For the last fourteen months (on and off), I’ve been working on a short story called Finkle and the Fish. It’s been a real slog, but today, I’m proud to say you can now buy it in the Amazon Kindle store.
Here’s the opening page, as it looks on Kindle:
It will be released in other formats soon. Or you can download the Kindle app to most devices.
Warning: It’s a little… dark.
In 2009, I was very happy to be on the winning Poke hack day team with Egg Watchers. But you’re only as good as your last 24-hour project.
Last week was the second Poke hack day. We split into teams, unplugged the phones and set about solving this year’s brief: To make our neighbourhood better. I’m writing a proper blog post about it for the Poke blog. In the meantime, here’s the idea my team and I made. It’s called Eastern Super Mayors.
In case you’re not from the UK, the name is a pun on a place called Weston-Super-Mare ;)
Our idea was to take the ‘dormant’ power of Foursquare mayors in East London and turn it into genuine influence. After all, mayors are by definition venues’ most regular customers and they are also, often very ‘connected’ individuals. They are exactly the sort of people venues should want to make happy. So what if we gave each mayor in the neighbourhood a chance to rally their friends behind one simple, tiny demand to make their venue better?
We manually inputted almost 60 local venues and mayors into the CMS that Chris, our developer put together in just a couple of hours, so all the data on the live site was genuine. While some of us continued to work on the idea, others started contacted a few mayors to see if they wanted to get involved.
One of the things that continues to amaze me about Poke hack day is what you can actually get rolling in one day. By the time we presented this idea to the judges (22 hours after conception), we already had three genuine mayors not only making demands but actually campaigning to friends. And a fourth had contacted me too:
Not all the demands were completely serious of course. Or maybe they were, Dan?
To top it all off, we also managed to get one demand satisfied (and filmed) on the day, improving life – even if only marginally – for an entire company, Digit, who will be enjoying a cheese and chutney day this week:
Both Poke hack days left me blown away. I was truly humbled by the people around me. They are all insanely talented and driven and it’s great to see everyone pitching in and getting their hands dirty to get things done.
I will link to the full blog post asap. Here are some pictures of the teams presenting their ideas.
We filmed it. You can watch all the videos HERE.
I can’t quite bring myself to post my intro video on my blog, but it does explain the whole thing, so you can watch that here. Not that you couldn’t have found it yourself. Shall I just keep linking to the same Vimeo album? OK then. Here’s a couple to warm you up:
Last night, was Metaphwoar! – an event I put on for Internet Week Europe. It was a playful format, inviting speakers to share one metaphor that would change the way people looked at something. As you can see, it was a lighthearted affair:
To be honest though, it’s very easy – and self-interested – to say that it was ‘me’ that put it on. I might have come up with the idea, but Nik Roope got behind it, Poke then funded it and gave me an entire team of talented, generous people to make it happen. By my books that makes it a Poke event. I feel I need to say that here, because I failed to explain this on the night (I was a bit nervous and not thinking entirely clearly).
I also want to thank the ten brilliant speakers that were brave and willing enough to put their name to an event called Metaphwoar! and deliver a compressed talk to a bunch of people with access to alcohol ;)
The full line-up was Hannah Donovan (above), Darren Savage, Andy Cameron (below), Nathan Cooper, Mathew Wilson, Ramzi Yakob, Jess Greenwood, Katy Lindemann, Dave Bedwood and John V Willshire.
I think it was a real success. At least that’s what Twitter said. Thank you everyone who came and who said nice things. We hope to do it again.
‘Official’ photos and videos of all the talks will be online next week. Thanks to Dogg for the pictures in this post.
And it’s a stonking one. Emails are flooding in with people wanting to come. It’s going to be a brilliant night. Or if not brilliant, then at least terrible, but full ;)
Go see the final speaker list here. Hope you can make it.
Poke and I are putting this event together for Internet Week in London. And we’re looking for speakers.
Please help spread the word. Or, if you’re a smart/cheeky human who has something to say. Get in touch.
P.s. Apparently this whole ‘phwoar’ thing confuses Americans. This will explain it. :)
Poke has made an excellent thing for Orange. I’m allowed to say that because I didn’t work on it. Trumpet: unblown ;)
Glasto Tag is a “deep-zoomable 1.3 gigapixel monster photo of the crowd [at Glastonbury] where people can find and tag themselves and their mates using Facebook”.
The secondary* goal is to set a word record for the most people tagged in an online photo. There are 6.5k tags at the time of writing this.
*The primary goal, of course, was to create something of real value and interest to the people who stood together at Glastonbury, soaking up the Sun and the atmosphere of one of the world’s greatest festivals. Every person in that photo wants to shout “I was there!” and now they can, with a single click. They were part of something then and thanks to GlastoTag, that sense of jubilant togetherness doesn’t have to end. Taggers can also easily befriend people they might have met there through Facebook connect.
GlastoTag is a beautifully simple idea. It asks very little and it gives a lot.
Well done Pokers.
Yes, there’s lots of general elections stuff going on. That’s why we did something light and fun for Yahoo! It’s called The People’s Policies.
Write a policy (under 30 characters) and stick it to the public vote. The hot or not of ideology, if you will ;)
Have a play and your policy could appear in ads, in the Metro or in cartoon form in the gallery:
