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I’m just looking through some online qual research that the fine guys and girls at face have engineered and moderated for us.

The qual was conducted with the Young. And I’m looking through various blog posts and wondering why now and again, they feature a capital D for no particular reason at the end of a sentence.

And then I look again at one particular cap D and I realise to my ageing horror that it’s a : D

Specifically:

Reminds me of when i was a kid

How to make yourself feel old.

Leithal Thinking are doing a bit of work at the moment for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. So incredibly benevolently, have offered us a handful of tickets for some of their concerts.

Tuesday just gone, Brie and I went along to what they call their CL@SIX. Classic pieces I suppose at six o’clock. It’s a great premise. Potted culture for the home-going workers.

My classical music tastes are populist at best. I like a little Bach, love the Queen of Sheba, Zadok and Mozart’s Requiem. All the ad / movie soundtrack stuff. In no way can I claim to be any kind of master. Perfect audience then perhaps for the CL@SIX.

The concert was delightful. We had a little Strauss, a Suite in B Flat. A perky little thing that skipped along but dwelt romantically now and again to make us feel a little bit melancholy. And then a wind serenade from Dvorak. I could pretend I heard the eastern European overtones in his march but I doubt I would’ve without the programme notes.

It took place in St Cuthberts, a church I’ve never visited before and am now glad I did. A lovely venue with beautiful accoustics. I would and will try such a cultural hometime foray again. £12 if you’re paying real money for an hour’s probable loveliness. On a filthy night such as Tuesday was - or even on a nicer one - this in my book is money well spent.

A few months ago, over what Julie Allan describes as, a “casual cup of coffee” with one Karen Andre (but I wonder if this is a code name for “bottles of wine at the local” - no offence intended) chat arose about the need for the company to do a bit more for charity. The outcome of this, was a small team getting together and discussing ways in which we could raise money for the lovely people at Erskine, who are not only a great client, but a great charity. They have recently opened a brilliant care home/hospital to help in the rehabilitation of returned service men (http://www.erskine.org.uk/) and the money that we would raise could go towards the purchasing of much needed equipment for the hospital.

Our goal was to hold a few events (something for everyone), and try and raise £3,000 across these events.

Well that’s the background info…

October 2nd saw us hosting an fun filled and eventful Race Night!! The stakes were low, but the banter was high, and the amount raised even higher!

Last night was our ladies night on the trusty Leith barge. We had the boys from Mix Sensations (http://www.erskine.org.uk/) making some superb cocktails, and some delish canapes supplied by Stan Andre (and assembled by his wife our very own Karen).

But is wasn’t all about the drinking & eating, we also had Laura Nolan (http://www.lauranolanbeauty.co.uk/) giving beauty therapy advice and hand massages. Carrie and Lousie giving us all some great tips on choosing the right red lippy and how to perfect the smoky eye. There was also Patzel Jewellery (http://www.patzeljewellery.co.uk/) and some hilarious comedic talents from Ailsa.

Both nights were a huge success, and so far we have raised nearly £2,000.

I look forward to hearing how the golf day, rations lunch and afternoon tea go.

A huge thanks for all those who have supported us and made donations.

As usual, I’m reading a business bestseller (in this case, Nudge) at least a year after it got popular. However, as a consequence, I was unusually interested in the following from BrandChannel as it provides further ammunition for Messrs Thaler and Sunstein. Apparently, if neighbours are aware of their fellow residents’ energy consumption, they’re more likely to reduce their own. It’s interesting stuff though hidden away here in a slightly rambling article.

Morgan Stanley this summer decided to engage the services of a 15 year old summer placement boy to write a review of teenage media consumption habits.

Whilst perhaps a little thin on an insight front, it does contain some nice observations about the things that really matter when you’re 15 and 7 months. Really big TVs for example. Fancy, unused app laden mobile phones. Pirated movies. And free music. Adverts on websites on the other hand are “extremely annoying and pointless”. Read it and remember being 15 all over again.

I love it when I’m doing something else altogether and come across a nice little bit of PR for us. This is the product of months of work from Sir Alan, the master and now sadly departed Dr Paul Stallard. (Only departed to Sheffield so it’s not as tragic as it might sound.) Worth checking out simply for Sir Alan’s use of a word I did not know existed: rectilinear. Must try and drop that into conversation with him, sometime.

To great fanfare, a new identity was launched this week for Dundee, one-time city of discovery. The fine product of lots of people’s labours actually, you can see some of the work they’ve been doing here. Sir Alan was mostly instrumental in this - if you believe his version of events - though I think he received a fair amount of support from beautiful Anne before she set off to discover South America, Gillian, currently discovering Glastonbury, Brian, currently discovering Mull and of course all the lovelies at Blonde who brought the website to life (of which, more here) and Stripe. I think I’ve laboured this discovery pun rather too much so yes, have a wee look and discover Dundee for yourself.

