For any of the hit-hunters out there, this should end any queries in your mind about currency being related to your hits. I posted yesterday morning about Thursday night’s Pecha Kucha night, and the result is expressed in the image to the right – nearly all search hits were Pecha Kucha-related, contributing to a one-day trebling of traffic.
Apart from the tiger sex search, that is. Jeez, you post one item about Tiger Sex and for the next two years……
I spent last weekend working in the press office for the Volvo Dun Laoghaire Regatta, with a few hours each day of frantic news-gathering for the daily report, in-Design work producing the newsletter, and interviewing the sailors.
Story of the weekend actually happened before the racing got underway – when Antix Dubh narrowly avoided being struck by lightning on its journey up from Cork. The blast hit the water 15 metres from the boat and fried the electronics for a time. Here, delivery skipper Rob O’Leary describes the incident.
All the omens were good for Dublin’s inaugural Pecha Kucha night. €5 on the door – reasonable. Nine speakers, 20 slides each, 20 seconds per slide – sensible. The Sugar Club – fashionable.
The attendance was a capacity crowd, but on stage, the hit rate was slightly less impressive.
The international phenomenon that is Pecha Kucha (pronounced peCHAkCHA, meaning ‘chatter’ in Japanese) is designed to stimulate creative debate by bringing together a few speakers to offer their interpretation of a single theme through the 20-slide medium. The theme for last night’s edition, of which there will be five more in the next 12 months, was ‘Small ideas, Big Impact’. Plenty of scope there, easy to interpret. You might think.
Of the nine speakers in the Sugar Club, just one fulfilled the brief: the sharp, intelligent, witty and visually clear presentation of Conor + David (Conor’s no relation, by the way). They spoke about the simple concept of being 100% sure, and how one’s approach to it affects projects as big as the moon landing. It was clever, challenging and fun, no doubt as much for them, putting it together, as it was for us watching it delivered.
Notable mentions for doing something interesting, but way off brief, go to TAKA for their presentation on doors, and Will St Leger who gave a synopsis of his influences as an artivist (arty activist). Both were interesting but wholly unrelated to the theme.
Kudos for giggles go to journalist Cian Hallinan for his Ulysses v PS I Love You stand-up routine, and Giselle Scanlon, who got a few laughs as well for her rambling but snappily-delivered sermon on the wit of human miscommunication.
A big ‘aboooo’, however, to Thinkhouse PR, who seemed to give a six minute and 40 second pitch on why no-one should hire them. If your sole function as an entity is to communicate effectively and creatively according to a client’s brief, one would think that you could come up with some sort of clever interpretation of a simple theme that provided plenty of scope for creativity. Their immature and self-indulgent display – ‘Stuff we Like’ – failed massively. Slides were entitled ‘Tits’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Food’, ‘Holidays’, ‘New Shit’ and, an assortment of other random words. Thinkhouse, clearly trading off a rep as industry luvvies, came across like a company where professionalism is a value best kept at bay with big pink blowtorches and snarky howls from the canteen.
Not that I’m a rules nazi, but next time around, I’d like to see people offer differ interpretations on the theme, doing something thoughtful and creative, rather than merely putting themselves up there for self-promotion or self-indulgence, lest it becomes a platform for the same. The Pecha Kucha concept is good, and when the presenters were good, they were very, very good. But when they were bad, they were horrid.
The press release issued last week by the owning triumvirate of the forthcoming Metro Herald newspaper offered little by way of information on what is now a confirmed merger. It was amazingly hollow, in fact. (The text of it is below the fold). Hiding behind the merger’s ratification by the Competition Authority, the release merely confirmed what had been already suggested, the release ‘announced’ that Metro Newspaper, co-owned by DGMT and the Irish Times and its rival freesheet Herald AM, owned by Independent New and Media, will both disappear as previously indicated, leaving a single freesheet, Metro Herald. This was padded out with a few gushing quotes from notable names, or the pens of their comm-hawks.
Metro currently has its offices in Embassy House, Ballsbridge, where it shares a floor with the Irish Daily Mail, however it is understood that the Metro/Herald hybrid will be located in the city centre, most likely in the Irish Times building on Tara St, closer to the hub of Dublin’s activity.
But none of the nuts and bolts were mentioned in the fluffy release which only alluded to the synergies, the benefits to advertisers and readers, etc. Benefits will only accrue to readers as long as the content is of a certain quality, so it would be hoped that writing staff would be retained, rather than merely having a team of subs patching a paper together from press releases and wire copy. But like the location, nothing is mentioned of staffing – who goes where and who, (apart from a grand swathe of distributors) goes home with an empty brown envelope.
The Metro staff has undergone a gradual but comprehensive whittling down of its editorial staff in the last few months and it’s a nervy crew who remain. And on the street, the distribution crews employed by the two papers will, assumedly, be downsized considerably too.
I wrote about this before (my thoughts here) and apparently, the Metro MD Paul Crosbie (disclosure: a good friend of my father’s) quoted a good portion of that post in the subsequent meeting with the editorial staff (made up of some good friends of mine, too), citing it as ‘on the pessimistic side‘. Which is probably how you’d feel if your company was preparing for a move - potentially a cull – and wasn’t telling you much about it.
As you read the text below, note the tone of the two soundbites: one from the IT/Metro side, versus that from the Indo side, each claiming the merger will build on the momentum their paper has created.
So, which one do you reach for at the train/bus/Luas stop in the morning?
