In this short RSA Animate, renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek investigates the surprising ethical implications of charitable giving.

Anyway, in the absence of having anything substantial to post I just wanted to draw your attention to a rather beautiful documentary. I’ve been, in retrospect perhaps a little ineloquently, excitedly babbling about The Semantic Web for what seems like an absolute age. Having had my head stuck in computers and the internet for most of my life, I find it absolutely thrilling that we finally seem to be getting to the point where using one is an intuitive experience. It’s not there yet, not quite, but we are getting there. When we do you will find computers, not to mention all other items of digital media kit, being used in a far more creative way by a far greater swathe of the world then they already are. So it’s pretty exciting, enjoy.

A story about the Semantic Web

Interviews with:

Tim Berners-Lee

Clay Shirky

Chris Dixon

David Weinberger

Nova Spivack

Jason Shellen

Lee Feigenbaum

John Hebeler

Alon Halevy

David Karger

Abraham Bernstein

All in all there were twelve different attendees and representatives from two different companies, not to mention three different parts of one company itself, and the spread throughout the room was impressively wide. We had everyone from Office Managers and Receptionists through to Production Staff, Program Managers, Comms Managers, Web Designers and IT Heads.

One of the really interesting things that came out of the day was the engagement levels of the attendees. The social graph was particularly scattered with some people only keeping up with children at university via facebook, others who eschewed the text based social space and preferred video chat, guys who use youtube as their primary channel and some people who used nothing at all. To top that off we also had some people in the room who had twigged on to the potential of the social web as a networking and professional development tool.

In Short then, a pretty excellent cross section of society.

I decided that, as there was so many different agendas from the attendees in the room, that to fill a six hour session with niche, techy, or geeky content was a losing strategy so I focussed the day loosely around three main themes:

• The characteristics of the Social Web: How sharing, rating and iterating changed everything.
• The power of the Social Web: How budget needn’t be a barrier and time vs. ROI.
• Promoting and managing engagement with the Social Web: Policy building to grow communities

I interspersed the session with some videos which broke things up nicely and ensured that I came loaded with biscuits to keep the sugar levels up. Also, I had a bit of a flash of inspiration at the very last minute and decided to add in The ABBA Challenge. Throughout the day I dropped in the titles of well known ABBA songs and the first person to ‘call’ these on the Ning network I set up to support the day got points which went towards the grand prize of £25 of Amazon vouchers. So it’s true what they say “if all else fails, try bribery”!

I probably delivered about half of the subject matter that I had actually prepared due to interesting discussions breaking out all over the place on copyright, the Digital Economy Bill, spam and how the Social Web impacts on brands. The main thing I learned from the day is to keep agile when doing training sessions of this size, be led by the group rather than your schedule.

Anyhow, I’ve already had some lovely feedback from the day and connected with some very, very interesting people. Thanks to Helen Philpot for arranging it all and I hope to be back across soon. Also, check out Channel7’s website if you haven’t already.

It’s also specially lovely when you consider that they have two stadiums (Wembley and the Emirates) which are absolute shoe-ins for selection of the final 12 and are therefore unlikely to be awarded the other. Anyway, some more local cities are also bidding to be host cities and given the amount of stick I would get if I didnt here are the link to Leeds, Sheffield and Hull‘s bid efforts. You can also follow them on Twitter here: Leeds, Sheffield and Hull

Regular readers of the blog (of which, admittedly, there aren’t many) will probably have been wondering why the lack of updates recently. The reasons are many and varied but the day job has been pretty hectic, lots of important and creatively draining meetings have been distracting me, I’ve been doing some serious decorating on our ramshackle 150 year old house and also I’ve been on holiday – see the pic of me and the little terror on the beach for proof.

On the holiday front, the weather in Whitby, North Yorkshire, on a north facing bit of coastline facing the North Sea in September no less, was absolutely fantastic. I had envisaged some ‘Withnail & I’ style “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake” disaster. I have somehow managed to jam my way into booking the best two weeks of the summer off for my hols. Gloat.

Anyway, I had hoped to have some posts ready to come out of draft form and into the cold, hard, critical light of “teh internets” but sadly I have been too busy not looking like a Goth to finish them. Expect some Augmented Reality stuff, some comment and ham-fisted analysis on Twitter’s recent change to their Ts&Cs and a comparison of some of the most popular Twitter desktop clients.

Anyway, here’s a cracking video from Socialnomics09 that – as well as having some lovely typography – also sums up some of the potential for Social Media. Enjoy.

We are, after all, talking about the same company who thought it was a good move for their band to be plastered across the chests of Chelsea FC who are probably the least likable, most vulgar team in world football. Until new petrochemical kids on the block Manchester City came along Chelsea were the embodiment of the ills of the modern game and a litmus test for just how far the world’s favorite sport had gone from being the working man’s game to the Oligarch’s latest play thing. Confusingly, the brand guardians at Samsung thought this would be the image they would want for their company.

Anyway, petty football rivalries aside Samsung have continued making their brand less likeable by now trying even harder to be likable. Lets face it, there’s nothing like desperation and neediness to make you less attractive. The amazing thing about this is that it’s the second iteration of this campaign, the original got panned so they re-cut and re-released it.

The film itself just feels like viral by numbers to me, you can imagine the “creatives” on this account getting the brief, replete with gems like “fresh”, “out of the box”, “guerrilla” and “edgy”, and rubbing their grubby little mits. They’ve even embellished it with the standard talking heads and, even worse, cringe inducing web speak in the form of “FTW” (which, for those of you who have a life and a soul and may not know, means For The Win).

Ugh, I feel all torrid now and need to go and have a wash. Anyway, have a read of some of the video comments for some extra derision.