OPEN

I thought I’d try out reflecting on some of the places me and my thoughts have been this week in links and images…

Stateside odyssey

Image: MIT WiFi.

First off, I’m in Boston ahead of a workshop on blogging tomorrow, then a series of meetings with clients and colleagues that will se me in Charlotte, Chicago and New York before returning home. Hopefully I’ll busy enough to keep my mind off how much I miss home already.

Image: MIT bookstore display.

I just took at a look round the MIT Press Bookstore which is across the road from my hotel. I could have filled my case with books, but I managed to restrain myself to a copy of Brain Rules (which I’ve wanted ever since I posted that video of John Medina talking at Google) and Extreme Toyota (what looks like an interesting addition to the canon of business books analysing that company). Looking forward to tucking into them (just as soon as I’ve finished David Brain’s Crowd Surfing – I managed to make it to the launch party last week, video on David’s blog here)

Can’t get The Wire out of my head

I won’t be stopping in Baltimore on this trip, but that city’s very much on my mind having recently finished watching the final season of The Wire. Beeker sent me a link to an excellent 43 Folders post which uses a discussion of the genius of The Wire to talk about arcs in writing blogs and creating all sorts of things. Well worth a read, but only if you’ve finished watching all five seasons.

If you’re in a similarly reflective mood about the genius of The Wire check out this Museum of the Moving Image podcast of a discussion between “David Simon, the series creator and co-producer; novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, who wrote several episodes; and four of the show’s stars: Seth Gilliam (who played Ellis Carver), Clark Johnson (city editor Gus Haynes), Clarke Peters (Lester Freemon), and Wendell Pierce (“Bunk”), moderated by David Schwartz, Chief Curator.”

How all web agency websites should be…

I stumbled across the website of The Barbarian Group, a very interesting agency in NYC. Certainly, I think it has the best looking (and functioning website of any digital agency I’ve seen).

I especially love the way the most frequent bloggers on the company blog get front page billing (the Active Barbarians section. Also the Barberipedia’s layout and the fact that all of the people who work there have their bios on the site feels very open and very real. It makes me feel well disposed to the company before I’ve even met anyone who works there, intrigues me to find out more and with the showcase portfolio front and centre makes it clear they are a credible bunch.

It’s a nice change from agency sites that make a lot of noise about understanding the social web all the while throwing flash animations in your eyes… arrgh… eek… get back you… carpetbaggers…

Peter Kim’s big list of brands in social media

Peter Kim’s been worth listening to for a long while. It was he who, while at Forrester wrote the seminal Connected Agency report on the future of digital agencies. Now he’s off with the founder of Razorfish and some significant funding to create a “strategic consulting practice and an enterpriseclass Social Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite“. Anyway more practically, he posted an updated list of social media marketing examples on his blog this week – well worth a peruse…

Social media opinions aggregator

Take a look at Swotti. This aggregator looks incredible and seems to offer a massive amount of analysis functionality that you normally only see in industrial strength web monitoring/analysis software, such “adjective clouding” and news clippings. Billed as an “opinions analysis” it claims a “web 3.0” (whatever the hell that is) and says it is analysing 500 million opinions. I’ll be taking a closer look at this…

Here’s the Swotti review page for the iPhone.

And finally…

A funny sign I saw today near Harvard Square. Rearrange these words to form a well known English insult:

And and advert which may become my Twitter avatar: