#CabinetForum — Could the creative industry grasp the future? Mostly not.

• Share 

by Guest Author on October 30, 2009

[UK] This is a guest post by communications specialist Antony Mayfield (twitter: amayfield) about C&binet Forum, the trendily named three day conference this week featuring the great and the good from the UK’s political, media and ‘creative’ industries. This ‘creative business conference’ was run by the Department for Culture Media and Sport, as a result of their joint publication (with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Department for Innovation and Skills) of a strategy paper for the creative economy called Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy.

If you liked ampersands, the Government’s creative industries conference, C&binet Forum was a great place to be. The logo sat everywhere, from the signs for dinner to massive “&” sculpture in one of The Grove’s lobbies.

And, and, and…

…and the ampersand character fitted the complexity of the conference. Just when you thought you could define or dismiss C&binet in a sentence, you realised it was too complicated to be concise about. For instance…

I think I would add a qualifying “yet” to the end of the headline on this Techcrunch article I wrote about this week’s Cabinet Forum, but that’s the relentless optimist in me, I guess….

CNN.com officially relaunched its website this week, and we’re pleased to announce that the updated CNN.com/TECH section now includes headlines syndicated from Mashable. This is in addition to a new column I’ll be writing on the site, going live Wednesday.

We’re in the middle of an exciting transition as social media and the mainstream begin to overlap in all sorts of interesting ways: this underlines our belief that social media isn’t some marketing fad, but rather a fundamental change to the way we consume and interact with content. We’ve been covering this transition for four years, from the rise of social networking to the birth of the “social media” movement as people began to use these tools of personal connection to pass content around the web.

Nice work by Mashable – what’s happening in social media is much bigger than its implications for marketing…

Cover design by DesignWorksGroup

I’m doing the final edits on “Me and My Web Shadow” at the moment. So I can sympathise with David McCandless’s mixed emotions on seeing his book for the first time:

“I received my first copies this week – a joyful and agonising experience. Joyful because yay it’s my book! Agonising because, inevitably, I keep seeing things I want to change or tweak or improve.”

His book looks amazing too – a great collection of infographics… I’ve pre-ordered a copy via his website – have a look. Looks like a great read or the perfect Christmas present for a significant geek in your life…

Via @adders

I’d heard of this 4IP-funded project before but was reminded of it yesterday by David Rowan of UK Wired. It’s a lovely thing:

“We’re planning on launching early next year when we’ll offer a basic product of a 12-page, tabloid-size newspaper in black and white or colour in quantities from 5 to 5000.

“If you’re experienced with design software you’ll be able to upload a PDF to us and we’ll sort out printing and delivery. Or, if you need a bit more help, we’ll have a tool where you can upload your own text and pictures and we’ll help you lay it out on the page so it looks lovely. Then you can get it printed etc.

“Or, if you want the full bespoke service, we’ll make you a whole newspaper; including finding writers and artists, organising design and all the printing and everything else.”

My mind is a-buzz with ideas for newspaper-like publications – can’t wait to try it…

Jump to more content from this blog

About this blog

‘Digital Revolution’ is an experiment in collaboration. We want to hear the opinions, thoughts and experiences from the populace of the web – you. Add your comments to our blog posts. Tell us the stories you think we should be covering. Your input will help shape our documentary.

Subscribe to Digital Revolution Blog

You can stay up to date with Digital Revolution Blog via these feeds.

Digital Revolution Blog Feed(RSS)

Digital Revolution Blog Feed(ATOM)

If you aren’t sure what RSS is you’ll find our beginner’s guide to RSS useful.

Follow us on Twitter and around the web

• Twitter
  @BBCDigRev Twitter feed
• delicious
  Our online research
• Youtube
  Watch ‘the web is…’ videos
• Flickr
  See ‘the web is…’ pictures

Coo – this is interesting: a documentary in progress about the digital revolution. Has “rushes” of interviews with some fascinating thinkers and players in the web, from Berners-Lee to Shirky and everyone in between…

Only a fool would predict the future of the web – so here’s my presentation from an iCrossing client event a week or so back talking about what (might) be coming up in 2010…

It’s got the audio, too…

By Nick Collins
Published: 12:01AM GMT 26 Oct 2009

Comments 7 | Comment on this article

More than half of office workers use sites like Twitter and Facebook for personal use during the working day Photo: REUTERS

More than half of office workers use sites like Twitter and Facebook for personal use during the working day, and admit wasting an average of 40 minutes a week each.

One in three of the 1,460 office workers surveyed also said they had seen sensitive company information posted on social networking sites, leading to fears about how workers use the internet.

Related Articles

• Trevor Bish-Jones’s click and mix approach to recruitment

• Small businesses are catching Twitter bug

• Government ‘Twittercrat’ to be paid more than Lord Chancellor

• £1bn scheme to create ‘soft jobs’

• Twitter breaks in to top 40 most-visited UK websites

Philip Wicks, consultant at Morse, the IT services and technology company who commissioned the survey, said the true cost to the economy could be substantially higher than the £1.38bn estimate.

“When someone is asked for their own use they say around 40 minutes a week, but when asked about their colleagues they say they say up to an hour a day. We have used the lower of those figures rather than the high point,” he said.

“It is the sort of thing people constantly use which means that its not quite the same as doing a crossword, where you spend half an hour on it and it is finished.

“When it comes to an office environment the use of these sites is clearly becoming a productivity black hole.

“Social networking can be a cause for good when it is used professionally but I think organisations need to wake up – that is not the way it is always being used.”

David Clubb, managing director of Office Angels, the recruitment firm, added: “As younger generations join the workplace, I believe UK businesses will, inevitably, have to embrace social networks, recognising the benefits of providing staff with well deserved downtime, but also their potential for business networking.”

Three quarters of the office workers surveyed said their employer had not given them any specific guidelines on how to use Twitter, but 84 per cent believed it should be up to them what they post online.

Last month staff at PC World and Currys were found to have posted offensive comments about customers on Facebook groups.

Some posters who said they were employed by the shops’ parent company, DSG, said some customers deserved to be punched, and asked if they should be allowed to “cattle prod” them.

British Airways staff used Facebook to complain about customers’ “stupid American accents” last year, while Virgin Atlantic employees referred to some passengers as “chavs”.

Here’s the comment I posted on Telegraph:

This story is boring, predictable nonsense…

It would be more interesting if Morse were to calculate how much Facebook and Twitter generate for the economy – jobs, collaborating on community projects, creating new business ideas, saving time on research.

For some advanced thinking on this, see management thinker John Hagel http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/john-hagel-on-the-social-web.html

Upshot: set people free on Twitter and stop wasting money on intranets and email…

O’Reilly’s Ross interviews John Hagel and it’s pure gold: synchronicity, tacit knowledge and real-time social web interactions are the themes for this first of three video excerpts from the conversation.

“John makes the point that the rise of the Social Web feels “a bit like Back to the Future” for people who have a long history with the Internet. In the early days the Internet functioned to link people – scientists, researchers etc. The advent of the World Wide Web saw the Internet functioning more as a publishing platform. Now, with the Social Web, we are back full circle to a network that connects people together. When you connect people to people (as opposed to just brokering information) you are able to surface valuable tacit knowledge that is difficult to express in documents.”