The panel moderator was TV industry journalist and analyst Kate Bulkley and the other two panelists were Jonathan Sykes, ex-head of content for Tiscali (formerly Home Choice) and Peter Cowley, ex-head of interactive content Endemol UK.

There is a short summary of it here and my slides are up on slideshare here.

Unlike the other panelists I am one of the least qualified people in the world to prognosticate about the current state or possible future of TV. What I think Kate planned was that I’d bring a contrarian POV about the intersection of TV and online audience participation (AKA social media).

As part of my prep for the panel I read “It’s Not The End of TV As We Know It“  by Sheila Seles at the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. In her paper Seles makes the distinction between Broadcast TV as being ‘Live TV (broadcast once)’ and Online TV as being ‘Supplementary Content’ (Webisodes, games, mobisodes etc) and that the intersection of the two results in ‘Duplicate Content’ such as full length episodes broadcast on Hulu or the BBC iPlayer.

TV Types: Seles, MIT

I’m not sure that I agree with the various distinctions and overlaps. I’d see Duplicate Content as it’s own area, not the overlap of Online and Broadcast. But with that change made I thought it formed a useful picture of universe of the opportunities for audience participation in TV. As with all other forms of content there is no distinction between where or when TV happens and  the opportunities for engaging an audience on social platforms occurs at every stage and in every iteration.

TV types; Amended

1. Bundling, putting similar themed tweets together (and with other media; youtube videos, flickr photos etc)
2. Reorder the tweets so I can put them together in away that makes sense other than just chronologically
   
3. Distribution: how can I communicate the existence of this bundle to others via friendfeed, twitter, buzz etc
4. Updateability: as story changes I can update the bundle
   
5. Curation: I’m seeing a pattern or I have an observation and I’d like to write a comment on it and associate that with the bundle
   
6. Now that I have created, organised, commented on and distributed my bundle I need to ask for feedback; comment area (that I can switch on and off)

It was not what I would have described as an unqualified success.

Things that went well

• Big old desks with carrels, just like at school
• Quiet. Really. Very quiet.
• Old men in tweed grappling with oversized musty reference tomes

Things that went less well

• Free wi-fi (that ran so slowly that I got out my dongle. Yes, I know its free, but I had my hopes raised, and a woman scorned etc.)
• Not enough power points for plugging in laptops
• A strange smelling man who I am pretty sure didn’t work there busted me working in a closed section of the library and insisted that my desk was not a ‘Designated Laptop Position’ and I should therefore interrupt my life’s work and move. (Yes I was in the wrong, but I needed juice and a woman scorned etc).

So I am not going back. Mainly because of the skeevy man, but also because I want to keep trying new places. They need to have electricity and wi-fi or at least a mobile (dongle) signal. They also need to be quiet so I can think and a bit noisy so I can argue with Oli, Mike, Gabby etc. So herewith a list of alternative work locations that I’d love you to add to;

• On a train to Cornwall. Get out at Penzance, have a swim and come back.
• The Waterloo Suset Room at the Haward Gallery
• In Duncan’s cottage in Wiltshire (added feature: send a second team there sepearately by train with the proviso that they have to finish writing / answering the brief by Tisbury. Pick them up have a slap-up meal at the Beckford Arms, sleep at the cottage and return the next morning.
• In another professional work environment; a room in a hospital, an architect’s office, an artist’s studio, a science lab, an engineering workshop…(volunteers?)
• Walking through The National Gallery as I did the other day with Mark Hancock
• On a ferry down the Thames

I also wondered if using different documentation formats might throw up some interesting things;

• Do all of the brief writing correspondence by posting letters
• Paint the response to the client brief (oils not water colours obviously) Some starters here at SXSWi with each keynote being illustrated / interpreted in real time by a different artist / designer.
• Tweet the brief to the creative team
• Only use photos
• Write it all collaboratively on a wiki

And of course working with different people. When we set up RMM we agreed that the three of us would work in planning pairs. Given the very different planners that we were, by personality; experience and interests, this worked so well that we used to joke that between the three of us we were actually quite a decent planner. The pairs idea is also alive and well at Draftfcb but now I have access to an even wider range of planners to pair with. The next thing I am keen to try is working really closely with a creative team; you know, actually sitting with them, kicking ideas around, sharing sandwiches. I am curious to see how that might work given the swan-like relationships that creative teams have. This is not the post for it, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the growing interest I have in the creative technologist as another useful way of interrupting the creative pairing process.

Thanks to @wipspace for pointing me to this talk by Filip Nilsson from the agency F&B at Cannes last year;

Filip Nilsson speaks at Cannes Lions 2009 from Jimmy Wulff on Vimeo.

