Category: insights

#32 August 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

All the things I tweeted this month curated for your delectation.

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After posting the 20th episode, a reflection piece on ‘Connecting Humans In A Beautiful Way‘ regarding Creative Welly.

This journal paper which says what it does on the tin (in bigger words): Survival of the Friendliest: Homo sapiens Evolved via Selection for Prosociality.

How all of Britain was put on Denmark’s red list – apart from Wales (the first time an EU country has differentiated between the UK’s four nations when specifying entry requirements).

A zero-carbon approach to heating homes by flooding old coal mines.

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Template Maker is a bunch of free custom sized templates for paper craft & packaging for all creative occasions.

A place to find and copy special characters (for pasting) to your clipboard.

Sheety, which turns Google spreadsheets into powerful APIs to rapidly develop prototypes, websites, apps & more.

This open-source software license that developers can use to prohibit the use of their code by applications or companies that threaten to accelerate climate change through fossil fuel extraction.

RocketChat is an open-source Slack alternative.

A delicious free font called Inter.

Extract vocal and instrumental tracks from any audio using AI.

Image credit: Annibale Siconolfi – solarpunk visions.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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Creative Welly Season Two | Connecting Humans In A Beautiful Way

Reflecting on the journey so far.

Last week, the 20th episode of Creative Welly: courageous conversations with bold humans, went live.

The purpose of this unconventional endeavour is driven by the desire to produce something beautiful and intimate—exploring through conversation, the emerging intersections of interest with two people who have never met before—done by pausing the melee of life and intentionally crafting a space to be human through stories and in time.

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

Visually, there’s nothing like it on the planet.

The completed twenty discussions featuring forty intriguing humans equate to 1943minutes / over 32hours, and in terms of the metrics of watches / listens: don’t know, don’t care*. That’s not the reason I started this (see above).

It’s also a wholly commercial free venture and costs time and money in the chunky pre-production investment organising the people, the space, the camera / lighting / mics, hosting of content plus post-production commitment to editing, audio podcast formation, uploading everything, posting online and crafting the subtitle snippets.

But when something so pleasing and unique manifests the effort is justified.

More episodes will follow, although for now we’ll take a break for a couple of months. Feel free to explore the growing back catalogue here plus subscribe in the way most pertinent to you.

Epilogue

This simply wouldn’t have been achieved if it wasn’t for:

I recently organised an exclusive gathering just for those who have participated in the project to celebrate and connect them i further conversation with the growing community:

*Postcript: Back in 2006 I started the MediaSnackers podcast. In 5 years I produced about 200 podcasts (which included a few dozen for other clients at the time). The stats were in the high hundreds per episode and it drove traffic to the website into the thousands per month. 15 years later, what success looks like is very different.
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#31 July 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Go for a digital adventure by following some / all of the links below which I tweeted last month.

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Venezuela exodus reaches record levels: “More than 5.6 million have left the country since 2015, when it had a population of 30 million, escaping political, economic and social hardships.”

How in Argentina, cheap government-issued netbooks sparked a musical renaissance.

Be careful what you say to Baby Boomers, they are more sensitive than Millennials (study showed).

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Google / Android are making it harder to opt-out of targeted ads (tracking, basically) so here’s how to do it.

An all-in-one browser called Vivaldi.

Slide Ace Ventura is why the web was invented.

An illustration of how we grow around grief / trauma.

Two audio episodes which are delightful: On Being discussing the new Rainer Maria Rilke translation of Letters To A Young Poet and Monocle chatting with Sir Tom Jones about his new album ‘Surrounded By Time’.

Image credit: “Pontty ty praid – the New Bridge over the River Taaffe in Wales”, former owner: George III, King of Great Britain, 1738-1820.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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What Are You Willing to Be Bad At? | Designing Differentiation

What you don’t decide to do is as important as what you do do.

Scott Belsky (Adobe’s Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud plus co-founder of Behance) gives a stunningly insightful talk which I revisited recently. It challenges us all to think about how to design / assess businesses and / or understanding our own business potential based on using a differentiating what we decide to do / don’t do:

“Self-awareness is the only sustainable competitive advantage you can find.”

Am hoping Mr Belsky won’t mind that I took the model discussed and made it available for download below as a blank template (just right click and ‘save as’)—it certainly helped me in some of my thinking about new service offerings:

Via 99u.com
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The Fuel Which Drives Community | The Company You Keep

Exist as an act of love.

