Posts Tagged ‘art’

Stop blocking

This website has been created by a stalwart of the international PR community, Shel Holtz, to help battered, progressive managers argue and lobby for offering or maintaining employee access to social networking sites during office hours. He has said the site became necessary when self-serving companies who make money out of blocking access discovered the key to getting headlines. They simply do bad mathematics to exaggerate the cost of employee time spent on social network (usually a big number around the multi-billion-dollar mark) and the lazy, uncritical media swallow it whole and run with bold headlines designed to foment wowserism and neo-ludditism on talk shows and in boardrooms. You can see the latest stories on his site but tonight I want to share his main arguments in favour of granting access to employees, namely:

• Well-communicated and consistently enforced policies will deal with most issues. The number of companies blocking access to social media sites is roughly on par with the number of companies without social media policies. Isn’t it possible that employees who knew what the rules were might actually follow them? Especially if they knew there were real and serious consequences for failing to do so? Read the rest of this entry »

Can a giant leech be art?
I have been running some marketing workshops in the Adelaide Hills recently and met a colourful and somewhat zany character, Janet Campbell. Janet is working on ways to promote local artists, particularly from the Hills region, on the wider stage.

What she doesn’t know is that I have stumbled upon her arts blog and one of her posts caught my attention: Can a giant plastic leech be art?

You’ve got to see the photo of the leech in question. It is one Janet helped the kids of Macclesfield make during the 2008 Fringe. Just seeing it makes you want to burst out laughing – it must have been excellent fun. And the fun would have been exacerbated by the fact that on the day the leech was paraded through the main street, it was hot and windy, meaning at any time there was the risk of a giant leech taking off and flying through the streets of an otherwise quiet country town.

But is it art? Not sure I have an answer either. I guess they have replicated or represented nature, which is an artistic device. It also prompts one to wonder what life would be like if the insects were our size and we were their size, and whether or not that would change the way we relate to them, ie, would we respect them more?

I would love to know your thoughts on this too!

(NB I was just called upon by my wife to kill a spider lurking in Alexandra’s jolly jumper device – how ironic given what I was just writing!).

Twitter Moms
This is a mini site for micro-blogging. Make sense? Well, micro-blogging is a subset of the blogging phenomenon in which bloggers restrict themselves to SMS-length posts and use services such as Twitter to facilitate quick posting. Twitter Moms is a group within the micro-blogosphere where mums who use Twitter can actually find one another and take part in discussions in the one place.

There are forums on “being moms” and special forums for mums of “twins”. All in all, the latest figures show about 5,000 mums use the site daily.

Here are some of the thoughtful topics that must be quite fun for mums to take part in as they snatch a few minutes from their chaotic days to bond with other women:

• What did you want to be when you grew up and what are you now?
• Do You Cook On Saturdays?
• What are your kids going to be for halloween
• Story behind your Twitter name?
• Work from home ideas?

You can visit the site to sign up at twittermoms.com.

It’s A Wonderful Internet
This is a little flash presentation that is cheesy in parts but does underline how ubiquitous the internet has become.

It is done in the version of “Twas the night before Christmas” and Dr Suess, and tells the story of a man who wishes the internet would disappear, and then suffers the consequences.

Firstly, he loses contact with his large pool of online friends, he goes out for some entertainment but has no idea how to navigate around town because that all happened with online maps before, he even gets evicted because he had become so use to paying his bills online!

You can listen to the story – and interact with it – at www.itsawonderfulinternet.com.

Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers
This site is an oldy but a goody. It is a collection of photos of men you think look like Kenny Rogers. As far as website ideas go, they don’t get much simpler than this (apart from cats that look like Hitler, but that’s a site for another day). I thought I would dig this one out because the silver haired country star is in Adelaide on October 26, 2008.

On this site there are photo galleries, hall of fame, Kenny of the month, corn muffin recipe, look like Kenny tips, and Kenny spotting tips.

• Look like Kenny tips: grow hair longer than is fashionable, if it is not white or grey make it so, sweep it back like there is a constant breeze, make sure it grows longer at the back over the collar, trim your beard severely and keep it white, drape a jumper over your shoulders or go the whole hog with a black leather vest over a white shirt, and cultivate a “country cool” attitude that says “I’d rather be fishing”.
• Kenny spotting tips: state fairs, airports, construction sites, drag races, secondhand shops, bars with sawdust floors, and church.
• Corn muffin recipe: The cornbread recipe (or muffins) is supposedly the secret recipe used in Kenny’s own chain of fire-roasted chicken restaurants. Having tasted “down south” corn bread in restaurants before, this sounds worth a try!

You can find the recipe and photo gallery at http://www.menwholooklikekennyrogers.com/. I am looking forward to some Adelaide additions after the concert!