Lingolook

With all this talk of interior revolution, the spectre of Net Neutrality has resurfaced once again. This time from an Italian blogger/journalist I haven’t yet met, but look forward to doing so soon.

Marco Camisani Calzolari writes for the IT supplement of one of Italy’s most respected financial newspapers. He has often described himself as a “bridge between the slow world and the fast world” and Shel, the next time you’re in Italy you should look him up.

On his blog, Marco has published this scary image of the future should the campaign for Net Neutrality be lost. It would be sad to lose my ideas for those online activities my wife and I are currently working on, but it would be a disaster for humanity to lose the possibility to discover knowledge. I’m thinking of the language course, of course, particularly as it now has a name: Language Is Free.

The picture’s here, but credit for it goes to Marco. Spread the word…

Share This

No Comments »

I’m a happy bunny (there’s a change, eh?).

The guys (gals?) from Blogging Expertise came back with a magnificent answer to all of our questions and requests. At this point, the new Runaway Parents site design is done. Now we move on to the technical aspects which I’m really looking forward to. I’ve also booked an appointment with my accountant and with an online bank for the e-commerce section so things are really moving along nicely.

Today was far slower than normal as I was bogged down by a projectors catalogue that never got finished. That and the fact that Word doesn’t seem to want me to draw the complex procedure I’ve come up with to make sure students do all the units in a dynamic online language course no matter which direction they turn and which lessons they decide to do has slowed that part of the language project down too.

It’s got a great name though: “Two Clicks of Separation”.

Share This

No Comments »

Read a phrase over on Shel Israel’s blog today: “Constraint spawns creativity.” Constraint has more facets than the business-oriented reality Shel brought up, but the result is always the same. Wise words indeed.

That was some post yesterday, if nothing else as it generates expectation that’s going to be fun delivering. The day after a revalation like that is always slow, as you take time to take things in, see them in their proper light, and shift gears.

Today I pampered myself with a few carefully tempo’ed purchases from iTunes and got the ball off to a surprisingly smooth start.

The reason for this is that the first after-effect of change is some pretty nifty time management abilities. Closing yourself down to certain aspects of your life actually provides an excellent excuse for some strict timelines. You give yourself X for this, and Y for that and to hell with the rest.

“This” is what I’m still paid to do. “That” is what I’m planning on developing over the next few months. They’re great projects:

The first is Runaway Parents. My wife and I had an urge to transform the passion we have to carve out moments for ourselves into an activity and Runaway Parents is the result. Sarah over at the excellent Blogging Expertise site has already given the site a new look and we’re both anxious to get this little project off the ground. It’s the first time we’ve attempted anything resembling e-commerce so it’s a pretty exciting moment for us. Look out for it very soon. Plus we have modelled it on Shel Israel’s brilliant suggestion of sharing ad-revenue so the results could be very interesting to watch.

The second is still on the drawing board but I have spoken about it over at Web-Teach. All those books, all those blogs, all those YouTube videos (thanks Richard) full of wisdom and direction have steered me towards getting this project moving. It combines everything I know on the subject of education and all the principles of social media I have experienced so far into one living breathing project that should turn the established language education systems on their head. Think Blogs - meet - NetVibes - meet - YouTube - meet - Digg - meet - Wikipedia - meet - the - Super-teacher and you’re halfway there. Oh, and it’s free too.

I haven’t asked Sarah what she’s going to charge me for it yet but I will very soon.

Share This

No Comments »

In this life of volatile emotions, when something breaks it’s usually because something else is trying to get out.

You can fight change, you can deny it too, but you can’t outrun it when it’s you that’s evolving.

The agents of change are powerful motivators as we are all fine-tuned into seeking out the next big thing. Yet despite being as big and as cumbersome as a London bus, the ones that really make a difference are difficult to spot for the simple fact is that we are not looking for them.

When one of these bright red agents comes down our street we see it a mile off, let it drive past, quickly read the destination and if we decide it’s going in the general direction we’re interested in, we hop on.

Once aboard, we pay the modest fare (money, toil, late nights, some other personal sacrifice) and only get off when we see another, bigger, brighter agent heading to the next Promised Land.

This is all very well, but whatever change made us jump on in the first place was outside of us (it was on the bus), not inside.

Every now and again life catapults you headfirst into the path of one of these agents and the blow leaves a mark a mile wide on your soul, and changes you forever.

As so it is with this copywriter.

The last time I looked at how this blog started, I didn’t recognize myself. Nothing deliberate but back then I was so busy trying to see whose paths my thoughts and experiences would cross that I didn’t notice the profound shifts taking place closer to home.

I have never been an academic. It’s one of my personal skeletons I defend by saying that for me structured academic intelligence simply gets in the way of my own understanding of a subject, slowing down my responsiveness and interrupting any emotional enjoyment I’m expecting to feel.

Take music for example. I couldn’t tell you the difference between Mozart and Mahler, or name more than a few of the myriad of music styles that have emerged since their time, but I have an innate sense of rhythm that is almost physical. I can actually “see” the most complicated percussion breaks and follow complex, computer-programmed drum sequences like they were softly flowing trickles of water. It just clicks.

These past months have stunned me into the silence you can see between this and my last post. Something new and unexpected just clicked, bringing a new order to my world that conflicts so much with so many of the things I have done to date that I am radically re-ordering my priorities.

In two short months I have read: The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Dip, The Tipping Point, Blink, The Assault on Reason, The Wisdom of Crowds and Out of Our Minds by the brilliant Ken Robinson. Then I wrote the corporate brochure of my biggest client (you try believing what you’re writing after a preparation of this calibre…).

If that wasn’t hard enough I then sought comfort in trying to take the corporate voice of this same client outside the accepted boundaries of damage limitation and it came straight back at me. Not from outside, but from within.

And then something broke…

You can’t outrun it when it’s you that’s evolving and what I’m becoming as a result of everything and everyone I’ve discovered online is starting to distance me from what I’m doing.

These discoveries refuse to be categorized as mere acquired knowledge that makes me function better as a copywriter, rather as agents of change that have brought an innate knowledge to the surface that makes me function better as a human being.

After years of perfecting my art, I now see the value (and lack of it) in many of the things I do and there’s the rub. How do you reconcile your personal thoughts and professional actions when they are in blatant disaccord?

On paper the answer’s easy, yet I’m willing to bet that no-one reading this is foolish enough to believe that anything truly worthwhile ever is.

I have a plan, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it.

Share This

1 Comment »