Watching a Shirky talk always means leaving with a huge amount of pearls, but check out the above plus the quote below and tell me it doesn’t resonate with any creative endeavours you have been involved with:

“…they don’t care that they saw it in practice because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory.”

If you work with a client or in a corporation / organisation which doesn’t get what you’re trying to do even though you have showed them the solution, forget changing minds, time to change the company you keep!

Then surround yourself with people who take care plus improve each others output.

Video link if not embedding above.

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#30 June 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Take a cyber-ramble around these jumble of things below.

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In a chilly foreshadowing of events to come, New Zealand’s foreign minister warns China ‘storm’ could be coming.

Greenland ice sheet on brink of major tipping point, shit!

How private is your Gmail, and should you switch? ANSWER: it’s not and yes (I use Fastmail).

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This online Lofi streaming site coupled with the audio-based effects and rainy vibes for when you want to chill or for background music accompaniment.

So pretty, meteor showers as seen from space.

Simple and free, “do wtf you want with” pixel-perfect icons.

More for your ears, a generative music platform for ambient background audio whilst you work.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#29 May 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Delight in some random things I tweeted from the world wide web.

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‘The knicker throwing started in the Copacabana in New York in 1968’ via Tom.

Google is testing out its controversial new ad targeting tech on millions of Chrome users, sighs, check here if you’re worried.

Another whistleblower personal account & another reason to leave Facebook whilst you can.

If you’re in Ireland, thousands are urged to sue Facebook in mass action over leaked data.

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A site to see a satellite tonight.

A growing list of those being brought to justice for the ‘Capital Breach’ of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C, on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021.

This guessing game pops you into the ambience of a random city and you have to guess where you are.

BONUS PICS

Image credit: Soon She Was Lost to Sight, Arthur Rackham via Old Book Illustrations.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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#28 April 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Lets your digits do the clicking with some curated niceties.

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TEDxWellington 2021 cancelled (ouch).

How Kenya is harnessing the immense heat from the Earth, seriously.

How the Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands thinks they got rid of COVID19 by competence and luck.

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Keep Being Human poster.

Listen to ambient sounds inspired by movies & TV.

Here’s an infinitely-zooming in or out painting.

A tool to explore the view of Earth’s globe from 750 millions ago until today.

The whole of the Louvre collection is now available online.

Image credit / check out Olga’s other colourisation work.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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TEDxWellington 2021 Cancelled & License Hibernated | A Big Hole Appears In My Diary

For nearly a decade, a huge part of my life has been devoted to a pro-bono endeavour of producing the community TEDx events here in the capital.

The decision to cancel this years event really hurt—read the full announcement here—as the 2021 event was going to be my last and boy I was aiming to go out on a high (with a 2,000 person event plus some wicked delegate experience ideas to boot as well).

However, after:

…my time as the kaitiaki of the capital city license has ended.

READ the FULL ANNOUNCEMENT, reflections & thank you / LOVE LETTER post VIA TEDXWELLINGTON.COM

SO, WHAT’S NEXT?

Rest.

Then explore new paid opportunities which align to my skill set and serves my individual purpose regarding enabling people to find and have voice through delicious learning experiences.

Am looking to work with kind humans who reach beyond their grasp and have complex problems to solve—I like intersecting disciplines, leading on collaborations and crafting outcome-based connections through content creation.

Big words for basically saying making cool and complicated stuff with nice people!

As way of an illustration, I recently developed and delivered an in-studio learning experience for Teulo which is an online platform for architects and designers.

Let me know if you are in need of a DK-shaped human to assist in any creative project directing / producing.

And I will continue to offer and deliver speaker coaching (one-to-ones and group masterclasses) for select clients as well as developing out the fourth Creative Leadership NZ 2021 conference for the end of the year.

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#27 March 2021 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A gathering of things found which has surprised and delighted.

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Fears over DNA privacy as 23andMe goes public in deal with Richard Branson.

Bebo reveals plan to take on Facebook & Twitter.

Facebook asks users to opt into activity tracking ahead of iOS 14 changes.

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Check out this massive amount of ZX Spectrum games online.

GutenSearch: Looks inside the books of Project Gutenberg.

This jungle wilderness simulator for relaxing, sleeping or working.

Comprehensive list of templates for Paper Mechanisms.

There’s a new hugging emoji (Unicode PDF details) 🫂.

Image credit: that’s a photo of the first roundabout under the Atlantic Ocean / read more about it here.
All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
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