Codes, advertising, annoyance
Whenever I hear the word QR code, I reach for my revolver.

The Friction in Frictionless Sharing
Tags – facebook, sharing, User Owned Data
A very succinctly put analysis of why Facebook’s frictionless sharing is really quite annoying.

When did the Remix become a requirement
Tags – remix, music
Nice article on the remix phenomenon and it’s evolvement through different genres and technologies. Good “sunday morning over coffee and 90s east coast hip hop” read. I would recommend Tribe or Dilla.

Rick Falkvinge: the Swedish radical leading the fight over web freedoms
Tags – copyright, pirate party, obsolete business models
“Musicians earn 114% more since the advent of Napster. The average income per artist has risen 66%, with 28% more artists being able to make a living off their hobby. What is true is that there’s an obsolete middle market of managers. And in a functioning market, they would just disappear.”

Chief ACTA Eurocrat quits in disgust at lack of democratic fundamentals in global copyright treaty
Tags – copyright, ACTA, EU, law
Another week, another daft piece of copyright legislation to combat it seems. This article is interesting because it A) it is about a person on the inside, saying enough is enough and B) kicks up a whole of questions around how laws are made at a European level. Ahhh the days you could just sit back and point at other countries and their corporate… erh, I mean corrupt judicial systems. Transparency is cool, although depressing.

Musicians praise Bit Torrent and Creative Commons
tags – copyright, bit torrent, business models
More proof that there really is an emerging business model for CC music and the music industry in general. Now would be the time to start experimenting with alternate business models, if you are say… a large multimillion dollar recording and distribution music company.

Inside Supreme – Anatomy of a streetwear cult
Tags – fashion, branding, streetwear, pop culture
Nice read on the notoriously shy streetwear brand Supreme and how they built their brand. Also reminds me of this BBC interview with Shawn Stussy from the 90s (Im guessing).

5 Big Ideas For A New Economy
Tags – economy, new models
Well we need some new ones, right? We can all sort of agree on that, right?

The Yin and the Yang of Corporate Innovation
Tags – Innovation, Steve Jobs, Google, Apple
In the wake of Steve Jobs’ death there seems to be a slew of people rushing to hail the “Genius Leader” as the only innovation model that matters, usually using the dreaded “design by consensus” as the polar extreme. I personally think it is slightly more nuanced than (benevolent) design fascism and dysfunctional democracy: great leaders can balance both – honestly it is to easy to just don the iron gauntlet. Apart from the horrible “innovation as jazz” metaphor, this article does present a slightly more nuanced argument.

It’s still January, so I can still sneak in a quick overview of the years reading. Being an avid bibliophile, this amounts to a sizable amount of dead cellulose since I believe that traditional flipping of dried pulp, earmarking and general coffee staining is the way to go when it comes to the #LongRead. Thats how I roll – or flip if you will

The Art of Immersion, Frank Rose
Having read Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture back in the day, this seemed like a natural progression. A good read on all things transmedia and UGC (user generated content) which spurred a brief flurry of interest in harnessing Otaku fan culture for content makers and steeled my belief in content production from below.

Nudge – improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, Thaler & Sunstein
Probably should have read this when it was getting a lot of hype, but simply didn’t get around to it. One of the books that started the “persuasive design” wave and an interesting, though slightly dated read. Worth it so you can chin stroke with confidence whenever someone starts ranting about the value of default settings and such.

Game Frame – Using Games as a Strategy For Success, Aaron Dignan
I picked this up because I saw Aaron Dignan’s PSFK talk and thought “what a delightful, humorous and non-gushy young man”, who seems to have a balanced and nuanced opinion on the G-word. Somehow he comes across a lot less nuanced in the book. It has a framework though. I like frameworks.

Content, Cory Doctorow
More of Cory’s crusade against copyright. Nothing new but always a good read and a peak into the mechanics of DRM and the general intellectual property debate. Link takes you to a free download of the book over on Cory’s site.

The Brand Gap, Martin Neumeier
Hailed as the “designers guide to branding” because (and I kid you not, this is a direct quote from the person who recommended it to me) “it is a really short read” (because as we all know designers can’t read, right?). I decided to read it to see what the ruckus was all about. Honestly, in my opinion Mr. Neumeier sacrificed nuance and functionality for simplicity, which makes it more or less useless as anything but the briefest of introductions and doesn’t capture the intricacies of working with brands in as complex an environment as we have today.

Noise Music – A History, Paul Hegarty
I like noise music, so this was kind of a no-brainer when it came up on Amazon’s recommendations. Weirdly conflicted on this one. On one hand, there are some interesting points about breaking with classical form and mastery as a prerequisite to performing music, some good musings on what noise is and how it is a prerequisite of order and such… but in between the dense theoretical musings, I could have done with a raunchy anecdote from behind the scenes.