Groups yesterday in Glasgow, a fairly thorny and sensitive subject matter and I’m reminded, for one, how remarkable people are and for two, what an extraordinary and peculiar job this is.

One lady in my group was in a motorcycle accident years ago. She broke 36 bones. She was immobile for a while, wheelchair bound for 3 years, walking with 2 crutches for some more years and is now down to one crutch but still needs fairly frequent pain relief. I made some utterly inadequate expression of sympathy and she said ‘well it’s a tribute to how far you can go if you try, isn’t it?’ Isn’t it.

Another lady had all sorts of medical complications and a few years back, lost both her kids in the space of 8 weeks. Her 16 year old daughter and then her 21 year old son. As she said, they hadn’t really had a crack at living by then. She cried a little bit and then pulled herself together.

A further lady then apologised because she’d “only” had a stroke and that was a couple of years ago and now she felt fine.

I hope I am delicate enough in these situations. For what an extraordinary privilege this window into other people’s worlds really is.

Spotted at Waverley Station

I’m just dashing through the final pages of a book called Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide by a fellow called Henry Jenkins.

Now the first thing to note about this book is that the poor guy spent 8 years researching it, published it in hardback in 2006 and only finally got a paperback edition printed in 2008. So given that he started working on it eleven years ago, you might forgive him for, in some instances, seeming a trifle dated in some of his observations.

The main subject of the book is my pet topic of the moment: user involvement in brands. Media brands in this instance. Co-creation, he might have called it, if he had written it now. And it’s proved to be a wonderful complement to a trio of books I purchased back in November: Wikinomics, The Long Tail (have I blogged about this yet?) and finally this.

Principally valuable for its case studies, Mr Jenkins offers lists and lists of examples of users / viewers / gamers / readers getting involved in producing their own content supporting a hero (media) work. Or building a community around figuring out a challenge set by producers, as in the US show, Survivor. And his examples are brilliant. I, an innocent cinema goer, had no idea that such a plethora of online excitement sprung up around the Matrix for example.

But. And you’ll know by now that there’s a but coming. He delivers this whole fascinating work in about the most turgid, dry, academic tone possible. So let me cruelly give you an example:

What skills do children need to become full participants in convergence culture? Across this book, we have identified a number - the ability to pool knowledge with others in a collaborative enterprise (as in the Survivor spoiling), the ability to share and compare value systems by evaluating ethical dramas (as occurs in the gossip surrounding reality television), the ability to make connections across scattered pieces of information (as occurs when we consume The Matrix, 1999, or Pokemon, 1998), the ability to express your interpretations and feelings towards popular fictions through your own folk culture (as occurs in Star Wars fan cinema), and the ability to circulate what you create via the Internet so that it can be shared with others (again as in fan cinema).

Well yes, but could you not have said the same thing in quite a few less words?

My favourite (cruellest) example of all - and here I refer you back to the publication date to make sense of this - is the following:

The term “blog” is short for Weblog, a new form of personal and subcultural grassroots expression involving summarizing and linking to other sites. In effect, blogging is a form of grassroots convergence.

And here lies my fundamental objection to this book. How can this poor man make such a fascinating phenomena - such a time of extraordinary and unprecedented change - such a time of no-one quite knows where it’ll end up but we’re loving watching all of the twists and turns as people come up with ever cleverer ways of getting involved - how can he make all of this sound so extraordinarily dull??!!

His final chapter, bless his heart, looks at American politics and explains how the digital revolution is revolutionising the world of political engagement. Painfully pre-Obama, I couldn’t quite bring myself to read this chapter as attentively as I’d waded through the others (but bless him. I’ve just forced myself to read to the end and Obama gets a mention in his developed for the 2008 edition afterword. Published long before election day. I take it back. Some of it!).

He has one further infuriating habit - though maybe this is a publisher rather than a writer-instigated decision - of printing long (like eight page long) case studies alongside the regular chapter text. Case study taking a third of the page vertically and the book’s text occupying the other two-thirds. Maybe this was deliberately intended to make the reader take twice as long dwelling on his wisdom as you’re forced to read, retrace, read case study, try and find your original place and then move on.

Anyway, I shall hush with my Preston to Edinburgh train journey boredom fuelled rant. This is worth a flick for the case studies. He’s clearly a very smart man. His writing style in my opinion leaves something to be desired. But as a repository of information about real people moulding, shaping and remaking popular culture, it’s a pretty handy book to have around. We must congratulate Mr Jenkins on his exhaustive (exhausting) scholarly endeavour.