TV Times

Chris Norton, May 23rd 2006, 12:38PM

This year Big Brother rolled out its uber-trashy all-seeing televisual eyes amidst a welter of warnings - 'kiss goodbye to your summer' cried everyone from Heat magazine to BB's own increasingly cartoonish Davina McCall. There's a grain of truth in that, at least for those of us who can't be bothered putting up an impenetrable, culturally cool acceptable front... in fact half of us round these parts of the office are already discussing Shahbaz every morning, like the bunch of gossiping old fishwives we really are.

The real-time nature of BB, and the fact that it generates those 'water-cooler' conversations (you know, the sort all the media journalists were going on about a few years ago), well it makes me think. There's all this buzz online about iTunes selling episodes of Lost (another of our favourites, especially now the plot seems to revolve around people sitting in a room doing inexplicable things with computers) and the new plan to sell 24 (yeah, we love Bauer too) on myspace.

But this narrowcasting approach, treating TV shows like music, seems a little foolish - TV is completely different, and nowhere near the solitary experience the naysayers wibble on about. In fact, I think it's the most social of modern media. Discussion of last night's crop of big shows is a vital office bonding experience... Daz got quite annoyed with me because I missed Lost the other week, and fair enough, I was a bit miffed myself. Not because I missed it, but because we all need a bit of fuel for talking outside of the world of SQL queries and web form design. OK, and because I missed it.

Hey, if you can't gossip openly about your colleagues, at least you can gossip openly about the people on TV - and to do that you need to be tuning in as it happens, in synch. Now where's my copy of Heat?

Tags: bigbrother, conversations, media, myspace, office, tv, video
# Comment (3 comments)

Office 06

Chris Norton, April 4th 2006, 11:15AM

My friends, we're living in the future. We can communicate with people across the globe as if they were in the next room, we can annoy people on the train with a vast array of portable noise-making devices, and we can access just about the entire sum of human knowledge from our desktops. So why are we still working in offices?

It hardly seems surprising that there's a game coming out called 'Office Massacre' (well, at least there was) -the cultural consensus seems to be that the office is a hellhole full of David Brents and broken dreams. Furthermore, over the years we've heard again and again that technology will let us all work from home. So why am I sitting here in a high-tech company that mainly runs from an open-plan office? Shouldn't we all be wired up to the matrix, holding meetings in a virtual space straight out of Tron and disconnecting occasionally to watch Neighbours at our leisure?

Well, from the technology side of things, yes, I could be working at home. But I'd be at a further level of remove from the team we have here. Communication is everything, and spontaneous communication is essential in this work. As I mentioned in my first post, I want to produce usable stuff, putting the emphasis on people. There's no better way to balance the highly abstracted coding my department has to do than to stick us right in the middle of a busy office. We can see what sales are up to, we can hear what tech support are telling the people who use our systems, we don't always need to formalise the process with meetings and phone calls, we're in it.

And the social side of things is much better than they'd have you believe, the writers of The Office or those smug rock stars who 'just couldn't bear the anonymity of office work'. Maybe we're lucky here with this mix of characters, but come on, who doesn't enjoy a bit of gossip? We're all social animals, even those of us who know what AJAX stands for and can happily spend an hour solid quoting Tarantino movies, and here we all are in a big room where we can easily decide to go to the pub after work - and if I was working from home I'd never get a chance to steal Giles' crisps.

Tags: conversations, internet, meetings, office, workplace
# Comment (4 comments)

What's your story?

Jonathan Bowers, March 21st 2006, 10:19AM

Every morning I check my RSS feeds and you can guarantee that one name will come up more than any other - but more than that - this company will be mentioned in a positive light nine times out of ten. The company is of course Google. I guess it could have been Microsoft, but the sun shines a little less for Microsoft.

Just this morning, the news is out on Google Finance. Reading through articles I begin to believe that Google Finance will be better than all financial sites that have gone before. I think, "Yahoo! has been going for ten years, but I reckon Google might just do it better." Then I read that the online brokers also feel the threat and I feel sorry for them, but wonder if we, the world’s businesses, are better off with Google doing it anyway!

I just assume that they have the globes’ best financial analysts working with them and that they know us well enough to work out exactly what we want. And I do this, because Google has very successfully sold us a story that we not only believe, but want to believe. Even if we try hard not to, we can't help but admire the innovators of Mount View California because all their gadgets make our lives easier and more fun.

What Google has achieved as a massive corporate is very impressive. They have gained the general public's trust and maintain such a buzz that we want to talk about them. Seth Godin calls this Flipping the Funnel and believes that any business that can inspire the public to do their talking for them is truly on the track to success.

I wonder whether you agree? Or maybe not? If the very thought of Google makes you scream and run for cover, then I’d love to know why.

Tags: conversations, google
# Comment (1 comments)

Conversations are happening

Jonathan Bowers, March 20th 2006, 3:38PM

I'm excited to be starting the UKFast blog because it's a brilliant way to open up new routes of communication with not only existing clients, but all those interested in the incredible potential of the Internet.

I'd like the UKFastblog to develop into a community that embraces and discusses the world it resides in, find it's own place within the blogosphere and encourage other businesses to get online and engage in 'conversation.'

On his blog mediations earlier this month, Philip Young, wrote about institutions and businesses wary of allowing comment and dialogue to spread, companies that discourage 'talk' in case it is of a negative nature. I think it's this kind of approach that deterred the majority of businesses from embracing blogging a few years ago in the UK.

As Philip points out - conversations are happening anyway. You can either join in and represent yourself or allow talk to grow into gossip and in many cases misrepresentation. Wouldn't you rather have 'knowledge' than 'blissful ignorance'?

As an Internet Service Provider, UKFast has a great role to play in the dialogue about our industry and so we'll be posting every weekday from now on. We have a great deal of expertise within our walls and I'll be calling on it to discuss anything and everything happening in the online world and how it might affect businesses online and off.

Hopefully, a number of you will join me to become commentators and decision makers in the Internet as it continues evolving.

Tags: communication, conversations
# Comment (0 comments)