Exposing the Magic of Design, John Kolko
Terrible title aside, this is a straight up “from observations to insights to ideation to implementation” handbook from a man who obviously sipped the multicolored process-juice. I tend to agree with him on most counts.

This is Service Design Thinking, Stickdorn & Shneider
The epic service design tome, bound in black with nifty design details and all. It is supposed to be an attempt at a textbook for aspiring service designers, which it seems to do quite well. Did feel they went through the methods/tools bit slightly quick and I am still looking for an insightful and interesting book with service design cases, where touch points are explored in detail, brand and strategy discussed, process unveiled and deliverables analyzed etc.

Business Model Generation, Osterwalder & Pigneur
Wow, this is useful and is quickly becoming a bit of a must-read in the service design community. Used the framework with quite some success for a BBC project and find it is really useful for breaking things into chunks and allowing people to deliberate on the small bits that make up the whole. Recommended!

Drawing the Head and Hands + Figure Drawing for all it’s Worth, Andrew Loomis
I started drawing again. It’s hard. These are supposed to be the definitive books on drawing. They are hard. I haven’t technically read them cover to cover – rather I have flicked through picked up a tip here and there, and failed miserably when trying to apply them. They are also quite fun and it’s nice to be drawing again – even though I just like doodling silly cartoons on post-its while on the phone.

Animation 1, Preston Blair
How to draw silly cartoons! Yay!

From Hell, Alan Moore & Eddie Campell
I am getting heavily into graphic novels again, after a roughly 20 year hiatus. This one is cramped, dense, claustrophobic and just plain amazing. Deals with Jack the Ripper, who used to haunt my current ‘hood. The part where the Doctor rides around London explaining the significance of the Masonic/druidic origins and meanings of the architecture had me riveted and now I can’t walk past anything Hawksmoore built without looking for hidden symbols and feeling slightly creeped out.

The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Will Self
As a newcomer to the country, I feel it is my obligation to study my host nation. People splutter into their beer when I proclaim that I am reading Will Self as a result.

Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delaney
Simultaneously one of the most confusing and most heart-achingly beautiful books I have ever read – my copy is now earmarked with a thousand different quotes that had me slack-jawed with awe. The style, the denseness, the schizoid incomprehensibility and the stark yet wonderful dives into self reflection are simply stunning. I have had dreams about the book ever since.

Cyclonopedia – Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Reza Negarestani
A so called “theoretical novel”, this book is as obscure as it is oddly cinematic. Detailing the role of the Middle East and “petro-politics” as a narrative baseline for world history, the author mixes in arabic occultism, syrian demonology, diverse conspiracy theories and mathematics - plus a slew of other concepts which I am still struggling to digest, into what is one of the hardest reads I have ever undertaken, paling even to Nicholas Luhman’s thoughts on discursive theory (which my proffessor confided to me “Nobody actually gets it – academics just say they do. It might all be nonsense for all we know”) that I plowed through in Uni. However, it invokes images of vast arid desertscapes and cavernous putrid secrets – and for that alone, it’s still worth a read.

Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti
Apparently popular with the whole Boyd Rice crowd, I think this just reads like a poor mans Lovecraft. Meh…

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
Recommended to me by the guy who started the NO2ID movement in the UK and a mix between a James Clavell novel and a beginners guide to cryptography – this was one of the most enjoyable books I have read this year in terms of pure pleasure (with a bit of learning thrown in for kicks.)

A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R Martin
Yep I saw the Game of Thrones series and then proceeded to hoover up every book available so far. All roughly 4500 pages. In what amounted to two months. I am not afraid to admit it – this was two months of plain getting my geek on. If you haven’t read it, rip out a couple of months of your social life and start reading. Who needs friends when you can have epic things like murder, conspiracy, dragons, bloodshed and even a bit of sordid incest.

Honorable mention: The Paris Reviews interview with William Gibson, by David Wallace-Wells.
Not a book so it technically doesn’t count, but this is just a great long form interview. Keep returning to it, so it should go on here too.

Honorable mention 2: Who killed Video Games, Tim Rogers
Brilliantly written and highly entertaining piece on the evils of social gaming (yes, that means you Zynga).

Just found this vid trawling through my YouTube favourites of Jesper and myself messing around back in the CIID days. I believe we were asked to create/rapid prototype something that “Protected you in a post-apocalyptic world” with some biomimicry thrown in for good measure. Uhm… yeah well, voila!

The very talented and often sometimes slightly surreal Di Mainstone cooked up the Hydrocordion for the Surface Tension exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin. I had the pleasure of hanging around her studio while she built it along with the equally talented Richard Shed, gluing the odd bit together here and there. Great fun to see the thing evolve from a morass of plungers and half-baked ideas and solutions to it’s finished hooty glory.

