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  • Nick’s Birmingam post blog: Let’s get lost - harnessing creativity through experimental web exploration

    05:27:21 pm on March 24, 2008 | no comments | view | original |

    Sometimes the longer you spend in a creative job, the harder it becomes to actually keep on innovating. Over time, you find that your ideas are just becoming rehashed versions of things that have been done before or that you've become so entrenched in your day-to-day routines that you just can't remember how to think outside the box any more.

    What's more, because everyone in your industry is most likely reading the same magazines as you, browsing the same Sunday papers, watching the same TV shows, and exploring the same websites, chances are that even when something does spark off an original idea, a dozen other people have just seen the same thing and are now beavering away on projects pretty damn near identical to yours.

    So what the hell do you do about it? Jack it all in and work in a factory? Cryogenically freeze yourself until a time when your hackneyed ideas suddenly seem ironically retro? Bury your head in the sand and try to ignore the whimpered cries of your inner muse as it slowly shrivels up and dies?

    No. Just get yourself lost.

  • 01:38:39 pm on March 20, 2008 | no comments | view | original |

    nicklockey: Overheard in office: "Yay! Our model has pubic hair: crisis averted!". Man I love my job.

  • 09:24:42 pm on March 19, 2008 | no comments | view | original |

    nicklockey: Gonna nail my (non) colours to the team transparacy flag. They're like the ninjas of colour wars. Banzai!!!

  • 12:33:37 pm on March 19, 2008 | no comments | view | original |

    nicklockey: Just preparing to give my second New Media briefing in two days - today for the "start in tv" bunch at endemol

  • 02:32:52 pm on March 14, 2008 | no comments | view | original |

    nicklockey: Good to see that pete and jo are still twittering on a scale worthy of sxsw. It's almost like we're still in Austin. Yay!

  • Nick’s Birmingam post blog: The Lacy/ Zuckerberg SXSW Keynote: A Post of Two Halves

    11:37:25 am on March 14, 2008 | no comments | view | original |

    Firstly, I want to point out that a proper digest of this year's SXWX interative festival is in the pipeline and secondly I want to apologise for this rather epic blog post.

    The thing is I really want to convey what struck me as one of the biggest revelations at this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas: Technology accelerates gossip so fast it's out of date before you even get to blog it.

    My epiphany came during the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg keynote event where the Facebook CEO became the subject of probably one of the worst-received interviews in recent history at the hands of Newsweek journalist Sarah Lacy.

    Many of you who follow tech news on the web would have seen the video clips of the disasterous keynote on Youtube and many of you may be wondering what all of the fuss was about. We'll nothing I have seen online conveys the sheer hostility of the crowd that day and this was something I really wanted to convey in my blog.

    Unfortunately I was hamstrung by two factors. Firstly, I was caught up in a wave of mob hysteria that amplified this barely remarkable event into something approaching a war-crimes trial. Secondly, my decision to delay writing my post until the next morning meant that the legion of Twitterers, live bloggers and industry gossip-mongers present at the interview had practically burnt the hype out before Lacy had even left the stage.

    So much so that I decided it wasn't worth publishing the post after all.

    In hindsight, however I thought it would be pretty interesting to revisit it now the storm has blown over just as an example of the wacky zeitgeist that swept the blogosphere over one 24 hour period in March 2008.

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