Really just using this post to test a nice little plugin courtesy of Claire which gives you the option of displaying your exif data with a rollover.
The pic was taken at the weekend on the Isle of Wight – it’s one of Queen Victoria’s garden sheds, snapped in the grounds of Osborne House.
When I heard the news about the demise of the spiceburger, I knew there was one person I had to speak to. One person who it had the potential to hit harder than anyone else. The Spice Burger Kid.
A friend of mine, back in the day, was the kid on the Spice Burger poster. He was, in very real terms, the Spice Burger Kid. He’s now a respected businessman, so let’s call him Mickey da Spice.
Me: I heard the bad news
MdS: What bad news? What do you know?
Me: The spiceburger. It’s dead, no more spiceburger. The company went bust.
MdS: Aaaa ha ah ha haa. I thought you had something important, you had me scared.
Turns out that Mickey da Spice wasn’t the biggest fan of the product. Always a finicky eater, no spiceburger ever passed his lips, and he refused to eat them at the poster photo shoot, much to the dismay of: ‘the guy from the company – he was there. It was pretty bad’
He rang me back later in the evening, after I had been to my local chipper for a final dose of spiceburger.
Me: Mr Spice.
MdS: Mr Nolan, what you up to?
Me: Actually, I’m having my dinner, I have two spiceburgers in front of me.
MdS: Seriously?
Me: Yeah.
MdS: Whaddya think? Will you miss them?
Me: They’re fucking vile.
A lens splurge motivated me to finally get around to filing some of my photos. Voila.
It’s not every day that the pub across the road goes up in smoke. The Graduate Pub in Killiney, just around the corner from my house, was the centre of a five-engine fire yesterday, closing down all the roads in and out of the area and drawing a huge crowd of onlookers.
The pub had apparently changed hands in the last few weeks, so the new owner won’t be a happy man. More pics on my Flickr Page, discussion on Boards.ie and some vid below:
Eight-year-olds today have it easy. One narky letter to the Guardian and you get whisked in to be G2 editor for a day. Charlotte Jones (8), emailed the Guardian to give out that her cartoon insert had disappeared, only to be replaced by a football supplement. In return for her letter, she got a day in the chair at G2, helping make decisions on the content of the mag for the next day. In fact, it wasn’t even a letter that she wrote, it was an e-mail. It may, or may not, have been dictated to a grown-up. No stamp bought, no envelope addressed, no journey to the postbox. Charlotte Jones, eight years old, you don’t know how good you have it.
I don’t usually launch attacks at intelligent, confident eight-year-olds, but having put in twice the effort at half the age for zero reward, someone has to speak out. Twenty-five years ago, aged four, I laboriously scrawled out a letter to the BBC expressing disgust at my programmes disappearing from the television. If you read their response, it’s clear that the convenient medium of e-mail was not available to me. On the letterhead of the BBC’s acknowledgement, there’s a telex number and an address for telegraphs. Email just wasn’t an option, so I got out my crayons, rolled up the sleeves, and set to work.
Note the care and attention to detail manifested in the coloured crayons. Yes, the handwriting needed work, but note also the clearly stated complaint and the equally clear demand for action, both of which are absent from Charlotte’s admirable but brief two-sentence rant. Note the LOVE at the end. I’m angry, but still capable of separating my love for the good people who produce television from my anger at their one-day walk out. Incredible emotional intelligence from a four-year-old.
I did get a letter in response from the BBC, however. A letter is good. (Better than an email, Charlotte, nyah nyah). It’s below the fold.
But I didn’t get my day in the seat. Taking into consideration that I was half Charlotte’s age, worked twice as hard to make my point, and have been delayed justice for 25 years, I’m probably due about three months’ editorial control at the BBC, and am now clearly mature enough to put it to good use. I await their response.
Ever since a family holiday in Crete back in 1988, I’ve been an avid yottie. Not to the point of a crowd of my mates, who have gone on to compete in the Olympics and the like, but to a point where I’ve been involved with the sport in almost every aspect, from teaching it to kids to organising large events. It’s meant I’ve never had to work behind a bar or stack shelves – sailing jobs have occupied my summers.
The last time I taught in Ireland was back in 2001, and the two most enthusiastic kids on the course were also two of the youngest. Matty O’Dowd was a blonde photon, bouncing off the walls with energy that you can’t bottle. Once you got him into a boat, he was a picture of focus, and embarrassed kids several years his senior with skills and speed on the water. Similarly, Jenny Andreasson was so anxious to get out sailing at the age of eight that I thought she might implode on herself with excitement, becoming the first human to spontaneously create nuclear fusion. Both her brothers were on the course, but her desire to be on the water was a vast multiple of their combined enthusiasm.
In both cases, their parents were worried that they were too young to start sailing, but in both cases they had siblings on the premises and so it seemed pointless to hold them back, meaning they started younger than most.
So it’s great to hear that this year, Jenny and Matty make up half of the squad travelling to the ISAF Youth Worlds, where they’ll represent Ireland against the best youth sailors in the world. Matty’s also winning a Laser Europa Cup event in Denmark at the moment, ahead of last year’s Europa Cup series winner, Jon Emmett.
We’ll have a podcast with Matty up on Afloat.ie later on, hopefully. Fingers crossed he can hold Emmett off during the last day’s racing. Although it looks like he’ll be more worried about Danish sailor Pascal Timshell, who has a string of race wins to his credit.
UPDATE: He only bleedin’ won it:
Matty Wins
