Social Media in Laymen’s terms

I found this rather nice video on the Experience Curve website.

It’s nice because it a) explains the idea of social media and b) uses a rather lo-fi method for telling the story.

Nice.

Listen to Birdsong

Crested Lark!

Originally uploaded by Abhishek unplugged!

I remember when I was at school and they were testing the broadcasting kit for Classic FM here in the UK. They used a continuous birdsong and everyone at school used to love it for revising for GCSEs.

We called it Bird.FM (inspiringly).

So you can imagine my glee when someone at LBi sent this through:

Web based Birdsong radio.
Yeahhhh.

However, while this is nice to listen to while working, I can’t help but feel a little sad that people don’t hear this stuff enough for real.

Enjoy.

LBi / Multimap Workshop

LBi Workshop

Originally uploaded by stephen__b

Some pictures from a very recent workshop at LBi’s offices in Brick Lane, London.

Courtesy of Stephen Barber’s photostream.

See the full photostream on Flickr, if you so wish.

Tesco creating ‘Eco-Towns’ – Building Demand – Filth

By Warren Hutchinson

Tailwind gets just a little bit protesting/activist today.

In a little village just outside Cambridge, on the Cambridge / Essex border is a picturesque little place called Hinxton. Just nearby is the village of Great Chesterford, Shelford and the medieval market town of Saffron Walden.

What surrounds these quaint and very old little villages is agricultural land. There are one or two A-Roads, A1301 and A505, that link the villages and of course the M11 makes it’s way past Duxford en route to the M25, but largely this is a beautiful and tranquil part of the world. I know because it’s where my wife is from and we’re often up there with her folks and siblings.

View Larger Map

Tesco, along with Jarrow Investments want to ruin it by building a housing development there.

Image taken from the Stop Hanley Grange Website.

They call it an ‘Eco-Town’ and use phrases such as ‘Hanley Grange is a new type of community. With sustainability and respect for the environment at its heart’.

Sorry, but how is it conducive to sustainability when you build on raw agricultural land?

Idiots.

Furthermore:

“Hanley Grange will feature around 8,000 new homes, 40% of which are affordable, with an opportunity to deliver a further 3,000 homes in the future. This will enable it to sustain a secondary school, up to five primary schools, a health centre and a range of community facilities, shops and public spaces.”

Ah, sustainability again. Sustain a school that wouldn’t have been required had they not built the houses.

Fools.

Who are Jarrow Investments? Well:

“Jarrow Investments has a long-standing commercial agreement with Tesco to work with them and other landowners to take forward the proposals for Hanley Grange. One of the requirements set out by the government for eco-towns is that they should provide a good range of facilities, including a secondary school, a medium scale retail centre, good quality business space and leisure facilities. We hope a Tesco store will play a part in delivering that retail centre and are delighted they are involved as Tesco an industry leader in the development of sustainable supermarkets.”

‘The development of sustainable supermarkets’?

Are they serious?

Tesco are the purveyors of fine intensively farmed chicken if you remember Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall’s ‘Chicken Run’.

(By the way, check out his site for information on the intensive farming industry, it’s an eye-opening read.)

They’re not sustainable.

This makes my blood boil. I don’t like Tesco very much. I don’t like them for all the reasons most people don’t; squeezing the suppliers, ousting local businesses, selling mucky, intensively farmed meat and poultry ‘2 for a fiver‘.

Hanley Grange is to provide homes for between 8 and 11 thousand people. See a map of the proposed site here:

Doing so is going to wreck the area and possibly close historic Duxford airfield, stopping the flight of Spitfires.

I think there should be more Spitfires flying, not less.

Taken from the Stop Hanley Grange Website:

1. The wrong location
   This is a resurrected planning application South Cambridgeshire District Council has already REJECTED and has chosen Northstowe as a new town – this should be our eco town.
2. Enough is enough
   We already have one of the biggest house building programmes in the country. South Cambridgeshire is committed to building 23,000 homes. We don’t need any more.
3. We don’t have the infrastructure
   Our roads are under huge strain now. The Liverpool Street/Cambridge line lacks capacity and station car parks are full. The Citi7 bus is regularly held up due to the volume of traffic.
4. Destroying greenfield land
   You don’t improve the environment by building on miles of high quality grade II farmland.
5. Undermining local democracy
   The “eco-town” is being imposed by ministers and bureaucrats in Whitehall, subverting the normal planning process. We believe that local people should decide through our elected representatives. It’s a question of democracy and accountability.
6. An ECO-CON, not an eco-town
   The carbon neutral house hasn’t been designed yet. Thousands more cars on our roads aren’t carbon neutral either. The plan just won’t work.

It’s one of 15 sites across the country proposed for development of an ‘Eco-town’.

Apart from all the usual anti-Tesco angles and the fact that this is an ill-coceived development in the first place, what about the following?

- jobs
- access
- water

What I disticntly dislike about this is the idea that Tesco build these places with a single view to provide intense demand for a store it hasn’t yet built.

This, people, is dark strategy in play.

There is a large Tesco in Saffron Walden (yes, of course – just on the edge of town) and a Waitrose in the town. There is a market and local butchers actually within the town itself.

Visit the STOP HANLEY GRANGE website and sign the petition by June 30th 2008. Or better still

Sign petition at No 10.

The Girl Effect

Just… well, nice:

London is definitely NOT a cycling city

I’ve had a small rant about cycling in this city before, but my frustration resurfaces with LBi’s move to new offices in Brick Lane.

I’ve been in my new location 3 weeks now and I struggle, for the life of me, to find a nice route to and from Waterloo to Brick Lane.

The problem is that there are just too many junctions, one-ways and congested traffic. Everyone is angry, Taxis are out to kill you and WHEN WILL MOTOROCYCLIST STOP treating cycle lanes and safe areas at traffic lights as theirs?

I hear that there are plans to allow them to use bus and cycle lanes.

RAaaaaAAaAAAaaR!

(Should I take my iPod off?)

LBi Move House

A ‘company man’ post today I’m afraid. Sorry it’s been a while, but things have been crazybusy.

Amongst all sorts of things work and family related, I’ve a new role here at work so have been deep in transition/handover etc. More later on that (he says as if it’s interesting).

But, down to the ‘move’… it’s finally happened.

After a year of planning, building and changing plans LBi (we) have finally moved into the new shiny office space in Brick Lane. We’ve taken over the Atlantis Building in Brick Lane’s Old Truman Brewery

Apologies for the pic quality but I shot these from my LG Viewty. They’re okay, just not great.

I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr if you so fancy. Of the prospective 400+ seats only the guys on the ground floor have moved in so far, so there are lots of empty seats.

It’s a really important step for the agency having previously been split across three London offices (2 in Clerkenwell, 1 in Kensington). As a consequence of the merger between Framfab, LB Icon and Wheel running the business across 3 locations was challenge to say the least. But we did it and now we’re moving into one place.

I’ve been here 1 day and I’m very excited about our future. This place is awesome.