Turkey was not the only Bird I had at Christmas this year.
I was also honoured to have Drayton Bird over as a guest. We’re cooking up a few very exciting things in the New Year together, which I will soon be sharing with you. In the meantime, I got a few snippets on tape from the Grand Master himself for you to enjoy. Here’s a funny story about Christmas and a certain David Ogilvy….
Lovely to report that I’m listening to my old friend Lemn Sissay on BBC Radio Manchester being interviewed by Alan Beswick about the fact that’s he’s been awarded an MBE! Regular readers of this blog will know that Lemn is not only an inspiration to me, but also thousands of other people, especially children – he has spent thousands and thousands of unreported hours doing workshops and talks for kids all over the world. In fact, when we used to knock about in Manchester it always amazed me how many bouncers we’d bump into who suddenly drop their guard and say stuff like “Fuck me, it’s Lemn Sissay!”, then give him a big, star-struck hug and spend 20 minutes telling him how much he inspired them in a talk he did at their school years before (much to the chagrin of the other revelers in the queue desperate to get into whatever house of ill repute we were attempting to enter).
Apart from being Best Man at our wedding (the poem he wrote and read at the ceremony “Heart Garden”, is one of my most treasured memories and possessions), he is also Godfather (in a non-religious type way, if that’s possible:-) to my son. Here they are just after he was born:
You can get further background on Lemn here, and you can get his work from Amazon here:
His second published book was “Rebel without Applause”. As he said on Alan Beswick’s show this morning, after Alan chastised him for moving from Manchester to London, he’s now a “Rebel with a baguette”. I can’t publish what he said MBE stands for. “Might Be Ethiopian” was my suggestion – not as funny as his.
One project Lemn has created that is really exciting is the GPS (Global Poetry System), a typically brilliant idea that is a user generated world map of poetry. Watch the video about it here:
We’ve often chatted about the use of poetry in the commercial world over the past 20 years. A couple of things we did together that I’m very proud of include the famous poem on the wall of Hardy’s Well pub on the busiest bus route in Europe on Wilmslow Road heralding the entrance to Rusholme from the South in Manchester. I pulled that together along with Toby Hadoke and the then landlord of the pub, Andy, back when there was a little comedy club in the back room.
That was back in 95/96 – and it’s still there!
The other thing was that when I won a sales promotion contract with Stagecoach to promote their weekly Megarider ticket (with the company I set up in 2001 that’s still going strong, AIM Solutions) I convinced them to them to do the whole thing around Lemn and use his poems in the promotional material.
We got Lemn on the side of hundreds of buses lying down “Sex and the City” style, his face on millions of tickets and posters inside the buses with his poetry all over them. I’ll never forget the meeting with Stagecoaches’ management when I proposed it. One of them said “I don’t want to do it if he’s associated with drugs”. Oh, racism. What a bizarre and stupid thing you are.
Lemn Sissay. Friend. Brother. Member of the British Fucking Empire!
Personalised search has been around on Google for a while, but only for people who were logged in to their google accounts whilst searching. It basically tailors the search results to your browsing history. Recently this feature has been widened to include people who are not logged into a google account when searching.
It has interesting ramifications for SEO – your listing will appear in different places dependent on how many times the user has clicked on your site for the search term.
One client of mine emailed me recently asking if I could do anything about the fact that his site was no longer Number One for his tier one keyword. I checked on my laptop and he was indeed still number one. The company he said had overtaken him were nowhere to be seen on my screen. I asked if he’d been clicking on his competitor’s site a lot recently (he had), so I told him to click on the Search Settings at the top right of the Google page and then to disable the customised search.
Sometimes Google doesn’t show this information, and sometimes it puts up a little “View customisations” link just above the information about how long the search took and how many pages were returned for the query. If you click on that, you get a message like this:
“When possible, Google will customize your search results based on location and/or recent search activity. Additionally, when you’re signed in to your Google Account, you may see even more relevant, useful results based on your web history.”
Disabling it is one thing, another is to go to a Google Dance tool like this.
The Google Dance tool allows you to check your rankings on different google servers from around the world, and will give you your actual, non-personalised rankings. The “Google Dance”, if you’ve never heard of it before, is simply the term used by SEOs to explain how rankings seem to jump up and down as Google’s servers get updated.
You should also make sure you’ve got Rank Checker installed in Firefox and schedule your rank checking automatically.
Now…I really should be out in the snow instead of blogging about rankings the day before Christmas Eve!
I came across this video recently whilst looking into the so-called Global Warming/Carbon Crisis following all the hullabaloo after the Copenhagen debacle.
It shocked me.
Are we actually living in a fascist state? Did the Nazis win the 39-45 war? Has everything predicted and illustrated by Orwell and Kafka come to light but hidden in plain sight?
If you care one dot about the concept of free speech, this should frighten the living shit out of you:
I’ve just come across this guy Phelim McAleer – seems like a decent citizen to me. Whether we agree with his views or not should not detract from the fact that he has a right to ask questions, and a right to his views which seem, to me in this case at least, simply to get Al Gore to clarify the fundamental errors identified by the British High Court in his film, “An Inconvenient Truth”. Especially as this film is being shown in schools to our children!
Nothing should be presented as fact like this (although that’s never stopped the religious indoctrination I witness at the nativity plays I am obliged to attend every year).
I watched that film about three years ago and it scared the bejesus out of me.
I’m starting to think that was it’s intention. Another tactic designed to keep us all like rabbits in headlights, along with wars on terror, swine flu, recession – the never ending list of nonsense designed to get us all distracted from massive changes in legislation that effect our rights as human beings on this Earth.
An amazing amount of snow on Sunday (which has me on a wild goose chase skidding from shop to shop looking for an elusive sledge – most of which had been sold out to more organised parents presumably) led me to take this picture from the car today. It was an experiment to see how the iPhone camera dealt with looking the sun right in the eye (something I teach my kids to do when they shake hands with anyone).
It’s also a salient reminder of just how beautiful this world really is.
