cubemate | Dan Ng

It's Good To Be Back

Humped Zebra Crossing originally posted by dknNYC

Co-posted to cubemate.com and the DDB Open Planning Group blog

I've been back in London for four months, and it's been very good so far. The planning department at DDB is even more fun the second time around.  I don't think I'll work with this many planners in one office ever again - 35 by last count across digital, direct, econometrics, and broadcast - and now we're Facebooking, IM'ing, and blogging.  Soon we'll sit together in the same area (and we already rant and drink together.)

Another part of being in London, though, is getting in touch with Greater London's Plannersphere.  But last week I rashly wrote on my friend Ian Leslie's Facebook wall that I was tired of the 'Plannersphere Mafia' and that I was glad that Russell Davies' Interesting 2007 conference was sold out.

The main reason, I neglected to say, was that I had read a few blog accounts of Iain Tait's presentation at PSFK London 2007.  The blogs I did read made the talk out to be really awful.  It made me feel like I was on the outside of the 'cool kids club' with traditional agencies named for dead white men (or "Benson, Christ, Smith-Fellow, Hasbeen and Shagalott" as the presentation put it) while the digital agencies were all vibrant and interesting.

I may have judged a little bit too quickly.  On reading the original posts at Iain Tait's blog, I found a well-balanced and well-thought out essay on the differences between our two approaches.  It might have been a provocative title, but it wasn't really that bad.  So I'm posting this to say that there isn't as much of a divide between big traditional agencies and smaller integrated ones, and if there is, let's talk instead of calling each other names.  It's really not very productive.

Trying a Different Approach

un-, originally posted by dknNYC

With the help of some friendly comments from Matt, Erin, and German, I am going to try a slightly different approach to this blog.  First off, I've redesigned the site a bit to make it faster to download and to make it easier to navigate.

I've also linked my del.icio.us linkroll to my RSS feed. 

If that sounds like gibberish to you here's the plain English version:  I've put all the interesting links I see everyday on a site called del.icio.us (.us is like .com, or .edu, but cleverer.)  It's like public bookmarks, except I get to comment on the bookmarks as well.  You can check for yourself any time by clicking on the del.icio.us button in the left hand column of this page.  The permanent web address for my del.icio.us bookmarks is:  http://del.icio.us/cubemate.

So, if you use a newsreader, you can subscribe to this blog as a feed, which means it will act more like it were e-mail.  That way you would only see this blog pop up if something new arrived on it.  The technology behind this is called RSS (for Really Simple Syndication.)  The easiest reader to use is Google's, and I'd highly recommend it.  Click here to find out more.

Anyway, the RSS feed from my blog will have daily del.icio.us bookmark updates.  So if you find some of the stuff I dig up interesting, subscribing to my RSS feed on a newsreader will give you a daily dose of what I'm finding out there.

Meanwhile, I'm going to give blogging another try, with shorter posts.  Thanks for the encouragement!