William Essex
Shall I tell you a story?
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Hearing those echoes again

6/6/2014

 
PictureEleven steps to...?
One of the advantages of being my age (seems I was scratching my name on ceramics back in 1862) is that you begin to hear echoes.
    Back in the nineties, there were people who would say "We've got a website!" as though this meant they'd cracked the internet. I remember early bank websites that were a picture of a room. Teller windows, filing cabinets, other bits of furniture, all of which gave access to literature on whichever services fitted the visual metaphor.
    Nothing happened online - just documents to print out (and post). That went on until about 2005, which was the last time I heard somebody in a business environment say "We need a website!" as though that would solve everything. [Remember the advent of TV advertising? Guess you don't. It was the same.]
    By then, we were sitting through those seminars and conference sessions on how to "leverage" Facebook. They never happened for Twitter, as I remember, and LinkedIn kind of crept up on us. Yes, Pinterest, Tumblr, namecheck, namecheck. Those seminars morphed into today's endless flood of "ten ways to get people to listen to you" blog posts, which all add up to "one catchy way of telling other people what to do in the hope that they'll listen to me forever".
    Then we hit social media. Stage one: realising you could talk to your customers online. Stage two: realising that if you screwed up service delivery, they could rubbish you online. Stage three: realising that talk is cheap while fixing service delivery is expensive. Talking more. And more. But always sounding like a robot taking lessons in cheerful.
    What's significant to me, in all of this, is not the moments of excitement - We've got a website! We could leverage Facebook! - but what happens when they don't solve everything. The excitements echo down the years, but so does that sense of bafflement that comes afterwards. It's the same every time, and it leads to real innovation, by which I mean a change of attitude leading into a change of behaviour accompanied by whatever new or re-purposed tools are needed to facilitate that new behaviour.
    Two days ago, I was invited to "like" a new Facebook page. Yes, I "liked" it, but all that does is make me aware of it. That's something, but it'll take something more to stop me forgetting it.
    Three days ago, I read an article (online) about teenagers' preference for reading stories in print. This wasn't a screamer; it was a sober little piece observing that teenagers also like books (alongside screens, games, et al).
    Two weeks ago,
I attended a "social media marketing" seminar. The usual. What Google's doing. Stats on what people do when they go online. I say "the usual", but it was useful. I've kept my notes. I mention it here because the over-riding theme of the whole thing was: good content. A few years back, it might have been: keywords. [It was. I was there.]
    But now - content.
    That's a change in itself. Thinking back to that Facebook page I "like". Facebook's useful. But so many people use it that it's a baseline. I might go back to that page. But not because I "like" it. Need more than that.
    Maybe that echoing sense of bafflement is a lot of people getting ready to realise that the content has to be interesting. Not just frequent, or catchy, or "liked" by them or anybody else, or broken down into a list, but a genuine must-read.
    Wouldn't that be great?
    What could you really say, if you took the time to think about it? What do you really think?

Those excuses I mentioned

5/6/2014

 
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Oh, those mornings between commissions. Finished yesterday, sent off, done. Start the next one ... in a minute. Just time to come in here and acknowledge the lack of progress on The Sanity of Crowds. It's going to have to wait for the end of next week. Too much work on. Sorry about that.

    Picture
    In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

    Picture
    Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

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    What happens here

    This site is no longer updated weekly because I've taken to writing at Medium dot com instead. I may come back, but for now, I'm enjoying the simplicity at Medium.

    No data is kept on this site overnight. Medium posts might sometimes turn up here, and posts from here might sometimes turn up on Medium.
        Mind you, if you get a sense of deja vu when reading my work, that may be because you've lived this life before.

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    There's a page for this [edit: there isn't], but maybe you'd like to see the cover here?

    Where are we now? We're hurtling round the sun, held to the ground by a weak force that we don’t begin to understand, arguing about trade deals between the land masses on a planet mostly covered by water.
       The dolphins must think us ridiculous. No wonder they only come to the shallow water to play with us, not to signal their most complex philosophies. More.


    Riddle. It takes two to make me, but when I'm made, I'm only a memory. What am I? Scroll down to find out.

    Is that a catastrophe I see before me? Could be. There was a clear sky earlier, but now clouds are encroaching from the North. We could be in for a storm. More.


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    Read My Shorts?

    Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

    A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.


    Roads without end

    Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

    Picture
    Also available in English. Look further down.

    State of the Union

    Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
         Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

    Categories
    (Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

    All
    Abuse
    Consent
    Media


    Kitchen parenting

    I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
       "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
        "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
        "Anything else?" More.

    Picture
    Variously available online, in a range of formats.

    No pinpricks

    Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.


    Picture
    Ceased to exist. Sorry.

    Making mistakes

    We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

    Man down?

    There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.


    Not available for women

    Offending the status quo

    Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

    Thinks: populism

    Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

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    Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

    9th May 2014

    On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

    Riddle. What are you? You're a conversation!

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No animals were harmed in the making of this website. Other websites are available online (and off). All the content here is copyright William Essex, this year, last year, the year before that and, you
guessed it, the year before that, although I don't have the time right now to hunt out that little symbol. This website uses organic ingredients and respects your privacy. Come back some time.