‘Think of London, a small city. It’s dark, dark in the daytime….’
When you’ve lived somewhere, anywhere for a while, it’s easy to forget what it is that makes it special. Via the wonderful Alison Headley, boston.com and the astonishing photography of Jason Hawkes comes a valuable reminder. London from above, at night.
Extraordinary.
Long time no post, eh? This one’s a bit of a cheat, but reflective of where I’m at at the moment.
I might not have been posting much, but I have been reading. A lot. And most of that ends up on Delicious.
And what have I been reading? Well, courtesy of Wordle, here’s a clue:
I don’t always find myself saying good things about TechCrunch, but Michael Arrington’s video interview with Twitter founder Evan Williams this week is unmissable.
The interview is ostensibly about Twitter’s acquisition of Summize. In the traditional business world, this sort of thing normally involves a cautiously worded press release; an awkward, lifeless photo call and press conference and some men in suits stifly shaking hands. Not here.
Instead it is made remarkable by the fabulous candour and openness with which Williams chats about Twitter’s past, present and future. He reveals just how much of Twitter’s future is up for grabs – not lacking direction so much as spoilt for choice. Summize happens in part down to Twitter’s ‘over-estimating’ of its own search functionality (there’s honesty for you), and in part down to another outsourcing deal with a major search partner seemingly not quite feeling right.
For some, this is uncomfortable territory – no pinned-down long term strategy, an environment in which a phone call with an old contact changes everything. But it makes me that anything is possible for Twitter. Williams and Twitter might just be reflecting what modern business increasingly feels like – open to new ideas, opportunistic, experimental. It’s thrilling stuff.
Spotted on a crowded platform at London Bridge on my way home tonight, my first sighting of the Japanese phenomenon of citing the search term rather than a website address. At the bottom left, the ad asks you to search for “I am”.
It’s a simple idea – rather than asking people to remember the URL, which becomes harder as memorable domain names becomes ever more elusive, using a search term instead. Always available, but at a price. I’d love to know just how much this cost Orange in search engine marketing. Interesting to see them picking up this idea here first (to my knowledge) – it’s something you are going to be seeing much more of in the near future.
Cabel Sasser wrote about it back in March in Japan: URL’s are totally out – and it didn’t take long to reach London. I like Cabel’s prediction in his piece about the Safari title bar – though I have to tell him, on the basis of some of the user testing we do, many people think that is the way browsers should work right now.
Seeing the Orange ad was almost as exciting as the screen which preceded it telling me that New Kids are reforming. That one’s for my youngest sister.
Some years ago, a journalist friend of mine told me a story about attending a post-match press conference at Ibrox. When Walter Smith, now as then the Rangers manager appeared, the journalists left it to their colleague, the legendary Alex ‘Candid’ Cameron to open the inquisition.
“Walter, your thoughts please…”
And so a hundred pens poised ready to take dictation. Investigate journalism it was not.
For most tasked with covering Scottish football, maintaining good, unchallenging, relations with Celtic and Rangers is a fact of life for compliant types required to promote the agendas of those behind the scenes in order to guarantee a few priceless exclusives and being viewed as ‘a man in the know’. Some journalist have an ‘in’ at Celtic, some at Rangers. With fans of the two clubs massively outnumbering the support of all the other clubs combined, this is understandable, but it’s not inevitable.
It’s for these reasons that Graham Spiers strikes me as an unusually courageous journalist. For some time now, in The Herald and now The Times, Spiers has fearlessly taken on the culture at Rangers and taken a great deal of criticism for doing so from those determined to see conspiracy in everything he writes.
In a recent piece, Spiers quotes Willie Waddell, Rangers manager in the early 70’s, addressing Rangers fans after they rioted in Barcelona following their Cup Winners Cup in 1972:
Rangers have undoubtedly made real efforts to change in recent years and deserve credit for doing so, however belated it might be and whatever the driving factors behind it. But the facts aren’t good: two European finals, two riots. That isn’t a coincidence, but a culture.
Celtic are far from angels, and there are a number of distinctly unpleasant characters in the stands there too, particularly at away games. However, there is a fundamental difference between Celtic and Rangers and it concerns what they are for.
The ‘Old Firm’ is a convenient but lazy label – there are sharply contrasting cultures at the two clubs. For me, part of this is that while Celtic appear to exist like Barcelona as més que un club (more than a club), an expression of a positive, of Glasgow’s large and distinctive Irish Catholic community. Rangers aren’t for anything, but instead primarily exist as a negative, an opposition to something, a protest, an anger. ‘We are the people’ isn’t a chant of celebration, but exclusion. ‘You’re not’, the clear implication of the Rangers fans.
Celtic continues, largely, to be a more open and inclusive place, where Rangers is more insular and closed. While significant numbers of Rangers fans turned to violence in the aftermath of the UEFA Cup final as they’ve done elsewhere in recent years, Celtic’s fans did no such thing after their own loss in the same competition five years ago and won an award for their behaviour.
Last night’s dramatic end to the Scottish Premier League showed it all over again to me in the way Celtic’s victory was celebrated. Celtic’s fans didn’t even invade the pitch at the end of a game that won them the title, never mind cause trouble. Instead the celebrations turned into a rather moving tribute uniting fans, players and management alike to one of their own, Tommy Burns, who died a week previously.
I can say with confidence that the scenes wouldn’t have been the same had Rangers taken the league at Pittodrie. The police surrounding the travelling support there told the same story.