In it, Nilsson observes that agency structures haven’t changed since WWII, so he instigated  a few initiatives. While most of these don’t seem that radical.  consider what impact they might have on your agency; No titles. Seated all mixed in together, not by discipline. Collective, public (within the agency) reviews of work. All creatives as of 8AM on Monday are digital. Owned by the staff. And while each of these initiatives or variations has been tried by different agencies e.g. Mother and no account people between creatives and clients. St Lukes and all staff ownership, I’m not aware of anyone bundling them all up and working in this way so successfully.

Your thoughts on the back of a post card to the usual address. (See what I did there?)

Thursday night saw the 2010 rebirth of Laptopdance; a networking, info sharing, drink sipping geek-out. The Laptopdance events have had a varied past ranging from four of us in my basement flat eating a rather fine monk fish saffron paella to 120 of us at the Forrester Marketing Forum in London and pretty much everything in between.

The concept is pretty straight forward; Every day as you meander across the web you discover and play with new applications, web sites and services. Laptopdance is a chance to share those discoveries over a few drinks with some likeminded folk. To make sure we can find them the next day we bookmark everything on Delicious.

To help us find things in the wider web I encourage you to use the hash #laptopdance as demonstrated here on twitter and flickr.

To get some continuity back into Laptopdance I am committing to holding them regularly on the last Thursday day of each month. Accordingly we kicked off the year with the first one at the award winning Lantana cafe (http://www.lantanacafe.co.uk) which is also owned by my sister. Due to capacity issues, both bodily and digitally I’ll be looking for a new venue and moving the invite engine to eventbrite.

Laptopdance events are ably assisted, co-hosted and orchestrated by dance masters Mark Palmer, Mat Morrison and Iain MacMillan.

Leo & Henry at Interetsing

Last weekened Russell gave Henry and me the opportunity to speak to the Intersting Conference attendees for 1.00 minute.

In a packed afternoon of inspiring and provocative talks it was a great opportunity to announce a Call for Assistance for BIL, the un-conference we’re working to promote for next year.

BIL started when Bill Erickson and 2 friends who were students in Austin Texas went on a road trip and crash the TED 2007 conference in Monteray.

By the time they got ther their group had grown to 30 and so they held their own impromptu un-conference just down the road.

Fast forward 2 years and BIL 2009 was held on the campus of California State University at Long Beach and with over 100 speakers and 500 participants, doubling the size the previous year.

These are the principles that guide BIL to this day;

• Take advantage of the TED conference and its approach to sharing Big Ideas
• Do it in a way that is open, distributed and democratic, sometime chaotic and always interesting

Henry and I met Bill when he was over here blagging his way into TED Global 09, which he did successfullly. And being a conference junkie and a fan of TED since the 90s (did I mention I interviewed Richard Wurman, the TED founder? I’ll do a little re-edit and put it up here). So naturally I jumped at the opportunity of creating a Salon des Refuses to TED’s Salon.

The end result is that we’re taking the BIL show to Oxford to coincide with TED international being held 16-17 July 2010.

To make all of this happen we’ve formed a small working group for next year and this is what we’re planning on doing;

• Other people have already solved the problem of being interesting and putting on interesting events.
• We’re going to act as an umbrella organisation, bringing these people and events together
• We’ll be doing the work of finding venues, providing infrastructure, marketing, sponsorship, all the top-level organisational bores / chores
• What this means is, we’re going to find some pubs, clubs & other spaces in Oxford where events can live, help match up events with venues and provide a overall framework for events organisers and attendees.
• TED being in town means there’ll be a certain amount of interestingness sloshing around. We want to feed off some of that and add a whole big pile of our own interesting. We’re structuring BIL to kind of wrap around TED in a couple of evenings after conference days and the trailing weekend to encourage some crossover between the two.

If we pull it off, it’s going to be super-fun. We’re going to have all these great little events going on in pubs around Oxford over the weekend, you’ll be able to roll from one to the other watching stuff in and joining in and have a geeky little dance in the evenings - we’ve got some good ideas for afterparties.

So here’s the Call for Assistance;

• If you’d like to speak as an individual or bring a collective of speakers to one of our venues we’d love to work you into our program
• If you know Oxford and people up there. we’d love to talk to you and tap into your network
• If you’d like to help organsie; take donations at the door, print the daily program, run around with mikes, manage a sound system
• If you’re a sponsor who might be able to give us wi-fi, beer, organic tofu burgers or cash

Then email us leo.ryan.mail@gmail.com and henry aninfinitenumberofmonkeys@gmail.com or follow us on Tumblr

It all went rather well and afterwards we were swamped with generous offers from lots of lovely folk, all of whom we need to follow up with properly.