Nice little film on Playtype – the physical font shop that my old chums and former employees e-Types created – by design aficionados and lifestyle-connoisseurs Monocle.

One of the last projects I worked on before leaving for the BBC – and really glad for e-Types that their work is getting the exposure it deserves.

Watch it here (Monocle have a rather… erh… quaint attitude to the web sometimes, so no embed.). you can suffer the grainy screen-shot above instead.

I attended my first ever Hacks and Hackers event here in London last Wednesday – a gathering of techie types and journalists + the people in between (that would be me).

The night consisted of 2 talks and a couple of 1-2 minute pitches – one for 44con.com, an infosec conference in London where they will be covering, amongst other things, satellite hacking and snooping on the US Government. The other pitch was lost in the general humdrum while I was getting a beer at the bar – sorry for sleeping on this, whoever you were.

The two main talks of the night befell @alecmuffet of Green Lane Security, who diligently went through what NOT to do online, when carrying out an illicit affair. Being a bit of a data tinfoil hat enthusiast myself, his run-through of all the potential data leaks that people skillfully fumble themselves into was enlightening, if not a sorry testament to the general unawareness of data sec by the non-data-literati. In short – his point was, to take a cue from the Wire and use throwaway phones and separate online identities – regardless of whether you are carrying on with the cute blond from Starbucks or plotting a government coup. You can catch his slides below – or here.

Second talk was from Guardian Lead UX and IA @Currybet – or Martin Belam to be more precise. Delving into how digital has disrupted the traditional news cycle, he went on to express his relief that digital was not all doom-and-destruction for News and indeed, we are seeing the rise of a new cycle where liveness is key. Where print is always about the past – Belam’s put it succinctly when he pointed out that the newspaper you picked up on the Tube this morning is describing things in the past – digital is about events as they occur in real time. Particularly interesting was his point about “Live blogging” being the first digitally native news format – with services such as Twitter, foursquare and the like holding enormous potential in bringing people the story as it unfolds.

There are two more points that I found really interesting – first was his thoughts on the transition from the formats we know from print into digital – using the two-page spread we know and love as an example. How do we translate the tips and tricks from print journalism into a truly digital form? Something I touched upon myself working on the redesign of Danish daily Berlingske Tidende for e-Types (we did typography and design, but also consulted on strategy and compiled a couple of future scenarios for them). There are a couple of attempts – for example Berg’s prototype Mag+ (video featuring my ex-teacher, the always entertaining Jack Schulze, here) that attempts a digitally native reading experience, but I still haven’t seen any that have successfully captured the newspaper experience – going beyond the 1-1 translation of paper to pixels and adding a link or two.

Secondly, was Belam’s attack on a recent survey, showing that editors value traditional journo skills over digital fluency – finding time management a more worthy pursuit than web and social media skills. Although I’ve experienced similar attitudes, it still surprises me that an industry on the verge of collapse (Ok, Ok slight overstatement there) feels it can afford to be so reactive and regressive towards the interwebz. I mean, its not like it is going to go away, is it? Oh well. Their loss really. Belam did mention a couple of nice examples of digital journalism – Paul Lewis’ twitter coverage of the London Riots for example (read this article for some social media goodness from the man himself) or a travel journalist from The Guardian (sorry, missed his name – busy tweeting) who travels to places and asks locals to tweet him suggestions of where to go – a sort of user-driven digital-situationist journo-practice.

(I’ll update with his slides when/if they become available.)

All in all, a good night and I definitely recommend checking out the next session – find Hacks & Hackers London here.

So if anybody follows me on Twitter, they’ll know I had a 3-4 week period where I disappeared almost completely from IRL with only sporadic tweets about “living in a box” and other (admittedly, slightly forced) jokes having to do with anything square. So in the interest of full disclosure, let me explain;

A while back, I was charged with looking at Brand Engagement from a BBC Online perspective – looking at how the BBC wants to engage with our audiences online. After a period of research we settled upon a number of principles which we compounded into a manifesto of sorts. A manifesto which we then turned into a script for a little stop motion video which you’ll find from roughly 00.25 to 2.05 in Ralph Rivera’s (Director of Digital media for Future Media) Industry keynote above.

The whole thing was conceived and executed by my very talented colleagues Karolina Kret and Jacek Barcikowski (and myself, obviously), with much glueing, cutting, painting, fretting and fidgeting over three weeks, with the very cool guys at Clapham Road Studios and animator extraordinair Mole Hill to help us get it all in the box (*snigger*) on the final week.

I posted a little behind the scenes video shot by Jacek earlier – should be a post or two down.